In October, I went to my first haunted house ever. I have never had any interest in haunted houses. But my sweet fiancé is in the Marine Corps and never scared by anything, so he enjoys the (to him) novel feeling of being jumpscared. I feel jumpscared by various things in my daily life, including but not limited to the possibility that my community choir is mad at me, wondering whether my cats are being exposed to carbon monoxide, and meal planning.
So that’s why I usually avoid haunted houses. In this case, though, I made an exception. Near where I live there is a town called Niles, Michigan. I once went to Niles, Michigan in the summertime to go to a steampunk coffee shop and ended up getting a private tour of a closed Christmas ornament shop with a puppy. Niles is home to a “library of things” where you can borrow lawn care equipment, sewing machines (in the plural!) and a TV projector. Anything can happen in Niles, Michigan, and one thing that regularly happens is the Niles Scream Park (proud owners of a truly iconic domain name, haunted.org).
Niles Scream Park is a nonprofit, benefitting a variety of local charities with the help of 150-200 volunteers, according to haunted.org. It has an aspirational-level dedication to camp and extremely high attendance—I hadn’t seen such a well-orchestrated parking system since I saw Taylor Swift at Chiefs Stadium. We walked through a haunted shipwreck as well as a traditional haunted house, all populated with a variety of scary-looking actors, puppets, and fog machines; we listened to animated pumpkins sing songs; I pretended I wasn’t scared of the zombie plumber who stood next to me while I drank hot cocoa.
What I learned while experiencing my first haunted house is that haunted houses can in some ways be a deeply wholesome experience. I have an unbreakable bond with the two girls who were running behind us and nodded gratefully when I said I could warn them about upcoming jump scares. I will never forget the six-foot-tall grown man who opted out of one haunted house because he found out there would be zombies, and he doesn’t do zombies. The decor was realistic enough to give me a little shiver, and I particularly got a good thrill out of the actors that would jump out from around corners, because I knew they couldn’t touch me.
In fact, in some ways the haunted house was a good reminder that maybe my community choir and my meal planning aren’t so scary after all. Getting my heart rate racing because I’m being menaced by a costumed actor with a chain saw is, perhaps, a more adaptive use of my cortisol, if I have to use it. I wouldn’t say I’ll go to every haunted house I see from now on, but I might just make another trip to the Niles Scream Park.
Selling Sunset is a Netflix docusoap that my roommate and I have been watching with irony and earnestness in equal measure since 2022. If you’re not familiar with a docusoap, it presents as a kind of “documentary”—with footage of real people’s daily lives, people talking directly into the camera, etc—but is clearly scripted to amp up the drama considerably. Selling Sunset documents a high-profile real estate agency on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, which employs exclusively women in sky-high heels wearing clothes no woman in the Midwest would be caught dead in.
I’m not sure exactly what draws us back to Selling Sunset over and over again. Of course, there’s the drama—I’m not going to pretend to be immune to the drama. The fascination of a docusoap is that the people really exist, so you get a lot of the satisfaction of realistic gossip, but you also know it’s not really real—at least, I hope it’s not. Soap operas run on the human love for gossip, and though gossip isn’t good, there’s something good that it’s a perversion of—our desire to know things about the people in our community, even though in this case our community is just a group of celebrity real estate agents to whom we’ve developed a parasocial attachment.
Another draw of Selling Sunset is the glimpse it affords into a totally different life. I was born and raised in Southern California, so this world of women in their twenties and thirties (and forties!) flaunting their designer clothing across Beverly Hills has something of the quality of an alternate timeline. Of course, I was never in the Selling Sunset demographic. But somehow, as I watch them in the California sun, part of me thinks I could have been—or simply imagines how strange it would be to be someone else, to be born into a totally different bubble of expectations and priorities and needs, and to work out what you want as a person within a totally different set of artificial conditions.
Part of me always wonders why these women don’t just take their millions of dollars and move to Montana or Cancún, build new lives for themselves. It’s clear from Selling Sunset that this lifestyle makes a lot of them pretty miserable—or makes them very good at acting miserable. But I don’t think I can muster the moral righteousness about that that I could have done a few years ago. I, too, am sometimes very miserable. Not always—not most of the time. But maybe that’s just part of the human condition. Maybe there are strange, ethereal desires they are striving for, something that the fancy clothes and cars and men and mansions symbolize but do not fulfill, and so they stay there because they are looking for something, just like I stay where I am, and go where I go, because I am looking for something too.
At least, I hope so. But on the surface, the world of Selling Sunset is dark, ruled by intrigue, fashion, and petty feuds, empty of most real human connection and happiness. Most of the women seem fiercely lonely, most of the time, wanting something very simple—a baby, or a man—and unable to acquire it despite their untold wealth. It arouses empathy, making the show even more enthralling, but also has some of the quality of staring into an abyss or watching a car crash. I don’t know whether it is good for me or not.
The fascination of Selling Sunset is very similar to the fascination of Taylor Swift. I have watched Taylor Swift cry on stage and on screen, have watched Selling Sunset realtors yell at each other and break down into tears. What is real in this whirling kaleidoscope of glamor and emotion? Does all this vulnerability, so freely offered to us on the screen, really come so easily to these women? Do they feel connected to us? If they don’t, then why do we feel connected to them? Above all, we wonder because we have been compelled to care, are they okay? And how would we ever know?
We wouldn’t. The best haunted houses encourage you to suspend your disbelief, just for a moment. Though I enjoyed the campiness and the goofy costumes, the real thrills of the haunted house were in those split seconds that you forgot all of it wasn’t real. I’m not sure what about that is baked into the human psyche—a desire for real danger, a desire to band together against enemies, even the instinct against evil—but it’s there.
The best docusoaps do the same, blurring the line between reality and fiction and presenting an alternative universe so convincing that you believe in it for a moment—and it scares you. I hope that these women don’t really live in this world they’ve created. Chances are, they’re just as much actors as the 150-200 volunteers at the Niles Scream Park. But there’s a moment when you look at the screen and you wonder, and I think that moment is important—it paves the way to something more human, encourages you to return to your real life with a deep sigh of relief.
Come back in January: for a patron-only post on why Claire’s is like Zillow.
Have a very lovely: Christmas.
Where I’ve been: