31 Days of Halloween - Welcome

Welcome to the 4th annual Halloween Countdown . Everyday for the month of October, I will be posting various tricks and treats for your enjoyment. As with the past two years there will be a daily Halloween riddle with the answer being provided the following day. There will also be a daily movie, and periodic musings, photos, and links to other sites. The big candy bar which I'll be dropping into your Halloween bucket each day is a collage portrait of a movie monster. These portraits are made entirely out of cut paper. The selection of the monsters was pretty much random in nature, and as there are only 31 days in the month, I will obviously be missing many, many favorites, of mine as well as yours. I'm aware of this, there's no need to point it out, though I'm open to requests for the future. If you like these portraits remember them when the Rondo Awards begin next February and you're filling in that blank space for Artist of the Year.

If you click on the Halloween Countdown button at the top right, you will be directed to the Halloween Countdown home page, created for this year by Shawn Robare as a home base to start out from in order to visit the almost 100 (so far) blogs participating in the Halloween Countdown this year. Everyone puts a lot of hard work into their own personal countdowns, so make sure that you drop the some appreciative comments as you stop by and hit them up for tricks and treats.


This brings me to one last item regarding my own Halloween Countdown. I am having a contest. What do you have to do? Not a whole lot. This year's contest is based entirely on participation. As I stated, a lot of hard work goes into these countdowns, and I am very grateful to all the people who have left comments in the past, participated in the riddles, etc. For each comment a person leaves, I putting their name into hat -- a moldy hat taken from the severed head of a rotting corpse. I'd prefer that the comments be a little more well thought out than simply "Cool!" I also recognize that there are dozens of other blogs for you to check out each day, so I don't expect in depth analysis each and every time either. I just want to know what people think so that I can make it even better next year. So what do you win? In the spirit of Halloween, I will just say that it will be more of a treat than a trick. I will drop a random item into five people's Halloween buckets at the end of the month, announcing the winners on October 31.

For newcomers, here are the Halloween Countdowns I ran for the years 2006 , 2007 , and 2008 . Enjoy!



Image source

31 Days of Halloween - Day 31 - Bonus

Thanks to everyone who visited this month for the Halloween Countdown as I guided you through dozens of monsters and over 70 movies. For those of you needing even more Halloween goodness tonight and through the days of head, here are some offerings for you.

The illustration above is a 3-D cut paper piece that I created for Underneath the Juniper Tree as the cover for the Fall 2013 issue. Each issue is filled with creepy stories and chilling art, and you can read them for free. Great for under the blankets on a windy Halloween night. 

The Grim Gallery is my other blog where I've been sharing some of the thousands of horror related images I've accrued through the years at the rate of one a day 365 days a year. It doesn't sound like much, but it's been running for three and a half years now with 900 images so far. 

Available now at a comic book store or book seller near you is X-Files Classics Volume 2 from IDW. This hardcover (despite what it says on Amazon) collects issues 10-19 of the X-Files comic book series which ran concurrently with the television show. It includes the first three issues I wrote. There is a link to order it at the bottom of this post. 

X-Files Classics Volume 3 collects issues 20 - 29, most of which were written by me. This won't be available until January 21, 2014, but you can pre-order it now using the link at the bottom of this post.

Finally, be sure to visit The Countdown to Halloween where you will find links to 232 dedicated blogs which have been sharing their love of Halloween all month long.

I'll be counting down to Halloween once again next year. In the meantime I'll have more stuff to share all year long starting next Monday when you can Ask Me Anything.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 31 One Last Treat

I ended receiving a couple of tricks this Halloween. The weather was, at least dry, but was too windy to carry out my "Halloween Tree" lit up with well over 100 of the classic plastic jack o'lanterns. I also ended up with a low grade fever (as did my daughter) on top of the ear infection I was already dealing with, so I didn't end up taking too many pictures of what I did end up putting together.

You can take a look at last year's Halloween for a better sense of the Halloween Tree, though with much less buckets.



I found last year that planting clear glass jars with tea light candles in them in the leaves around the base of the trees in our yard had a pretty nice effect. Since these seemed to be better buffers against the wind I set about do this again this year.



