All was quiet in the halls of Kim Kardashian’s palatial Calabasas mansion. The kids were asleep, Pete Davidson was in New York doing table reads for SNL, and Kim finally had a moment of peace to herself after the whirlwind week of Met Gala prep.
She removed the day’s application of KKW Beauty body foundation with military-grade steel wool, put on her coziest SKIMS, and settled in for popcorn and an old movie. “Ugh, I love this one,” she said to absolutely no one in particular while queuing up Some Like It Hot.
Suddenly, her lights began to flicker. “Northie, go to bed!” she yelled out. But just as soon as they began to flicker they were out completely. She got up from the couch to locate the breaker box with her phone’s flashlight before remembering that her walls were bare and designed for any electrical source to be completely invisible.
She made her way to her kitchen to locate candles, nearly breaking her foot on every piece of hard marble furniture that she ran into along the way.
She could swear she heard laughter so soft it was almost a coo, echoing through her barren home. Her kitchen smelled unusual, there was an air of Chanel No. 5 mixed with the unmistakable metallic scent of blood. Suddenly, she realized her feet were scratched, cut from small shards of diamonds littering her kitchen floor, torn from priceless jewelry she kept in an uncrackable safe upstairs.
Then, her phone flashlight went out, and the device began to ring. Unknown Number. Kim, in tears, answered, her voice shaking. “H-Hello?” she asks, her voice reduced to a whisper. A coquettish yet irrefutably demonic giggle erupted from the other end, causing Kim to drop her phone, shattering the screen. “Happy Birthday…Ms. Kardashian. Make a wish, it’ll be your last!”
The most famous woman in America is creating a horror movie for herself while the rest of us are already living one.
The Haunting of Kim Kardashian...
Kim Kardashian desperately wants to be haunted, this much has become abundantly clear as the week has progressed. Her billions of dollars have allowed her to experience every earthly pleasure and every last human emotion that can be registered by the brain, and now, all that’s left is for her to dip her toe into the netherworld of the spiritual realm to invite a possession.
It began Monday night when Kim stepped onto the Met Gala red carpet in New York wearing Marilyn Monroe’s infamous, and priceless, “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” dress. But leaving her literal mark on an irreplaceable archival piece was only just the latest step in her preternatural plan. The day after the 2022 Met Gala, Ripley’s Believe it or Not!—who loaned Kim the dress for a brief spell on the carpet before she changed into an exact replica—posted a video of a fitting they had done with Kardashian in April where they surprised her with a Tiffany blue box containing a silver tin filled with a lock of Marilyn Monroe’s actual hair.
It feels eerily fitting, if a little on the nose, that while most Americans spent their Tuesdays concerned about the state of Roe v. Wade and what a potential overturning of that decision would mean for people’s autonomous rights, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! was casually posting videos of them giving away a dead woman’s hair. But Kim Kardashian has never been one for subtlety or any kind of cultural awareness that doesn’t directly serve her own brand, so why start now?
As she opens the box to see the lock of hair before her, Kim gasps and frantically asks the Ripley’s representative what it is, though she clearly already knows. It’s the final key to lowering the veil between this world and the next; the ghoulish artifact that will allow Kim to reach across the aisle not politically but paranormally; the ghastly token that will set forth her plan into action. “Oh my god, I’m literally going to do some crazy voodoo shit,” she says through a thousand-watt grin.
Cultural insensitivity of that statement aside, it’s startling to watch her admit to her dark machinations with such delight. But when you reach the point that you need to invite a haunting into your life just to stir up a little excitement, you’re probably well past the point of self-editing.
Once she had the hair safely in her possession, all that was left for her to do was to get the dress. Mere seconds on the Met Gala red carpet would be all she’d need to begin making contact with a malevolent spirit of Hollywood’s past, be it Marilyn Monroe or someone else sent from the great beyond to do the late blonde’s bidding.
Once she was in the dress, her DNA would make contact with whatever shreds of Monroe’s that may have been leftover from that fateful night in late May of 1962, just under 60 years prior.
