John Carpenter was a pretty amazing filmmaker in his early years.  He took three pumpkins, a bag of leaves, a poorly tuned piano, a half-in-the-bag lead actor, bad lighting, and an awful script and turned all that into a cinematic masterpiece.

Halloween isn’t a cinematic masterpiece like Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon is...but for what John Carpenter was working with, he achieved an impressive financial and visual result. 

But as creepy as John Carpenter’s Halloween was, the story...was dumb.

So much of the modern “horror” genre is dumb.  Zombies and vampires and serial killers who don’t die — it’s all been done over and over again. 

Most folks don’t think of Jack London when it comes to the authors of frightening stories, but you should.  Because Jack London wrote one of the most unsettling and frightening stories ever told.  It’s called “To Build a Fire.”

It’s a half-hour read, and it doesn’t have ghosts, werewolves, or possessed dolls.  “To Build a Fire” is a horror story where the only thing that is going wrong is the subject of the story’s lack of imagination.

He is a man who has forgotten how to be afraid of the cold.  He doesn’t imagine just how many degrees of frost he is facing.

Everything he does is a mistake.  Every time he tries to make things better, they get worse.  And it all was 100% preventable.

As I read “To Build a Fire” again this fall, I realized that this work might as well be a metaphor for Joe Biden’s energy policies.

When the man sets out in weather he knows is colder than usual, also knowing that he is inexperienced...I am reminded of our sudden obsession with “zero carbon,” with zero real-world experience in zero carbon.

When he builds a fire under a snowy branch and discovers that warming snow falling on his fire puts the fire out, I am reminded of the folly of the E.V. fiasco.

And at each point along the way towards his doom, he thinks about the warm camp he will arrive at later.  Denying the reality that he has already made a series of fatal errors is the biggest fatal error he makes. 

It’s a lot like the illusion climate zealots have that getting rid of carbon somehow means that they get to keep civilization.  They don’t get to keep it if they get what they want.

If wind and solar were enough to power industrial civilization, the Dutch would have had our civilization back in the 1500s.

Zero carbon means zero industrial civilization.  It means 7 billion people starve to death.  It means we have forgotten to fear the cold.

So for a frightening read as the weather changes and the leaves fall, check out “To Build a Fire.”  And remember how to be frightened of the cold.

Image via Pexels.