Evil Rabbit Investigation
My investigation of the Evil Rabbit Phenomenon begins, simply, with a memory. As a child roughly between the ages of four and five, I was the bearer of a nightmare which made me horribly afraid of the Easter Bunny for many years. In the nightmare, I am chased by a six to seven foot tall humanoid rabbit with long, sharp claws and razor sharp teeth. He; For there is no doubt it was a male rabbit; had matted dirty-white fur and a face that looked as though it had come straight from Hell. The Nightmare ends right before he catches me. In the Nightmare, I automatically knew it was Easter and the weather coincides with this.
I am now 27 years old and as I remember this Nightmare, it becomes as fresh as if I just had it last night. The strangest thing is, I usually know where my nightmares stem from. When I sit down after the fact and look at them, I can usually tell what parts of my life came together to create the individual fears within the dreams. I watched a Werewolf movie as a kid and had a nightmare of wolves chasing me. A good amount of my dreams and nightmares have ties into the waking world, however there are some that don’t and it is those types of dreams I find most fascinating.
I find them fascinating for several reasons: 1. Some of them are dreams of fore-telling, wherein I see something that has yet to happen. 2. The dreams are so against my natural character that they unsettle me. 3. the landscape is vastly different than real life and yet feels as familiar as if I had known it my entire life. 4. Some of them have the feel to them as if I am experiencing an alternate reality or test of sorts.
This nightmatre insterests me because it has no ties with the waking world. There was not a movie or show I watched, nor story I head involving a giant evil rabbit. Similarly, the Evil Rabbit Costume phase had yet to be adopted. Perhaps when I was very little, a person showed up to Easter in a Rabbit costume and it scared me because I didn’t know what I was looking at and perceived it to be a monstrous thing. I plan on asking my family if such occurred, though I have doubts that it did.
As my investigation continues, utilizing the assets of the internet and Google/Bing; for lack of a proper library and resources; I am finding a very strange phenomenon, indeed. It seems that humanity itself has an subconscious fascination with both rabbits and evil rabbits throughout history.
Beginning with Easter itself, I noticed immediately on the wikipedia article that at one point in time, the Easter Bunny was seen to be a judge and wasn’t a bunny (rabbit), but a Hare.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Bunny
“the Easter Hare originally played the role of a judge, evaluating whether children were good or disobedient in behaviour at the start of the season of Eastertide.”
Leafing through popular culture and memes, I have found a disturbing trend. I first found a Facebook page titled: ‘When I was little the Easter Bunny scared the crap out of me.’ Going further, I found a good amount of pages devoted to an Evil Easter Bunny, almost a cult following.
In recent popular culture, we find several mentions of Rabbits from the Trix Rabbit to Bugs Bunny to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, not to mention the Mad March Hare in Alice in Wonderland. We see Rabbits as the sly tricksters, some times as insane (and that part is based in rabbits actual nature in March when they breed, as they lose all sense of reason when their hormones overwhelm them.)
But, we even find disturbing visions of rabbits within popular culture, such as Frank from Donnie Darko, the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog in Monty Python’s Search for the Holy Grail, Cabin Fever, One Crazy Summer, Night of the Lepus, Harvey, and the rabbit that is pulled from the hat in the Twilight Zone Movie:
cdn2-b.examiner.com/sites/defaul … 637f84.jpg
Continuing further, we find people dressing up in evil rabbit costumes:
oregonlive.com/pacific-north … _kids.html
2.bp.blogspot.com/_S1nm9ato8eA/S … +Bunny.JPG
ryantrone.files.wordpress.com/20 … _bunny.jpg
We even find one person who drew pictures and created a short webcomic story about a sort of demon-rabbit slayer for their friend:
elfwood.com/~trumbo/Evil-Rabbit.3301567.html
I dug a little deeper and found that kids being scared of the Easter Bunny is quite a common occurence:
answers.yahoo.com/question/index … 909AAN9dFG
manifestiron.blogspot.com/2013/0 … bunny.html
blog.rightstart.com/is-your-kid- … ter-bunny/
answers.yahoo.com/question/index … 839AATselU
wcrz.com/some-kids-get-completel … nny-video/
hahabuda.com/2012/04/07/happy-ea … ter-bunny/
We also find the repeated story of the killer in the bunny suit:
In CSI: answers.yahoo.com/question/index … 630AALVChW
Urban Legend: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunny_Man
There are a good amount of variations to the urban legend but all are roughly the same.
There are also a fair few tales of rabbit mythology to be found from the Lakota Indians as well as other tribes and in other older civilizations.
If we care to dissect the Holiday of Easter, we can readily assume that the eggs were definitely a sign of fertility and that the holiday was originally taken from pagan rituals wherein they gave themselves over to this Goddess. The Christians or Catholics or whoever it was that decided to upgrade pagan religions to draw them under sway of the power of the roman church, put the date of Jesus’ Rebirth upon this day as well.
But, where does the Rabbit come from? If we look at such an obscure reference on the Easter Origins Wikipedia page again and look at the Easter Bunny as the judge of little children, does it make it clearer? I think it does, as it would seperate these images of rabbits within our pop culture. To good little boys and girls, the rabbit would probably appear to them in a less-frightening manner. For the bad little boys and girls, well…
To which you say, ‘that’s horrible!’ Is it? Perhaps that is why we forget about the Easter Bunny as a judge and the stories hidden behind that seem to be lost. Perhaps a lot of people forget they had this nightmare as a child or blocked it out and still others have been afraid to admit it. But it seems to be leaking out, anyway, whether due to a subconscious need to have those fears visualized or from a desire to express those fears to the world them; fears they no longer remember the root of.
We tend to avoid talking about the things that scare us the most, but we’re now living in an age of people who are desensitized to violence and horror and I believe that is what breeds such groups as the Facebook groups and those people in the evil/creepy rabbit costumes. A lot of people simply forget the nightmare as they grow up or don’t feel the need to mention it to others, but I think that it does leak out through the subconscious. Perhaps in the posting of this analysis, they will be reminded of those nightmares and come togther to relive their own experiences and marvel in fear over the impossible-seeming nature of such a phenomenon. Perhaps many will scoff and disclaim it and then claim to debunk it, like so many other phenomena.
What I think is most likely is that it is an ancient spirit, both good and bad, depending on who is receiving it. I believe this Rabbit looks into the souls of children and judges them; not permanently; on their behavior and if the children are found to be bad, they are given a scare. It makes sense that in the spingtime of our lives; our childhoods; we are judged and given a choice and then at the end of our lives in the winter, we are judged yet again by another friendly-seeming face and we are either given gifts at such a point or given coal.
At one point in time, people had to be more aware of it, for being more in tune with the things they could not directly see or touch, but experienced nonetheless and the rabbit became associated with both the sun and the moon in accordance to this duality of nature; a duality of nature that exists all throughout nature and even more all throughout our desired beliefs in spirits and Gods. When power and control took the space of prominence in the land and these spirits were tarnished and dragged through the mud and changed, people forgot, over time, what these things once stood for and since others looked at them as if they were fools when they mentioned such things, it quickly became taboo to mention anything occult or supernatural at all.
Even in today’s world, it’s a kind of taboo because people in large simply don’t want to believe in anything, even the good; for if the good things exist that we can’t see; then so must the bad. You get some who believe and then many who try to say otherwise. And they may not even realize why they do so.
The mysterious Rabbit Man. Who knows. It was interesting enough to not curse the time lost in search of answers.