Sure, the veil between worlds is at its thinnest when time aligns, but you can’t move The First Monday in May for anyone, not even Kim Kardashian! Well, unless you count when last year’s Gala was held on the Second Monday in September, but that date change was an act of divine intervention that allowed us to get all too acquainted with Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend’s balls. But I digress.
Kim told Vogue that she lost a whopping 16 pounds in three weeks so she could fit into the dress. “I would wear a sauna suit twice a day, run on the treadmill, completely cut out all sugar and all carbs, and just eat the cleanest veggies and protein,” she confessed to the magazine. Of course, this makes so much sense, because a possession requires its host to be in a weakened state.
How could Kim become a vessel for her haunting if she were not willing to undergo severe body modification just to wear a dress for five minutes? Call her Kim Cronenberg! This had to go perfectly, she had only one shot to make contact with the other side. “It was this or nothing,” she told Vogue about the crash diet. Seems like something that someone who is determined to be pestered by phantoms would say.
This is not Kim’s first attempt at making contact with the phantasmagoric. She’s been moving through history, trying on the visage of different famous women of politics past. When the number in your checking account adds a seventh zero, you just get a free pass to play in the murky waters of the supernatural. And you can do it without a hint of tact.
After dressing up as Jackie Kennedy in a 2017 Interview photoshoot and failing to conjure up the angry ghost of Mrs. Onassis herself, Kim put her proclivity for the macabre on the back burner until her goth sensibilities were awoken once more by Lucifer fallen to Earth herself: Ellen DeGeneres.
DeGeneres enlisted Kim to accompany her talk show’s producer and his hair plugs to Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights last fall for a segment on the show. Once there, Kim screamed her way through the attraction, her cries of terror often evolving into cackles as she remembered what fun it is for her to toy around with the dead and how alive it makes her feel. It was then she might’ve decided to give awakening the dead another try, and now she has gone from Jackie Kennedy to the alleged mistress: Marilyn Monroe.
She’s hellbent (and I mean HELLbent) on angering the spirits one way or another. She’ll spit on anyone’s grave if it means the chance to come face to face with the only force that’s more powerful than she is: a poltergeist.
Whether or not she’s successful in her attempts to be haunted is of no concern to her. Sure, she’d love to wake up to the feeling of barbiturates being tossed against her face, only to open her eyes to see Marilyn Monroe standing at the edge of her bed and staring at her or hear her former DASH store employees rattling A Christmas Carol-style chains in the night, demanding the overtime pay they never got, but for her, this is all just to feel something. Something new, a rare thing that money can’t buy for once. A new way to spend an afternoon!
What good would it be to, you know, spend all that energy and time on something that matters when instead, she can spend her free time reenacting the entire plot of Hereditary from start to finish just for fun to see what happens.
She's mobilized an entire team to help her collect haunted tokens in some twisted, macabre scavenger hunt so she can take them into the bathroom at The Met and spin around in the mirror three times while saying “Bloody Mary,” whereas others are mobilizing to try to make sure people can maintain access to safe abortions and fundamental healthcare decisions.
There is no longer any hope for a point of intersection between these two states of existence. Kim Kardashian can take the baby Bar Exam as many times as she wants, but it’ll still always feel like a twisted show of misguided progression toward some state of faux relatability, some activism for a sect of the public that she cannot possibly understand.
A person who has the time, energy, and resources to starve herself in order to lose 16 pounds to fit into a dress so she can call upon the dark lord Beelzebub is not someone who can ever align themselves with a public who finds their rights under siege by the same type of wrinkly, old white men who dated, lusted after, and disrespected the posthumous estate of the woman who she likes to play dress-up as.
There is not a lick of true reverence for the ghosts she’s so desperate to make contact with by making herself in their image. She wants to taunt them, and one should know to never taunt a ghost. She may as well have just brought out an ouija board and asked all of the Met Ball’s co-chairs if they want to play.
Kim Kardashian’s yearning to experience a haunting has found her playing with the thin thread of fate that strings together life and death like it’s a game, similarly to the way that the highest levels of lawmakers treat life-altering decisions that will affect the rest of us forever. She just can’t see that connection, but her self-made horror film is largely the same as the one being enacted on us—hers will just end with the Videodrome cry of “Long Live the New Flesh!” in nasally vocal fry.
