No need for thrillers, real life is enough

NEW YORK -- NBC is promoting a night of Halloween-themed series as "Must Scream Thursday." The WB is pitching "Haunted Thursday." \nWe can meet "Ghost Detectives" on Discovery Channel, cackle at Mel Brooks' masterpiece "Young Frankenstein" on Comedy Central, or, on VH1, get creeped out by a circa-"Thriller" Michael Jackson. \nThen we can throw the jack-o'-lantern out and clean the eggs off our car. But Halloween TV won't be over until Monday when, fashionably late, Stephen King's high-school horror "Carrie" premieres on NBC, starring Angela Bettis in the title role that launched Sissy Spacek a quarter-century ago. \nAs in the original film, Carrie White is a loner scorned by her schoolmates and tormented by her religious-zealot mother. An added burden: She has telekinetic powers which seem to control her as much as the other way around. \nPoor Carrie is caught in a titanic struggle between the sacred and the profane, and, just as in the earlier film, a climactic battle is waged at the senior prom. This is no dance, it's payback time as Carrie teaches all the kids an awful lesson. \nA massacre in a high school gym at the hands of an alienated student -- this classic scene seems overtaken by real-life episodes of school violence in recent years. \nEerie enough. But watching "Carrie" or any other freaky Halloween TV, we may be plagued by an even more immediate issue: What could be scarier than the newscasts we've been watching leading up to Halloween? What could be more macabre than the real-life events TV news is covering: \n-- Just last week, 800 Moscow theatergoers were held hostage by Chechen rebels for 2 1/2 days. Then 115 of those captives died from knockout gas used as part of the rescue effort by Russian special forces before storming the theater. \n-- War against Iraq is in the air, and therefore on the air. Still in the talking stage, we hear more than see this story in the form of saber-rattling from President Bush, arguments pro and con from other officials, and, of course, endless chatter from the pundits. And it all seems to take place beneath the spectral gaze of real-life monsters Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, who we never see but, we fear, can see us. \n-- The sniper shootings in the Washington area seemed to borrow from a horror-movie formula: an unknown, deadly stalker terrorizes a community, picking off its citizens one by one. But this carnage was real, with 10 killed and three wounded in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia since Oct. 2. \nHour after hour through the month, cable news networks carried police briefings, spun theories and maintained chopper-vision vigils over each successive shooting site. \nWith such a sprawl of airtime to fill, TV news even found time to raise the possibility that its coverage was excessive. \nTV commentators "are just engaged in sheer conjecture," said radio talk show host Laura Ingraham on CNN's "Reliable Sources" Oct. 19. "No one knows anything and yet everyone keeps talking about it .... I call cable news `tragedy TV."' \nNew York magazine media critic Michael Wolff agreed that, aside from the actual shootings, the story being covered "is all made up. There is nothing here, absolutely nothing. It's television engaged in ... selling this event. This is theater." \nThe story reached a resolution of sorts with last week's arrest of two suspects. But even if the "who" was answered to the great relief of a preyed-upon public, "whys" remained in short supply. And weighing on everyone were these prevalent unknowns: What will be the horror-film scenario next time, and where and when will it unfold? \nThis year, as with last year after the terrorist attacks, no wonder some of us condemn Halloween. Real-life evil puts us out of the mood. \nBut the fault isn't with Halloween, which offers us an annual safe haven for identifying what most horrifies us (or amuses or enchants us) -- then becoming that thing for a night. Halloween invites us to face (and even mask ourselves as) what we dread, then have a fine time spitting in its eye. What could be more restorative? \nAnd as spectators, we could hardly ask for a better time than Halloween to quaff a witches' brew of ghoulish TV. 'Tis the season to be morbid, to submit to our demons while the media assists. \nOn TV and off, then, Halloween is a good day. \nIt's the rest of the year that should continue to alarm us.