Is there anything wrong with attending haunted house attractions during halloween? It is something my girlfriend and I sincerely love doing just for the sake of the season and the fun… We are both committed Catholics.
God bless!
I personally do not think that it is problematic for you or your girlfriend. It is quite natural for humans to mix entertainment with scarey imagery and experiences. Such events trigger strong survival-oriented mechanisms (such as fear, heightened senses, etc.) but do so in an environment where one knows that one is safe. Therefore, one gets the “rush” but not in the presence of real danger. As you put it in one of your posts, there is an aspect in enjoying the “fright factor” with such things in the entertainment industry. This is why people who scream on roller-coasters will gleefully wait in line and pay money to get on one. This is also why many people enjoy horror movies, telling ghost stories around the campfire, etc. Visiting a Halloween oriented haunted house attraction gives a person the added thrill of, in a manner-of-speaking, walking into a horror movie. But, of course, like a horror movie there is no real danger.
In addition to this is, of course, the element of fantasy. Haunted house attractions can simply allow a person to enjoy the illusion of make-believe and the creative talent behind the imaginative people who design the sets. Fantasy is fun because it is a momentary distraction from the mundane aspects of daily life.
But let me also say that I think one needs to be careful in how all these sorts of things are portrayed. I can tell from your posts that you and I are “on the same page” in this regard, but I will elaborate further for the sake of this thread discussion in general. I think that the horror entertainment industry should avoid things that seem to glorify violence and promote interest in the occult. Rather, the effect should be one that teaches the repulsion of evil and the dangers of the occult.
At this time let me also describe an account of something I used to assist with in the past. When I was an Episcopalian I attended a church that was in a neighborhood which had, unfortunately, “declined” in many ways. Simply put, it was not a safe place to be at night due to crime and such. And yet there were a lot of families, including lots of children, who lived there. In light of all this, my church held a Halloween party in our social hall each year, with games, costume contests, food, and, of course, candy. Next door was an old, unoccupied house, which the owner allowed us to turn into a haunted house attraction in conjunction with our Halloween party. I was on the team that decorated the house and designed the events in each room, and we had things which were typical of haunted house attractions (for example, I was the werewolf). As you can probably guess, the whole idea behind all this was to give the families in the neighborhood a safe environment to enjoy typical Halloween stuff, and many families appreciated this and joined us for the fun. So I think there is something to be said of haunted house attractions in this regard as well.
Later as a Catholic I once belonged to a parish that did a similar thing. We set up some “haunted” sets which were also designed to teach aspects of the Catholic Faith. For example, our mock graveyard was inhabited by “ghosts” who said that they were in Purgatory and pleaded to be remembered in our prayers.
All of this also reminds me of the practice of many Christians to have
“Hell Houses” available each October. There are, after all, Christians who think that going to haunted house attractions is problematic, so a Hell House is offered as an alternative. One gets some of the thrill of going to a haunted house, but in a venue that teaches the horror of evil and hell. So the idea is to, in a very real way, scare the hell out of people. I have not been to one, but I have seen some video clips of them, such as
this one. Let me also add that this was nothing like what I did in the past as an Episcopalian and later as a Catholic.
Hell Houses can actually be more disturbing than a traditional haunted house because they are not dealing with the element of fantasy (such as vampires and werewolves), but with real life situations (such as depictions of teen suicide, drug abuse, etc.). That, of course, is the whole point, but nevertheless it would not be something I would consider a “fun venue”, and one must also understand that such attractions are sometimes designed to teach morality from a strict Christian fundamentalist perspective (which, IMHO, can be problematic in certain areas). Perhaps I may sound hypocritical because I stated earlier that my desire is for the entertainment horror industry to be geared toward the repulsion of evil. But on the other hand, from the little I have seen of the Hell Houses, we aren’t really dealing with entertainment here. I think they create the
illusion of entertainment (presented as a kind of haunted house attraction) but the real idea is not to have fun but scare people into accepting a particular kind of moral teaching.
). Halloweens just a fun time to joke around and try to scare people. Nothing inherently wrong with that.
