Ghoul Logs and the Continued Abstraction of Everything We Love and Hold Dear (Patreon)

I spent Saturday watching approximately eleven hours of Ghoul Logs. Not a horror movie proper, but a riff on the Yule Log tradition. It was amazing and my new ASMR is now just footage of spooky ambience wailing away in the background while write, sleep, and make sacrifices to forgotten gods. But, to be honest, I'm not sure how much of that eleven hours was spent actually watching anything. The Ghoul Log isn’t meant to be watched like a movie, but rather ran in the background for ambience. This might seem like a goofy internet meme stemming out of the rising popularity of their Christmas rivals, but Ghoul Logs have been with us for decades…

Ghoul Logs are not new, not a viral trend sprung forth from the aether like all viral media appear to be. They are the logical iteration on trends that have been with us since Halloween became a marketable phenomenon. It’s instructive in this discourse to look to the true granddaddy of all Ghoul Logs, NYC’s WPIX Channel 11’s Yule Log. 

The Yule Log first aired as a repeating 17 second loop of a log burning in a fireplace. This was broadcast on a two hour loop into the homes of people in the greater NYC area on Christmas Morning, 1966. Ratings were great and much like the antique carpet in front of the original Yule Log, the phenomenon caught fire. The original Yule Log was the creation of Fred M. (Myrrh? Merry? Mistletoe?) Thrower, then President and CEO of WPIX. Fred has a vision of the televised log as a “gift” to residents of NYC who had no fireplaces of their own and as a “gift” to his employees of an extra two hours off.

We see not only the boundaries of modern life under capitalism straining against tradition, but also rapidly hybridizing, cross pollinating holidays. The opportunity to burn an actual yule log with family and friends has been taken from us. The salability of holidays have supplanted any meaningful folk connections. Each year Christmas starts earlier and Halloween slowly bleeds into the winter season. The Ghoul Log, in part, shows us that the harvest in the Harvest season is no longer about being reaped, but doing the reaping. 

This begs the question: “What do Ghoul Logs replace?” If the Yule Log was aimed at families robbed of the ability to embrace either their traditions or a more present sense of community, what is taken by the Ghoul Log? Ostensibly, if the functions are similar, it stands in for the ambience of a jack-o-lantern, anything else that could be on that screen, or no screen at all. The Ghoul Log, like the Yule Log before it, stands in for a severance. It is another layer of removal from the smell, touch, taste of a real pumpkin. It is connection and participation with nature supplanted by televised content. 

 It is the haunting we wish we had.