Fairy Tales and Horror

I grew up next to a Forest

“Plenty of humans are monstrous and plenty of monsters know how to play human.”

I grew up next to a forest, a dark, thick forest where you could only see slits of light flicker through the branches in the middle of a sunny summer day. At night the forest would take the form of an impassable wall, keeping what was inside from getting out or anyone from entering it once the light of day vanished on the horizon. In spite of this, there were days where it seemed like a path had been created when the day slipped away. In the middle of the impassable wall, a line of trees walked away so that one intrepid soul could adventure inside and disappear. It was my childhood monster and my faerie realm at the same time.

I don’t think you can look at a forest and not see both, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that I grew up to both love and fear the monsters. Aren’t they one and the same always? The eerie minuscule faery that could steal away your children and had teeth so sharp they would cut through flesh and bone like we did though a strawberry, smearing their lips with bright red in a smile of excitement of the meal to come; and the magical fairy godmother that would come to save you from your living nightmare as she did for Cinderella or the giggling musical small one that would dress in colourful flowers and play with you, hidden away from your parents because they did not believe in magic anymore. “The fairy tale, let’s be frank, does not differ much from the alien movie: there are also no significant contrasts between the visions of San Antonio and the delusions of Stephen King” (Padilla, 2013, p. 83)

I fear the oppressing darkness that surrenders my bed at night, that would give cover to ghosts, furies, giant spiders, and vampires, but the darkness also gives me cover when I hide, covers my body in a cold invisible cloak so that my nightmares might not get me, it swallows the dreadful light of the day when I feel like I am so heavy I could be lying on the bottom of the ocean, the day to come becomes the pressure of the water, and the darkness becomes a suit of oxygen that protects me.

Fear, monster, and terror aren’t that far away from happiness, excitement, and faeries. Maybe they could even be one and the same, a single being, one creature, one feeling, one emotion. Maybe, we live in such a complex world that we should expect monsters and heroes to be one and the same, after all as far we can prove they are all humans, and perhaps we don’t need to know any more than that about them, just to remember that fear can be masking an adventure, that an impassable wall of giant boulders can give away to a mystical path.