Salem’s Lot
How fascination with the supernatural drives interest in Halloween—and shapes the post-truth era
Lowell Brower, PhD ’19, says that Halloween, the public response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and politics in the US all have something in common: supernatural storytelling. Experimenting with these narratives is an important way of exploring our fears—hence the ongoing interest in horror movies. Analyzing a society's "standardized nightmare"—expressed for instance, in beliefs about witches and witchcraft—can tell us a lot about its values and worldview. When contemporary legends give rise to "rumor panics" and spur people to action, however, the result can be real horror. In the lead-up to Halloween, Harvard Griffin GSAS's Office of Communications spoke with Brower, formerly Harvard's director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Folklore and Mythology, and now a member of the Folklore Program faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as well as a lecturer for Harvard Extension School, about “dark tourism” in places like Salem, Massachusetts, the terrors of the post-truth era, and how leaders need to understand stories better—and tell better stories.
In 2005, US consumers spent $3.3 billion during the Halloween season. In 2023, that number was $12.2 billion. Salem, Massachusetts, where I live is projected to see 1.2 million tourists during October—a new record for us. Every other store here seems to sell custom vamp fangs or other scary tchotchkes. As a scholar of supernatural storytelling and legend, what’s behind the ongoing interest in witches, zombies, and things that go bump in the night?
As a folklorist, it warms my heart to hear about all the interest in the supernatural!
Places like Salem offer us the opportunity to experience the thrill of occult experimentation at any stage of life. They give us a chance to play with ritualization, with re-enchantment, and to induce fear in a safe environment. And they give us an excuse to feel like kids communing with witches, ghosts, and spirits, doing something fun and risky.
You talked about all the trinkets you can buy and the witchcraft stores. A lot of people think of that as a kind of commoditization that trivializes and appropriates people's beliefs. As a folklorist and supernatural scholar, I have a different view of the way people are drawn to dark tourism. Every time we embark on one of these transgressive adolescent rituals—every time my daughters go out to the woods to cast a spell, or even when we pay 50 bucks to be led around someplace like Salem by a guy in a cape—we are opening up to something that could instill in us new wonder, emotion, memory, or belief. I know I've had profound experiences on commercial ghost tours.
Visiting a supposedly zombie-filled cemetery can also be a way to teach people about things they’d rather not think about. For instance, as the site of 17th-century witch trials, Salem has a truly scary—and violent—history. Supernatural narratives offer people a way to confront historical guilt, to turn the brutal truths of human-on-human violence into stories that teach profound lessons about who we have been, how we've mistreated one another, and what we owe the dead.
You mention the witch trials. You’ve studied the work of the South African anthropologist, Monica Wilson, who wrote about witch beliefs. What did she have to say? Why are we still drawn to them?
Monica Wilson was a professor at the University of Cape Town who observed witchcraft panics in colonial Africa during the 1950s. She wrote that a society’s structures, norms, environmental pressures, and political systems determine which specific types of figures are threatening to it—its standardized nightmare.
Wilson looked at two distinct societies, the Nyakyusa in Tanzania and the Pondo in South Africa, which had very different conceptions of witches and witchcraft. The Nyakyusa were subsistence cattle herders and agriculturalists who lived with a lot of food insecurity. They had elaborate rules and rituals around food, sharing, and farming. For them, a witch took the form of someone possessed by a gluttonous stomach python that emerges in the night to fly around the village, steal cattle, gorge on beans, destroy banana trees, and drink all the milk. Witches transgressed against the most fundamental rule of kinship and generosity, without which their society would collapse. That was their nightmare.
The Pondo were a group that was ruptured and thrown into crisis by the racist apartheid government system in in South Africa. They practiced exogamy—marrying outside the kinship group. They had elaborate prohibitions around who could marry and have sex. Apartheid destroyed that balance by turning a large segment of the male population into migrant workers for half the year, radically changing the fabric of society and typical social relations. For this community, witches took the form of this little beast called the Tikoloshe—an insatiable sex goblin that transgresses against rules about marriage and procreation and that would, if it took hold, destroy their society.
For the conservative, God-fearing, supposedly upstanding fathers of colonial Salem, witches took the form of an eccentric landowning widow at the edge of town. This was someone who had different ideas about power, and who represented a threat to the Judeo-Christian hetero-patriarchal social order closer to home.
In all of these cases, witches are pretty clear objects on which societies project their grievances, their misfortunes, and their crises. They’re how people deal with fundamental fears and contradictions, transforming structural, political realities into standardized nightmares that are more actionable. That’s the ongoing attraction. In the internet age, it’s easier than ever to call someone a “witch,” so to speak, and drag them down to the digital town square via Twitter or Instagram—much easier than it is to engage with the waking realities of changing social conditions.
The right question to ask of a legend isn’t “Is it true?” it’s “Why is it important?”
—Lowell Brower
What role do you think the real terrors of COVID-19 have played in our attraction to the supernatural and the occult?
One of my favorite folklorists, Sabina Magliocco, says that COVID-19 was a collective “numinous moment”—a time when we’re faced with hugely uncertain circumstances and the stakes are extremely high. It's a moment when we're open to experimentation and when we might adopt a new contextual belief. For instance, we might pray to a God we didn't believe in before or try to intercede supernaturally in events.
It’s the age-old saying, “It's not true, but I believe in it.” I definitely turned to that maxim a lot during the pandemic in a situation of radical uncertainty. I washed my vegetables three times when I took them home from the supermarket. For some people in Japan, though, that response took the form of a collective participatory art project. People drew versions of this thing called the Amabie—a supernatural mermaid-like creature that was meant to confer health upon whoever saw it. Around the world, people solicited coronavirus protection from their local pastor, imam, or other religious leader. People turned to all kinds of magical thinking and practice to solve a biological problem.
A lot of us also turned to scary fictions in the face of scary realities. Horror movies always respond to the times, and there was an efflorescence in viewership during the pandemic. Which is a curious thing; in the face of a phantasmagoria—a space of inexplicable misfortune—we invited more phantasmagoria into our lives.
Speaking of horror shows, there’s an election coming up. Partisans on both the left and right are painting pictures of the hellscape our country will become if their side loses. Can you talk about the way that the standardized nightmare is expressed in our politics?
I would argue that our contemporary political landscape is more terrifying than anything [horror movie director] Roger Corman ever envisioned, but also the terror it's eliciting and is capable of unleashing is very different. The kind of supernatural storytelling that governs our reality now is more akin to contemporary legends, which folklorists think of as belief genres—complex, allegedly true folk narratives that supposedly happen to real people and ask us to change our beliefs.
Contemporary legends allow people to express diffuse anxieties and fears in ways that represent felt psychological truths if not verifiable facts. Thinking about the power of legends in our contemporary political sphere is hugely productive. Encountering a contemporary legend—be it about dog-eating Haitian immigrants, or about Satanic pedophiles in pizza parlor basements—can clue us into what people believe, what they value, what they fear, and what they're capable of based on that fear.
The dangers our society faces today are based on turning folk narratives into fodder for action. This is something folklorists call ostension—the enactment rather than the telling of a supernatural legend. When people act in the world based on a supernatural narrative, it’s often harmless and fun. We go to Salem. We dress up like a witch. No harm done. But sometimes it's horrifying and deadly. We whip ourselves up into a rumor panic and hang a witch in the town square. That's people taking action. That’s the power of supernatural legends to govern a political universe and change people's rationality in a seemingly enlightened place.
So how do you counter contemporary legends and rumor panic? What about the truth? Don’t facts matter?
The right question to ask of a legend isn’t “Is it true?” it’s “Why is it important?” Regardless of a story’s facticity, it can tell you a lot about the people spreading it and their worldview, anxieties, beliefs, and prejudices. The best legends are the ones that catch on with the largest group of people, enter into their beliefs, and spur them on to action. To come back to Monica Wilson, she said that folklore is one of the most vital tools we have for contemporary social analysis.
We're living in a post-truth world. We're seeing all of our old certainties crumble. Fact-based, rational, scientific, and expert opinions aren't getting through to people. So, what are we to do? I think it boils down to storytelling and understanding the narrative strategies that connect with people. I think we've gotten an up close and personal look at the power of deeply dubious, supernatural, rumor-panic-inducing narratives over the past several decades. I think the people who want to save the world have to start telling better stories, ones more capable of tapping into the good old-fashioned power of vernacular folklore, in a brave new world of post-truth memetic warfare.
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