A couple of days ago, I whipped together this sad little paper mache, coat hanger and packing material ghost. At night, he actually looked pretty good. You couldn't see the strings or the coat hanger wire, so his limbs seemed to be floating intangible along side of his amorphous body. Did I take a picture of this? No.



This seven-foot tall skeleton is a holdover from last year. It's essentially a huge marionette controlled by the wind and the tree branches. My original plan was to build a bunch more, but my summer was taken up by another large scale paper mache project. I'm shooting for next year.



Here's the skeleton at night. Unfortunately the flash eradicated the numerous tea light flames around the base of the tree, though you can see the reflection of some of the jars. In the background my kids are returning from trick-or-treating before the ever present nosferatu in the window. The table housed the candy in a severed bald head bowl, which had a motion sensor and made sounds and pleas. There was also the animated witch spirit head from Target which really unsettled some of the trick-or-treaters, two cast iron jack o'lanterns you can sort of see, and a boombox playing a sound effects CD I cobbled together a few years back. There was also a fog machine, which at this point was turned off. Again, the wind didn't cooperate too well with that effect.

Here's my daughter as her faceless phantom/Ring Wraith/Dementer...
...and my son as a skeletal "Gate Keeper." I told him that when I was his age, that costume would have had a thin, garishly painted plastic mask that stayed on with a cheap rubber band, and there would be a big picture of the character on the vinyl coveralls which would also have the words "Gate Keeper" printed across it.

That would have been pretty cool, actually.



Here's our jack o'lanterns. The kids designed the faces, my wife scooped them out, and I carved them. We all ate the seeds.

I noticed this year that all the jack o'lanterns were carved from huge pumpkins. Was this phenomenon nation-wide, or just a regional thing. I never saw a pumpkin for sale that was smaller than one of those cement buckets they use in construction.



Here's the nosferatu in the window in the dark. I think they were the most effective, and easiest, thing I made this year.

>

Not a very good photo of the huge light up inflatable tarantula that was set alongside the house. It looks much better in person, and really casts that eerie purple glow. One of these years, I'm going to make it a giant web, with a wrapped victim stuck in it.



Here it is under the harsh light of the flash.



After a night of Trick-or-Treating, here's the reward. I'm glad the tradition of sorting the candy continues, though it must be some part of the Jungian collective unconscious, as I never instructed my kids on this tradition.

They also collected about $16.00 for UNICEF.

I'd like to thank everyone for visiting, and in turn, for sharing so much of their own collections on their own blogs. I apologize from my absence here, and elsewhere the last few days. I've tried to peek in to see what was being posted elsewhere, but haven't really felt up to commenting.

I'm curious as to what people liked best, least, etc., and what you'd like to see brought back next year, or omitted from next year's countdown. I had a bunch of stuff that I never got to post, and hope I remember it next year.

In the meantime, following a few days break, I'll be putting up all sorts of other stuff, though not on a nearly as frequent basis.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 31 - Happy Halloween!

Today's the big day that we've all been counting down to. I'd like to thank everyone who's participated in this year's Halloween countdown, whether by simply stopping by, especially those of you who have taken the time to comment and participate, or who have been running countdown's of your own. I'm especially pleased by how big this year's Halloween countdown has grown since last year. Last year there were only a handful of us doing this (at least in an interconnected manner). This year there are a couple of dozen. Hopefully next year there will be even more. Then the world will be ours. I've taken the time to visit each of the other particpant's blogs on at least an every other day frequency, and have enjoyed them immensely. I've learned things, coveted things, laughed out loud, and experienced a profound shared embracement of the holiday. My apologies for not commenting more frequently, but my computer seems to have some difficulty with the little comments pop up screen, that I haven't figured out how to get around.

I still have a few posts to put up today after this one, so be sure to check back tonight or tomorrow. There's one last movie to watch and post, a riddle to answer, and pictures of my outdoor decorations to share.

In the meantime, here are links to two sites that I'd been meaning to put up, and never seemed to get around to it.

First up, is Mark Harvey's13th Track.com. Mark probably has the greatest collection of Halloween songs, stories, and sound effects on the planet. He also broadcasts a year round streaming radio program of Halloween music, and also composes his own spooky music which he sells on his own record label. There's tons of great stuff here whenever the Halloween mood strikes you.

Secondly, one of the most unique blogs participating in the Halloween countdown is The Armchair Chef. We've got plenty of crafts, and costume scans, toys, music downloads, movie reviews, childhood reminiscences, book recommendations, magazine graphics, all of which I love, among us, but I think this is the only place that's been feeding us a steady diet of recipes for Halloween treats. If you've got a Halloween party planned for tonight and are looking for that special something to serve, then this is the place to go.

Everyone, have a safe and Happy Halloween!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 1

Welcome to my 7th annual Halloween Countdown. Every day throughout the month of October I 'll be dropping treats into your virtual Halloween bucket through a series of posts pertaining to the spirit of Halloween.

While the Countdown is transpiring, I'll be suspending any posts here that don't support the mood of the Halloween season. Regular posting will resume in November, though my regular feature "Ask Me Anything" won't return until the first Monday in December. For those of you new to this blog, or who only venture here during the Countdown, "Ask Me Anything" is something I run on the first Monday of every month (except October) and is meant for you to ask me anything you want about my work, inspiration, this blog, or anything at all. Feel free to revisit in order to do just that.

This year, my Countdown posts will cover a broad spectrum of subjects ranging from pictorials to longer essay pieces, comic book stories, artwork, costumes, monsters, reading recommendations and more. I will also be continuing with my tradition of daily horror movie watching throughout the month (something I've done since way before the internet) and will provide my reactions to what I watch, hopefully providing some new titles to add to your own viewing queue.

What else will you get?

Last year I also posted FREE daily print and cut out paper masks. people seemed to have enjoyed those, so I'll be running more of them each day this year as well.

For those of you who are friends with me on facebook, (feel free to friend me if you're not -- just mention the Countdown) I'm going to attempt to continue providing a short Halloween related video each day.

Be sure to visit my companion blog, The Grim Gallery, where I'm slowly posting my thousands of monster related images at the rate of one per day. There are monsters, ghosts, ghouls, and creeps there every day 365 days a year, but during October, the images tend to be more relevant to Halloween.

If you like what I post this year and want more, be sure to check out my previous Halloween Countdowns by visiting the October archives for the years 2006-2011. The Archives can be found in the column on the right side of this blog page.

Finally, for more Halloween than you can handle, please visit The Countdown to Halloween where you will find links to hundreds of blogs also participating in the Countdown this year. Everyone involved works incredibly hard to bring you the best treats possible all month long. It would be almost impossible to visit every one of the blogs involved every single day, but please try to get to each one at least once and leave them a comment to let them know their efforts are appreciated.

Happy Halloween.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 1

Image source

Welcome to the 6th annual Halloween Countdown. Every day throughout the month of October I'll be posting a variety of tricks and treats for your enjoyment. This means that it will be a month long holiday from the usual business at this blog such as "Ask Me Anything" which will resume the first Monday of November.

What you'll find instead are a wide range of posts pertaining to all manner of creepy seasonal things. I'm continuing to do post about my daily movie viewing throughout the month. Hopefully you'll find more recommendations of horror movies to watch than horror movies to avoid at all costs. There will be one new feature added this year, which will continue into next year. People really responded to the daily Halloween riddle that ran during the 2007 - 2009 Halloween Countdowns. I really wanted to add something again that unified the countdown here as a themed regular daily feature. So this year I bring you...

Free Halloween print and cut-out masks. Every day this blog will feature one, sometimes more, Halloween masks that you can print out at home, cut out, and wear. This is perfect for those last minute costume parties you aren't prepared for.

Finally, for anyone who wants to join me on facebook I'll be featuring a different Halloween related video there every day throughout October. Be sure to mention the Halloween Countdown if you choose to friend me there.

New this year is my companion blog The Grim Gallery a place where I'm posting all of my thousands of weird photos and images of monsters and other strange beings at a rate of one a day. This month's posts all lean towards being relevant to Halloween.

You can also peruse my past halloween Countdowns by checking the October archives from the years 2006-2010 in the archives to the of this post.

Also be sure to check out Countdown to Halloween where you'll find links to hundreds of other blogs and websites participating in this year's countdown as well as contests and cool merchandise to spook up your home for Halloween.

Now for the first treat I'm going to drop in your bucket.

I'd like to recommend to everyone who is enamored with Halloween Lesley Bannatyne's book Halloween Nation. Bannatyne has written, or edited several books about Halloween (including this one).  Halloween Nation takes an in depth and fascinating look into what Halloween means today to all of the adults who celebrate it with exuberant devotion. She interviews artists, musicians, spirit mediums, parade organizers, prop builders, yard haunters, zombie walkers, collectors and others in her entertaining and enlightening quest to document Halloween in the modern world.



    

31 Days of Halloween - Greetings

Welcome to my 2016 Halloween Countdown. This is my eleventh annual Halloween Countdown. This year I'm going to do something a little different. In past years I've posted several times a day including random, or themed, depending on the year, observations, art, riddles, links, photos, comic book stories, etc. devoted to the big holiday on October 31. Along with all of those posts I've also shared every movie I watch throughout the month of October one, two, and even occasionally three per day. That's around 650 movies so far. The plus side of that is it's a lot of movies, many of which I'd never seen before. The down side is that because I only wanted to cover movies I hadn't posted about previously that meant no repeats and left a lot of favorites off of my viewing list for October for a long time. This year I'm going to bask in the companionship of the Universal Classics as well as many other favorites, but I won't be posting about them here. If you want to see what I watched you can find a list here and the rest here. My previous Halloween Countdowns in their entirety can be seen by clicking on October of each year from 2006-2015 in the blog archive to your right.

Instead I'll be covering another love of mine. Same genre, different media, which doesn't get nearly the coverage during the Halloween season as it should. I'm talking about books. Anthologies, single author short story collections, novels, macabre non-fiction, biographies and graphic novels will all be represented as I share some of the relevant books I've read over the past few months. The good thing is that I've decided to share only books I really enjoyed, and only books by authors who don't often get the spotlight thrown their way. Sure, I really enjoyed Joe Hill's The Fireman, recent books by Stephen King, and graphic novels by Mike Mignola, but those guys don't really need a finger pointed their way. Also, because I really like to go into a book knowing as little about it as possible, the reviews are pretty general and as unspoilery as I could make them. Some of the books work incredibly well if you have no idea what they are about before starting them.

Each of the books I chose are also pretty easy to get your hands on, and I've even provided a handy link on each post so that you can order the book from Amazon. Please use this link. If you make a purchase from Amazon by visiting through those links (even if it's not the item in question) Amazon will throw some revenue my way. It's hardly a noteworthy amount, but can cover the cost of a book or two that I purchase later on.

I recommend doing this on any site that provides a link to something that the creator of that blog has steered your way. Think of it as a tip jar for being directed to quality entertainment.

Also, be sure to visit my companion blog, The Grim Gallery for all things monstrous 365 days a year.

I'm not alone in running an annual Countdown to Halloween. After you are done here, please visit Countdown to Halloween where you will find links to hundreds of blogs hosting their own countdown this year. If you want to be part of that group, information on how to do so can be found at that link as well.

Now go grab a warm glass of apple cider and curl up under a thick blanket while the wind howls outside and a branch (or, is it?) taps at your window glass. You have some spooky reading ahead of you. Enjoy.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 17 - Movie 1

I had planned to conclude "A Nightmare On Elm Street" week with "Wes Craven's New Nightmare" (1994), a movie whose self-referential post modern handling of the film series appealed to me. However, when I opened the case in my box set, I discovered that it had the wrong disc, making it impossible to watch until I can somehow get that replaced.

Instead, I opted to watch two movies instead. While not an "A Nightmare on Elm Street" movie, "The Nightmare Before Christmas" (1993) has a somewhat similar sounding title. In this movie, the Pumpkin King, Jack Skellington, ruler of Halloween Town is bored with organizing Halloween year after year (about this time of year, I can start to understand his feelings). Looking for something new, he accidentally stumbles into Christmas Town and dazzled by what he finds there, decides that this year, he's going to handle the duties of ushering in that holiday. Of course because he, and the fellow residents of Halloween Town, can only see Christmas through their Halloween oriented eyes, they make a mess of Christmas.

This is where I make a confession which surprises almost everyone whenever I let it be known. I don't really like this movie.

I have a lot of "The Nightmare Before Christmas" memorabilia, several large storage bins worth and then some. I love the design of the characters, I like the look of the movie, and the artistry that it took to bring the characters to life. I even think the story itself is a good one. I don't care for the execution of that story. I find the screenplay limp, the dialogue sub par, and the characters themselves really bland. The songs are okay, but not great. Whenever Oogie Boogie appears, I start to tune out, and only manage to remain interested a slight bit more when Lock, Shock, and Barrel enter the movie, which I think is overlong by about twenty minutes.

When this movie first came to theaters, I sat through two showings in a row. I watched it a second time because I couldn't believe that a movie I'd been looking so forward to, that should have felt like it was made just for me, left me so cold. I've watched it many other times, trying to figure out why this movie connects with me on such a superficial level, but fails in any way that's meaningful. I still don't have an answer.

I know this much. I think "The Nightmare Before Christmas" is far more successful at conveying Christmas and the warm feelings of Christmas, than it is at depicting Halloween. In fact, I think it fails spectacularly at getting across a sense of Halloween. The limited grey and white palette, the architecture, the monsters themselves, while being really cool, simply don't suggest Halloween itself. Where's the oranges and greens of the die cut paper decorations of the 1960s? Why aren't there jack o'lanterns everywhere? Where's the crisp fall air and Autumn leaves? Why is the opening montage of "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" so much more successful in invoking the feelings of Halloween than a movie set in Halloween itself?

Having said that, I found myself enjoying "The Nightmare Before Christmas" much more this time than any previous time.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 29 - Contest Results

No matter how well you plan something, at least one thing is bound to do wrong. This contest was no exception. As the entries came in, I carefully jotted down all the names and addresses of the entrants onto slips of paper which were placed into a plastic jack o'lantern trick-or-treat bucket so that I could later draw a winner at random. I also carefully placed all of the photos sent into two folders on my computer desktop. One file contained the sent photos, unresized and formatted, the other folder contained the photos after I'd resizewd and reformatted them so that I could place them on my blog when the winner was announced.

About ten days ago, I selected a winner at random, and mailed off their prize. My plan was always to officially announce the winner here at the end of the month, I just wanted to be sure that the seasonal DVD reached them in time to watch it before Halloween, not after.

No problems there.

A couple of days later, I dumped one of the file folders into the trashcan on my desktop. A couple days after that I emptied my trashcan. So what do you think happened yesterday when I decided to put all of the entry photos on my blog? Correct, I discovered that I no longer had most of them, including the photo from the winners. I only have these to post because, I happened to still have the original, untouched images, either still in the old file, or in the original emails, which still hadn't been removed from my virtual mail box.

So to all of you who sent in pictures and don't see them here, I'm terribly sorry about the mishap. There was a really nice range of material submitted, and it would have made a really nice near finale to my Halloween countdown. To Jeff, whose images, I could never download properly, I'm sorry I couldn't see them and share them. Everyone who entered, no matter any problems at my end, was in fact entered into the contest. No one was overlooked. I thank you all for entering.

Congratulations to THE O'BRIEN FAMILY in upstate New York for winning a copy of "Halloween The happy Haunting of America," and for sending in that picture of the cool home made monster for your front porch, wich I wish I could share here.

The photos I have left are still great to see and share so here they are.









The top 2 images come from riddle master, and all around nice guy Stephen, including those amazing Jack O'Lantern portraits he did of his kids.

Next comes some nice Halloween trappings including an almost entirely black cat rubbing gums with some really nice seasonal decor. This comes coutesy of the drunken severed head's better 3/4.

Fellow UMA member, Rob, supplied a nice batch of photos including these two.

One of the nice things about this contest was seeing entries from people I don't know, including Sandy who sent me this one of herself zombified, as well as one featuring some modern horror icons including Chucky and a nicely made mask of the puppet from the "Saw" movies.

Thany you everyone, and again, my apologies for the mishap with the rest of the photos. If you'll all kindly lower your pitchforks and torches, I'll come down out of this windmill.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 13

This being Friday the 13th, I thought it appropriate to post about the symbol of Halloween most associated with bad luck -- the black cat.

