I’m not going to comment all that much on the Joe Wilson’s CIA Spook Wife scandal, because it seems self-evident to me that 1) It’s pretty awful, and the heads of the people responsible should roll as far as the laws of physics will allow, and 2) It’s being overblown for political purposes by the Bush Bash Brigade. Believe it or not, both 1 & 2 can be the case.

At any rate, Jim Henley offers the most plausible explanation I’ve yet seen for what the hell the administration staffer who leaked the info was likely up to. (If you ask me, the White House should be taking a lot less, er, esoteric action against the habitually incompetent George Tenet. If that guy manages to hold onto his job after both 9/11 and the no-WMDs-after-all “scandal,” the Red Sox should hire him to manage them in the post season–he’s un-curseable.)

I’ve given a lot of thought to why I like horror.

I mean, it is the kind of thing to which you probably should give a lot of thought. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’ve spent (to use the apt cliche) countless hours watching movies in which hundreds of hapless individuals are needlessly subjected to varieties of frightening and violent unpleasantness as appalling and terrifying as they are oddly creativ by an assortment of monsters and lunatics ranging from potty-mouthed demons to giant cannibalistic retarded hillbillies. My wife, whose constitution, thank God, is more delicate than my own, has asked me on numerous occasions how I can stand to watch films that are little more or less than parades of inhuman and undeserved brutality that more often than not end badly for everyone involved. “I just do” is not always the response I give, but it’s probably the most accurate.

But again, why? I’m still not 100 percent sure. I guess the usual vicarious-thrill/cathartic-release arguments about roller-coaster-rides and monster-identification hold as true for me as they do for anyone, but there’s more to it than that, I think. I’ve noticed that the underlying themes of the horror fiction I enjoy are also present in a lot of my favorite non-horror fiction. (What do you think’s really going on in Eyes Wide Shut, for instance? Or Nineteen Eighty-Four, for that matter?)

I finally put my finger on it in therapy a few weeks ago. Somehow I got to thinking about all the movies and books I’m really passionate about, and I realized that the overwhelming majority of them have down endings. And not just “oh, too bad things didn’t quite work out for them” endings, but “her friends and brother have been beaten with sledgehammers and carved up with chainsaws and she was just tortured for hours and now she’s escaped but she’s been driven batshit insane” endings. In many of these works, and in the horror ones particularly, there’s no shelter, no safety, no hope. And that’s when I realized that what these films and books offer is certainty. Yes, it’s an awful certainty, the certainty that nothing will ever be right again, but to stare that darkness in the face is preferable to the great not-knowing, isn’t it? And if we’re left with nightmares, that seems but a small price to pay for the lesson learned.

Now the days are getting darker quicker, and it’s time to learn the lesson again.

All this is a roundabout way to introduce Where the Monsters Go, a 31-day horrorfest here at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat. In honor of the evil little holiday that ends the month of October, I plan on blogging something about horror (horror films, mainly, but other stuff too) every day. I’ve got two big projects planned: The first is to make available for download several of the papers I wrote on horror films during my undergraduate years as a Film Studies student at Yale University; the second is to end the month with The Thirteen Days of Halloween, a 13-day (who’d’a thunk it?) marathon of horror-movie reviewing, in which I’ll watch and post thoughts on one of my favorite horror films every day for nearly two weeks, culminating on Halloween itself with The Scariest Movie I Ever Seen. In the tradition of the great low-budget horror films of yore, I’m pretty much flying by the seat of my pants here; come by every day, because you and I both will never know what I’ll, ahem, dig up.

A quick word about “Where the Monsters Go,” the title of my little Horror Month: It’s a quote from Clive Barker, specifically from his novella Cabal and the film, Nightbreed, derived therefrom. The to-the-point description of the fictional underground village of Midian, where a wide assortment of creatures and freaks live undisturbed by the horrors of the real world, it seems like an equally apt description of this blog for the next 31 days or so. Also, insofar as Nightbreed was the very first “real” horror film I ever watched (I’m not counting the old Universal flicks, or Godzilla movies, or The Lost Boys), it’s a phrase that initiated me into this dark world much as it did the character of Boone in the film. Moreover, the movie helped begin my long love affair with Barker’s work. Indeed, since his films and books (particularly Hellraiser and the six-volume Books of Blood, and even more particularly the short story “In the Hills, the Cities”) have had an appropriately transformative impact on me for nearly a decade, I gratefully dedicate this project to him. And to the monsters.