The Dark Side of Summer
By Ludmila Rishkova
June 8, 2011
It’s full of good stuff. Ice cream, motorcycles, beautiful cars, skin, flowery dresses, sultry nights, the pleasant smell of greenery, terraces, summer sports, chance encounters, you name it. And yet summer has a dark side. Up in Canada, where winters are illuminated with snow, summer means that darkness descends in a thick curtain, the air is heavy with humidity, the warm nights are dense, palpable. Opportunities open up. The air is so fragrant one gets enchanted, carried away, sometimes forever. The heat and the exposed skin wake something animal within each and every one of us. No wonder some of the best horror stories are set in summertime. Heat and darkness are the crucial elements.
With the heat, come open windows; with them, opportunities for observing and being observed. The nights out become more frequent; with them, opportunities for chance encounters. Heat brings storms and destruction, vulnerability, distraction, loss of control. Summer has a supernatural quality. It fuels imagination.
Each open door and window tells a story, except that those with a dark imagination people it with dark characters. We hear angry words exchanged in a house. We imagine how the anger might escalate, passion leading to a loss of control. We see a boy leading a girl into a park and can only guess at what really waits for them in the density of the forest. A kiss might be exchanged, maybe two, before a dark shape lurking beneath the trees decides to act. Children are driven to summer camps or to relatives’ houses for the summer. They will enjoy the fresh air; they will explore the surrounding woods, the lakes, the abandoned houses. They will find everything that is off-kilter, look into it, and disturb something that has been long asleep. Some of them will not come back.
Some of the best horror stories are set in summer. Stephen King’s It is a story of a bunch of friends exploring every nook and cranny of their town, disturbing things better left undisturbed. The Resident, reviewed in one of our earlier blogs, talks about moving, something so familiar to Montrealers in summer. Moving means leaving one life behind in order to start another. It means creating friendships and establishing trust that will not always prove stable. The CSI series explores what happens to people who stray away on warm nights, be it into a party mode, a dark alley, or simply taking a chance with a stranger on a night we feel particularly enamored. On those nights, we are hardly ever enamored with the stranger. We are, rather, enamored with the night.
The summer night is silky, it’s smooth, it’s all enveloping, all encompassing and impenetrable. The summer night has voices. The hot summer day has voices that lull. Perhaps that’s what makes the morbid summer night, the transition from day life to night life. When darkness falls, everyone is awake. They are finally ready to face the world, and the world, after a long day’s rest, is ready to face them. The summer night is beautiful, but one should never trust a thing of infinite beauty.