"a place where all the mutants go"

It will be Halloween soon. Our house is currently being transformed into a kitschy house of kid-friendly horrors. Paper spiders and bats adorn the front window. A very large black and green spider is crawling across the pillars on the porch. Just about every horizontal surface inside is covered with some grisly or ghoulish chotchkie. There are lots of candles shaped like pumpkins, a candle holder shaped like a severed hand, figurines representing all manner of frightening creatures (some of which are bobble-heads, limiting their terror quotient).
The pervasive nature of the scary bits started me thinking: wouldn't it be scarier if there was just one horrible thing in an otherwise normal setting? My mind flashed on the image of the ear in the middle of the vacant lot at the beginning of "Blue Velvet." That was disturbing. Horror spends most of the time hiding in the closet. Steven Spielberg knew that the big rubber shark wasn't nearly as scary as the thought of a big rubber shark. Fear is lurking just out of the corner of your eye.
When I was a teenager, my room was in the basement. Sometimes I would leave the light to the stairs off as I went down to go to bed. When I got to the door of my room, I could feel the big dark room behind me full of winged demons and killers with stainless steel hooks for hands. Turning around would make them go away. Turning on the light would make them appear before my wide eyes. I waited for a sound as the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. When the light did come on, there was nothing there, but my heart racing from the momentary exercise.
We're putting our fear on display, to keep them from becoming real. The skeletons and fanged aliens are curiosities to be inspected. When you can get a good look at them, they're not so scary after all. On Halloween we can dance with the dead and shake hands with monsters we made up in the first place. In ten days we can put them away again until next year.