Cats have always been believed to possess magical powers. Most cultures have cats associated with magic and the supernatural in some form. The Druids feared cats believing them to be humans transformed by supernatural forces. They were considered evil spirits and were sacrificed on fires during Samhain to ward off bad luck in the coming year.

In Europe it was believed that witches had familiars which took the form of small animals such as toads, hares, bats, and cats. These familiars would assist the witch in practicing her magic. There's nothing that says that a witch's cat has to be black. There are several documented incidents of alleged witches with cats of other colors, but black has always been associated with evil things.

It's arched back, yellow eyes, hair standing on end, and often screeching face, the black cat is one of the primary symbols of Halloween.




Here are some superstitions associated with cats...

Cats suck out the breath of babies.

To become invisible, make a charm of dried cat bones.

If a cat rubs against you, you can expect good luck.

A ship with a cat on board will never be wrecked.

Never let a cat into a room with a corpse. It may be a demon and turn the dead soul into a vampire.

Fear of cats is called ailurophobia

Samhainophobia is the fear of Halloween (fear of festival of the dead)

Phasmophobia - fear of ghosts

Hematophobia - fear of blood

Sciophobia - fear of shadows

Paphophobia - fear of graves

Necrophobia - fear of the dead

Nyktosophobia - fear of the night

Triskaidekaphobia - fear of the number 13

Paraskevidekatriaphobia - fear of Friday the 13th




Some other Halloween superstitions...

Wearing a blindfold, pick a cabbage from the cabbage patch. If it's frostbitten, then watch for bad luck. A clean, healthy cabbage indicates good luck.

Put corn meal by the side of your bed and the ghosts will write your future in it.

Walk into room backwards at midnight on Halloween while looking over your left shoulder, and you will see your future mate.

On Halloween, run around the town square with your mouth full of pins and needles. Come home, look in the mirror, and if you are to be married, you will see your future husband.

Wear a mask on Halloween and you will have good luck all year.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 30 Spooky Bonus

On Halloween 1984, I was a freshman at New York University and had only been living in New York City for about two months. The weather that day was overcast but not cold. My Wednesday morning classes were over and after lunch, my roommate Steve, myself and I think one other person, headed off to the east village to attend a double feature of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1931) and “Freaks” (1932) at a revival house theater which I believe used a rear screen projection system for their movies. It was the first time I’d seen either film on the big screen, and the first time I’d seen “Freaks” period. I remember the great, almost transformative feeling that came over me once the lights dimmed and Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor played from the soundtrack as the titles for “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” appeared on the screen. The feeling stuck with me through both features, and this already felt like a pretty damn good Halloween.

When we left the theater, it was already late afternoon. The sky had begun to darken. The wind had picked up a bit, blowing Fall leaves down the streets, and we were seeing our first kids in costumes coming home from school, or heading out with their parents to parties or trick or treating. I often find myself disoriented coming out of a movie theater after attending a matinee.

There’s something jarring about coming out of the dark theater into broad daylight, or watching a movie that is filled with rain only to be greeted by a sunny day or watching warm sun and stepping out into wind-blown snow. This day was like that too, but it was more like a magical transformation had occurred while we were in the theater and all of New York City had been infused by the spirit of Halloween. There was definitely something magical in the air that day, which is why I still remember it so clearly nearly a quarter of a century later.

Steve and I headed back to the dorm for dinner. Even the dining hall had a special quality to it that night. Dry ice had been added to the serving area. There were orange and black balloons, crepe streamers, and students in costumes ready to go out to clubs, parties, or even the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade which would pass by the windows of the dining hall in just a couple of hours. A Crowd of parade spectators had already begun to form outside and you could see them occasionally silhouetted against the window shades, their costumed forms like strange creatures out of a Hieronymous Bosch painting in shadow form. Two people acted out a murder against one shade. One of the balloons inside the dining hall seemed alive as it floated quickly around the room, rising then dipping down to head level as it worked its way around the room, presumedly riding currents of air, but to the eyes seeming very much like a living creature, or ghost even.

By the time we headed back out, the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade had just started. At this point, it was barely a decade old and still small enough to maintain its short route between Sixth Avenue and the Washington Square Arch. In the next couple of years the parade would become so large that the route would need to be expanded to accommodate the crowds of participants and spectators, though it was never easy to tell where the division ended.

