l'Horreur

Greetings, kiddies, from the haunted flea market of Sainte-Ouen.

To my great joy, I'm part of a generation that was raised on a heavy dose of spooky culture. On TV, old horror movies ran on weekends while reruns of the Munsters, the Addams Family, and Scooby Doo were on every day after school. Titles like "The Witching Hour," "Werewolf by Night," "Swamp Thing," and "Tomb of Dracula" were on the comic book racks at 7-11. "Monster Mash" and "Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House" got regular rotation on my record player. Basically, if you watched, read, or listened to anything targeted at kids back then, any normal day might include imagery of ancient cemeteries, old dark mansions, and crumbling castles. And that's not counting monster-themed toys and games (I know I built the Aurora glow-in-the-dark "Wolf Man" model, and maybe the "Mummy," too) or standard Halloween icons such as bats, witches, and skeletons.

None of these horror motifs ever really scared me as a kid. I imagine a lot of other kids felt the same way. We understood it was supposed to be fun, even campy, though we would not have known that term (not a lot of Sontag readers on my block when I was growing up). Together, they made up just one aesthetic (we would not have known that term, either) that was part of the larger kid culture.

So it's a bit odd now to be in a place where every day you can visit actual ancient cemeteries, rambling old mansions, and crumbling castles. On one hand, I'm delighted when I encounter something in the local art or architecture that evokes horror motifs--such as bats and skeletons used in a subtle (or unsubtle) way.

Subtle: bats in a chandelier rosette, Paris Opéra (Palais Garnier), 9th Arr.

Unsubtle: La Mort (Death) by Henri Allouard in a courtyard at the Sorbonne's school of medicine, Campus des Cordeliers, 6th Arr.

On the other hand, most of these little bits of the spooky and macabre are cultural remnants from societies that saw them very differently, and likely attached to them more serious meaning than most people today would consider. The Church might have wanted to awe worshippers with the grandeur of the almighty and a dread of damnation, but I doubt the gothic style of church architecture was intentionally spooky. Time, the elements, and the shifting centrality of organized religion to everyday life in Europe have accomplished that.

One of the damned at the base of a holy water font, Église Saint-Eustache, 1st Arr. No missing the point, here.

The façade of Église Saint-Jacques, Dieppe. 800 years from now, your house will look spooky, too.

Monsters crawling down the side of l'Hôtel des Abbés de Cluny, 5th Arr., were probably supposed to give you the creeps. 

I also recognize that the context of some elements we now consider macabre have changed over time. To the modern eye, the fence of skulls and crossed bones in the design of Dr. Jacques Lisfranc's tomb at Cimetière du Montparnasse evokes "Pirates of the Caribbean." Likely the intent after his death in 1847 was to memorialize the surgeon's battle against death itself, similarly to the motifs that appear at Louis Pasteur's monument and on the Campus des Cordeliers at the Sorbonne's medical school.

Detail from Dr. Jacques Lisfranc's tomb at Cimetière du Montparnasse, 14th Arr.

At best, this will only ever be the second most notable sculpture at the Sorbonne's school of medicine, Campus des Cordeliers, 6th Arr.

Death, lurking at the base of Louis Pasteur's monument, 7th Arr.

Even if I don't understand the context of a piece, I don't necessarily assume that an authentically spooky detail was intended purely for goosebumps--as opposed to expressing some horror itself, as in the case of the tombstone shown below, from a trip to the Cimitière du Château in Nice. It's also possible that creators sometimes miscalculate the effect of their creations (which is itself a foundational horror theme). I can't imagine that the departed's loved ones wanted to see him carried off by some Lovecraftian nightmare each time they visited his grave, but what other effect could it possibly have?

A gravestone in the Cimitière du Château in Nice.

So I try to be mindful that campy Gothic tropes reflect values, folkways, and anxieties from the past—perhaps degraded and worn a bit by every use and reuse along their way to the Scooby gang unmasking shady property speculators in abandoned amusement parks. It was serious business when the Romantics used ancient tombs, crumbling battlements, restless ghosts and immortal revenants to thumb their noses at the Enlightenment's rejection of "superstition" and older cultures. The Victorians repurposed these same elements to evoke the dread of the "old worlds" that they were colonizing or displacing with industrialization. As painted backdrops and set pieces, they lent cheap atmospheric touches to Edwardian stage plays and Hollywood horror movies of the 1930s and 1940s, to the point where they had become a lazy shorthand for scary when "Shock Theater" brought these same movies to television in the 1950s and horror comics were "causing juvenile delinquency." By the time my friends and I got hold of them, they were just kids' stuff.

None of this means that appreciating the spookier elements of Europe (or anywhere else) for the pure fun of it somehow demeans the worldviews of the past--and who really would be harmed if it did?

But as I make my way through Europe, I don't want to let my own enthusiasm for the spooky stuff of my childhood cloud my understanding of what I'm seeing or experiencing. While I'm here, I'm trying to puzzle out the people I encounter and why they think what they think and do what they do. I just don't gain much insight by viewing their past as a campy joke.

Of course no one gets off the hook if they created a piece of nightmarish public art in my own lifetime, or use the old horror tropes in irreverent or ironic ways. In these cases, my pure enjoyment of the creeps is as good as any meaning they might have tried to communicate.

"Le Manteau de la Conscience" (2009) by Anna Chromy, Le Jardin des Pêcheurs, Monaco. I'd prefer my conscience to be a bit more like Jiminy Cricket.

The pure joy of a giant bat descending upon Montmartre in this contemporary detail, 18th Arr.