The supernatural has intrigued humans for all long as anyone can remember, but does anyone think of their side of the story? Do supernatural creatures ever get a chance to just kick back and enjoy life?
They seem too busy conjuring, hunting, and doing evil to just enjoy the little things. Maybe they should visit a supernatural spa, take a long supernatural walk, enjoy a stunning supernatural sunset, or read a supernatural book, give themselves a supernatural break.
Instead they enrage already angry mobs, dodge bullets, arrows, demon hunters! Avoiding being burned at the stake or getting a stake through the heart! Avoiding the sun, salt, garlic, silver, conflict with others in various realms – there’s a lot of avoidance behaviour there.
Just seems exhausting.
They must feel like saying, Supernatural Calgon take me away!
They just don’t seem like they get a lot of time to themselves.
So they’re creepy but are they happy?
None of that explains why we like the supernatural, superstition, mysticism, religion, etc. so much.
Does scaring ourselves let us come to terms with our fears in a sort of safe mode?
Can we sense the supernatural in the natural world and we’re trying to make sense of it?
Perhaps it’s the illusion of control? To believe in supernatural causality, that somehow one thing causes another to happen without any natural process between them, perhaps it’s comforting.
In the spirit of Halloween I’ve been reading creepy and kooky and sometimes even spooky books, including The Bane Chronicles by Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan and Maureen Johnson (Margaret K. McElderry Books/Simon & Schuster), a sort of spin-off from The Mortal Instruments series where Bane (not one of my top characters at least in this series, but these historical follies were amusing), an immortal warlock goes on a supernatural bar hop scavenger hunt through time. I got a chuckle from the inference that he’s the reason we have the idiom, Bane of my existence…hmmm, I suppose that could refer to Batman’s Bane as well. But I digress…
Of course, reading this made me wonder even more why we can’t get enough of stories of: warlocks, witches, zombies, aliens, demons, demon hunters, ghosts, angels, monsters, fallen angels, werewolves, vampires and other supernatural beings?
Do we need to put a face and a name on the things that go bump in the night?
Try to calm the inner turmoil caused by our fight or flight response?
Or is dressing up at Halloween and scaring ourselves with movies, books, TV now merely entertainment?
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