It was July 4th 1985. While the annual Independence Day block party raged, full of worthy distractions for a young lad, I was more concerned with what the older kids were doing, the gaggle of cousins and my brother, to old and cool to be seen in the daylight. I found them crowded on and around my aunt and uncle’s sofa in the darkened living room. Their eyes wide and unblinking in concentration on the television screen.
As the film churned with the muted pulse of the DJ thumping from outside I soon came face to face with the monster that would haunt my dreams and symbolize all of my fears and insecurities throughout my developmental years and deep into my 20’s.
The movie was A Nightmare on Elm St. and like most kids at that age, I discovered within it something primal that reached out from the dark and touched me. Freddy Krueger was my boogey man, the horror in the unknown when I closed my eyes.
Being from a happy, middle class family, there were few real horrors I had to confront growing up. Freddy Krueger came to represent the only thing I knew how to fear, which was something breaking through from the outside and disrupting and disturbing without impediment. Dark corners, empty houses, and basements were all fertile ground for such fear. Long nights I spent staring up at the soft curvature of the bunk above me, hoping my brother lay awake too.
As I grew older, my subconscious molded this boogey man to my fears. A child’s primordial worry of the unknown gave way to a confused teenager struggling with an anxiety disorder, a lack of popularity with girls, and trouble with school, all of which came to me in dreams bearing the mask of Freddy Krueger.
By my late 20’s Freddy had faded into a speck on the landscape of my dreams, trumped by the reality of adulthood, and a new relationship with mortality that comes with age. My fears became more existential and beyond my grasp. There is no more fear of the dark, but of day lit doubts and questions of oneself.
I was only a few years older when I first saw The Silence of The Lambs, and at that time Hannibal Lecter terrified and tantalized my childhood imagination. But, as an adult I view him no differently than Freddy, more of a dark fairytale too fantastic for apprehension. However, in revisiting the film recently it was the character of Buffalo Bill that struck a chord with me.
There is something tangible about him, a societal castoff driven to horrific ends. Though he isn’t much different than Lecter in his actions, there is a humanity behind his madness, a deep rooted loneliness that drives him, and looking past his repulsive acts of violence and treachery it is easy for anyone in their moments of self-pity, which come way to often as we get older, to see a morbid reflection of ourselves.
Naturally finding something even remotely recognizable within a monster like Buffalo Bill is terrifying, but what I think this boogeyman represents is the extreme of what we find when we look inwards and confront our tendencies and doubts about who we are and what we’re capable of.
Buffalo Bill’s madness has twisted and distorted his desires beyond recognition, but the root of them, a sense of belonging, a need to be someone better than he, is the kind of troubles that we all struggle with. But in the right kind of mood we dare ourselves to tweak our fear and desires to the darkest of ends. That’s where monsters like Buffalo Bill live, not in the dark corners surrounding us, but within us.
I’m sure I’m overstating the obvious here, but it bears mentioning; the root of all our monsters is an attempt to shine a light on and exorcise our deepest fears. They are the projected definition of what we can’t define or express, whether it be teenage angst or midlife melancholy.
– James Merolla