Bogeymen

Bogeymen, looming around the annals of American cinema come out during the Halloween season. The likes of Jason Voorhees, and Michael Myers, and Freddy Krueger speak to cultural notions of “goodness” and “badness” and tightening of belts in the face of opposition. The bogeymen act as impregnable juggernauts of evil, pursue, and kill, people of various moral standing. Strangely, the first to go in horror movies are often those who show transgressions – lapses in ethics and judgment. The fornicating neighbor. The malevolent bully. Somehow the villains of Hollywood cinematic horror become great levelers: exactors of justice. Bringers, perhaps, of karmic comeuppance.

The looming way in which the semi human monsters pursue the innocent, however, speaks to a larger mythos. The unstoppable, insurmountable, and unshakable nature of the bogeyman represents the larger unrelenting trials of life itself. The sheen of a kitchen knife in low light, or the ominous sounds of footfalls from a floor below are dangers more acute, than perhaps, a mortgage payment to be made, or a term paper due. But the bogeyman represents oppression, and all that which induces fear. The face, that philosophical idea of “recognition” with the “other” presented by Emmanuel Levinas is conspicuously garbled and warped as the bogeyman. These faceless or deformed characters lurk in stark denial of that recognition, denying knowing the “other” as “self” as they simultaneously and slowly hunt their prey.