NIGHT TERRORS
- maecrawford
- Oct 31
- 4 min read
Last week my two-year-old daughter and I celebrated Halloween by dressing up as bloodthirsty ravens, alongside my husband, costumed as a pale, sullen Edgar Allan Poe dying of tuberculosis. Then we took center stage at the New York Public Library’s annual costume competition, judged once again by famous fashionista Tim Gunn, host of Project Runway and Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style.
About a thousand people attended, but it was our little Ari and my handmade raven costumes — the bent wire beaks and flared, feathered wings — that quickly became the talk of the event. When we won the competition, I gave Ari a big hug, shared a giddy giggle, and flashed a relieved smile.
I wanted the holiday to be pure fun for Ari. Because for me, I was haunted by all those spine-chilling ’80s horror films that my father showed with me when I was a kid, movies he had no idea were inappropriate for children or would leave such a lasting mark on me and, later, on my art.
That’s because one of the strangest features of narcolepsy is that, during sleep, the narcoleptic brain is still largely awake. So in my childhood nightmares, I felt truly present, as you do in the middle of your standard weekday, only that I’d be standing petrified and helpless in front of Freddie Kreuger and Jason and all their evil ilk.
They’re called night terrors. And for narcoleptics like myself, the worst of those terrors stay with you, forever, like real-life memories. Unable to shed them, eventually I realized that I’d do best to process them through my painting.
You can see the lingering influence of those childhood nightmares most clearly in last year’s Pieces of Me series, which combined horror film fears — drowning, being eaten alive, attacked by aliens in my sleep, lost amid the flames of hell — with the deep-seeded lessons of my Catholic school education.
For example, in Can’t Let Go, my 4-foot-tall self-portrait, there I am in the ocean, floating in the water, seemingly alone, until the viewer notices the pod of ravenous killer whales circling around my exposed body. The plot of the painting comes from the horror film “Orca,” the 1977 classic about a vengeful killer whale hunting the human who murdered his pregnant mate, a “Jaws” companion that was clearly inappropriate for young kids but that my dad showed me anyway.
As with all of my paintings, I like to reward my viewers for their continued attention, devoting additional minutes to exploring details you’d surely miss in your first minutes of looking at the canvas — details laced with ambiguity, keeping the viewer considering what they’ve seen for days or weeks to come. In Can’t Let Go, perhaps you’ve now noticed the mysterious hands of an underwater figure grasping the underside of the floating woman’s shoulders.
Is the floating woman about to be violently tugged to the bottom of the ocean? Or are those hands steadying her above water, keeping her above the waves and away from the whales? Or is the floating woman rescuing the underwater figure, offering her body as an unsteady life raft in a desperate effort to save her companion?
Can’t Let Go made a big splash at last year’s New York Fashion Week, the globe’s premiere fashion festival, where my painting was hung in the VIP lounge overlooking the models’ runway. Questions abounded from fascinated onlookers as to what they were seeing and where in my imagination these images came from.
Other paintings in the Pieces of Me series include Puberty Comes for Me, a sketch that developed into a 4-foot-tall acrylic painting personifying the fear I felt in those early teen years, with the flood of hormones and bodily changes, and a frenzied, fantastical wish to stab back with an arrow at the raven-haired hormone-soaked monster that was consuming my body.
Some of the pieces in this horror series I still haven’t decided whether I’m going to continue working on, like Hell, a roughly sketched confrontation with an oversized demon, and Buried Pieces of Me, a sketch in minimalist style of standing in the wind, the stench of a massive pile of body pieces wafting up from below. Take a longer, closer look at Buried to see the detailed body parts and feel the painting’s real horror.
Please accept my apologies if my Pieces of Me series ends up giving you (and your family) your own endless string of night terrors.
Visit www.melissamaekors.com or email me at melissamae@melissamaekors.com
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