ENDPAPER

Boo!

It was when my young teenage son and his friends started choosing horror films as a treat that I began to explore ideas about the pleasures and uses of fear. They'd lie down in a huddle in front of the video player, shrieking and squealing blissfully as they covered their eyes. Reaching out to embrace the objects of terror--and thus tame them--they were adopting a widespread human defense that can be seen in full force at Halloween.

I once arrived at the San Francisco airport on October 31 to find one ticket clerk wearing an ax through his bleeding head, while another, in full ghoul makeup, began asking me the usual security questions. Halloween guising involves conjuring objects of horror and dread, the more terrible the better. Children won't be dressing up for Halloween this year as good, polite graduates of Hogwarts, the school of magic in the popular children's books about apprentice wizard Harry Potter. Rather, they'll be playacting monsters, vampires, witches, and warlocks--creatures on the side of Harry's implacable enemy, the evil Lord Voldemort.

The ancient, seemingly instinctive game of peekaboo brings many infants their first experience of scary pleasures: the sudden appearance of a mother's eyes from behind her fingers will make a small baby gurgle with surprise. From this gentle exchange, it's a short step to the much rougher game of Boo!, which children love to play, jumping out of a hiding place to give someone a fright. (Startling a predator by springing out unexpectedly is also one of the most effective protective devices in nature; a butterfly's suddenly opening its wings to flash a pair of boggling painted eyes exemplifies nature's use in earnest of the Boo! effect.)

Use of this bilabial plosive, as the abrupt Boo! sound is known in phonetics, goes back to at least 1420 in English and has been heard in children's games in places as different as the Middle East and North America. The sound may be related etymologically to the Sanskrit bhu, the divine command of being and generation. As the linguist J. R. Firth wittily put it, "God created the world by saying bhu."

Many words for Halloween-type specters are based on this sound: boogie, bogy, boggle-bo, bogeyman; in northern England, boggart; in Scotland, booman; bugaboo in the Isle of Man; a bucca in Cornwall, a buggane in Wales; similarly in Russia, buca; boogerman in the southern United States; in Newfoundland, boo-bagger and bully-boo.

Reptiles--both real (lizards and snakes) and fictional (dragons)--used to dominate the imagery of bogeys, but insects and other arthropods are now taking over. Scales, proboscises, pincers, gleaming carapaces, elaborate mouthparts, and bristling antennae from the hidden, subterranean territory of creepy-crawlies characterize the scary cast of current fantasy. In the latest Harry Potter book, the young wizard and his friends have to learn to handle vicious, scorpionlike "skrewts," while in real-life supermarkets, parents hoping to add thrills to their children's bath time can buy giant bugs encased in translucent bars of soap.

The more fragmented and incoherent it feels to inhabit the technological world (and the more sophisticated the special effects that same technology makes possible), the more terrifying are the images produced by today's monster makers. It is revealing that they often mix and shuffle elements from various species, combining the antlers of a stag beetle and the feelers of a fly, or a butterfly's proboscis and an ant's thorax, to create fantastic new hybrids. Predatory space aliens are imagined with the hugely magnified eyes of flies and wasps; the film Alien pictured the invaders as reptilian bugs hatched from a monstrous, maggoty queen ant; Men in Black imagined an apocalyptic takeover by a colossal cockroach.

With these insect connections in mind, I was intrigued recently to discover that the word "bugs" originally meant demons. The Coverdale translation of the Bible, made for Henry VIII and published in 1535, is known as the Bug Bible on account of its translation of line 5 of Psalm 91: "Thou shalt not nede to be afrayed of eny bugges by night"--and the line doesn't refer to mosquitoes. These perils include Beelzebub, the devil who is "Lord of the Flies" (2 Kings 1:2). Children's stories, horror films, and Halloween parties, carrying on the traditional ritual combat against monsters, are once again closing the gap between "bug" meaning insect and "bug" meaning devil.

Marina Warner is a novelist and historian who writes about myths and fairytales. This essay is adapted from her most recent book, No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1999.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning