“I always get butterflies walking up to the entrance and hearing all the screams from the corn,” Rachel Monninger said.
The Eugene local and University of Oregon freshman has been through Lone Pine’s corn maze every year for five years, but she still gets nervous every time.
“It’s always been so scary to me,” Monninger said. “I always freak out right before and feel so accomplished afterward.”
The maze is open every day of the week, but once night falls on the weekends, it becomes a haunted, twisted journey full of ghouls, ghosts and people–who are trained professionals–who will chase you with chainsaws, including on Halloween this Saturday.
“It’s not recommended for children under the age of 12,” said Lone Pine Farm’s bookkeeper Denise Garner about the infamous haunted maze. “Some adults can’t make it through the first part. It’s very scary.”
Oregon State University graduate and Junction City native Ryan DeLieu went to the haunted maze for his eighth year this past Saturday, a tradition he began in high school.
“I feel like every year they try to change their scare tactics,” DeLieu said. After going for so long, “you get used to how they scare, but even then [it’s hard not to] get startled when some masked man yells, jumps or chases you.”
This is the time of year when horror is coveted. People actively search out grotesque, shocking forms of entertainment to force them to huddle under the covers, too afraid to shut off the lights. But what is it about these scenes that keep us coming back for more? Generally, fear serves as a negative emotion, so why are we drawn to things that make us feel scared?
We might be in need of fear, according to Baran Germen, a graduate fellow who teaches a class on abject horror literature in the Comparative Literature Department at UO. Germen’s class is called “Literature of the Abject,” and its students study Kafka, Shakespeare, and other works featuring the debased and vile.
“Fear, like desire, is an instinct we all have,” Germen said in an email. “Think of the early human beings and their relation, say, to the predators wherein fear steps in for survival.”
Humans no longer need fear to escape from predators, and in middle-class America, most people don’t face life-threatening situations every day. Our lives, by comparison, are boring, and horror films can fill that primal craving for adrenaline.
“Works of art come in as a substitute for our atavistic fears and shake us up and reinvigorate us in our rather banal worlds,” Germen said. “As an instinct, fear makes us feel alive as a particular way of relating to the world around us.”
Putting a horrifying experience onto a screen or into a cornfield allows spectators control over it, according to Sean Hanson, a Eugene Film Society critic who has been with the organization for a year now.
“It’s contained in a safe space, and we know when we leave, everything is going to be okay,” Hanson said. “We like having our nightmares rendered onto film.”
Nightmares vary from person to person, and the trends in film are constantly shifting to recognize new fears in different ways.
“Some are timeless (creepy dolls) and some are contemporary (xenophobia in post-9/11 torture films like Hostel),” Hanson said in an email. “So in a lot of ways, horror films simultaneously capture cultural anxieties and regurgitate them as images that become part of our collective nightmare.”
Think Freddy Krueger, the iconic face of the boogeyman, or Pennywise the clown from Stephen King’s It (1990).
The cinematic experiences these films give us are timeless, which is why classics like The Exorcist (1973), The Shining (1980) and Psycho (1960) are still some of the most critically acclaimed horror films of all time. It’s in the build of the music, suspenseful camera pans and the sound effects that make us jump out of our jack-o-lantern socks.
“There is something inherently and unavoidably terrifying about sitting alone in a dark room full of strangers,” Germen said, “and with a fully focused orientation toward a big screen that almost completely frames our field of vision.”
But for some, the screen just isn’t enough. They need to feel that adrenaline on a heightened level, running for their lives in real life. This is why, for people like Ryan DeLieu, the corn maze is something he keeps coming back to, to the point where now it is pure entertainment. Over the years, the corn maze has become an annual tradition he and his friends do.
“It’s more of a nostalgic thing to do now,” DeLieu said. “I don’t really get scared during the maze, but I love to laugh at the people in my group who do.”
Lone Pine’s last night of horror will be Halloween, which falls on a Saturday this year. The actors generally go all-out on the last night of the season, Garner said, and she expects it to be “extremely spooky.”
It might be the isolation of the countryside, or the fact that you can hear the snapping of stalks and husks in the distance before you actually see what lies beneath; perhaps it’s the claustrophobia of being enclosed in an open space with no visible exit. Much like the horror movies we watch, the corn maze serves as a safe space to experience our most terrifying nightmares in a temporarily exaggerated reality.