IT, The Halloween Tree, and Allowing Ourselves to Write Innocence

There’s something different about certain stories.

I’ve been partaking in different tales when I can, and one such tale is The Halloween Tree, a short story of Ray Bradbury’s that I honestly hadn’t listened to before. (Treason! Heresy! I know, especially considering how many of his stories I adore.) I also just watched the 2017 remake of IT, (yes, I need to watch Chapter Two. We have established that time is a weird soup and I lose track of pop culture media.) and I noticed similarities:

They both are powerful statements of (specifically boyhood) innocence. Rough and gnarly and crass and loud and free.

It made me ponder: do we allow ourselves to write this way anymore?

There’s a quiet naivety to them, where the children are all-knowing and the adults have lost their ability to believe; this majorly plays into the horror factor of it all. The people in charge, the very people who keep kids safe, can’t see the danger or are the danger themselves. It’s no wonder that so many new pieces of media are set in the 1980s- it was a different time, as all the grandpas say, and it’s easier IMO to place innocence in an analog age rather than the hyper-digital one we call home. How can we effectively set the outside tone of dark and eerie when the glow of our screens keep us warm and firmly inside? There’s something to be said of running, and riding bicycles, and open streets, and streetlights signaling time to come home.

Maybe it has to do with the melancholy of lost innocence. Maybe it’s nostalgia and rose-colored glasses from authors beyond those times. But it feels different. And it sure makes being scared easier.

We live in the most advanced age of the world, and sometimes, it seems like this age eats innocence for breakfast.

What does all this mean? Hell if I know! It’s just hurgle burgle food for thought. What are some of your favorite callbacks to simpler times? Do they inspire some calling within you?