Steve and I worked our way to the subway station, taking in some of the parade as we went. Our destination was the Thalia uptown for another double feature, this time “Tales From the Crypt” (1972) and “Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors” (1965). The Thalia was a revival cinema that was featured prominently in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” (1977) and has an unusual feature in that the floor of the theater slants upwards towards the screen so that you feel like your sitting in an airplane at take-off. I don’t know how the people in front of you didn’t end up blocking your view, but they didn’t. We were joined by Steve’s brother Greg and talked movies for a bit, comparing the merits of the Universal horror films and whether Lugosi or Lee made a better Dracula, before the features started. I’d never seen either of these anthology films before, but loved three of the five stories in “Tales From the Crypt” and enjoyed the very much inferior “Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors” but more for the unintentionally humorous dialogue throughout, which made this a great horror movie to see with a crowd.

It was pretty late by the time these movies let out, but we were all young and this was New York City where we were already used to beginning our social lives at 11:00 PM. The three of us went out for a second dinner, then Greg left us to go home and Steve and I returned downtown where we made the circuit of the dorms searching out parties where the alcohol flowed freely. Naturally, this is the part of that great Halloween that I remember not at all.

To wind down this year’s month long Halloween celebration I have decided to watch both of these double features again. Alas, I’ve split them over two days, and Steve is not at my side to watch them. Even so, they feel like Halloween to me.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 30

Every year I mean to drive around town and take pictures of houses that have decorated for Halloween. Every year I wind up being so busy worrying about getting my own yard ready that I invariably never get around to it. Just over the course of regular travel, I only saw a few houses that had anything up at all in their yards, porches, or windows, let alone any astonishing yard haunts.

Today, while I was waiting for paint to dry on a few of my own last minute props I was putting together, I decided to go for a walk with my camera in hand and see what I could find. The following photos all came from a single neighborhood about a mile from my house, and spread over about half a mile of distance. Two of the photos come from the same house. There was also one other house that I didn't photograph because the man who lived there was in his yard giving me suspicious looks.  

It makes me happy when I see houses done up like this with no frills decorations that harken back to the 1960s and 1970s. It's certainly much better than the house I passed that had a pine tree in their front yard covered with bows make out of cutesy "Halloween" ribbon. They just don't get it.

What depresses me though is that I don't see more houses like this. You always hear statistics about how Halloween runs second only to Christmas in terms of money spent. On what though? Are all those billions of dollars simply going to candy? Or do I just live in the wrong towns? When I lived in Los Angeles lots of houses here done up, and there was an entire block in Venice, CA that had every house participating in a themed Halloween each year. The year I went it was a creepy carnival and each house was like it's own different sideshow exhibit. There were games and everything. In Ann Arbor, MI, there were some houses, but not a lot. Our yard decor definitely inspired a few neighbors to at least make a token effort. Now that I'm on Cape Cod, I'm seeing very little evidence that Halloween is a holiday that people actually participate in.

According to an article I found on Shellhawk's Nest about the husband of my daughter's third grade teacher, who created Brandywine Cemetery, a survey given by the National Retail Federation 50.1% of people will decorate their yards for Halloween. I find this statistic entirely suspect unless they surveyed the participants of the Countdown to Halloween, or people shopping in the Halloween section of stores. That percentage means that every other house should have decorations out on their yard for Halloween. Don't I wish that were true.

Does anyone out there reading this live somewhere where a large part of the population seems to have the holiday spirit and decorate the outside of their homes for Halloween? If so, please send me the real estate section of the newspaper.

One of the reasons I do as much as I do is because I want the kids that trick or treat through my neighborhood to have at least one house where they go "wow" when they see it. I also keep hoping it will inspire their parents to do it to their houses too.



  

100 Days Until Halloween

There's only 100 days until Halloween, and only 69 Days until the beginning of this year's 31 Days of Halloween. That's 31 days of daily posts all about the best holiday of the year. Last year over 70 different blogs participated in the annual Halloween countdown. This year, I'm guessing, we'll see over 100. I've already begun compiling my list of this year's participants. If you're planning to join us this year, please let me know.

If you're not planning to participate, but want to be part of the fun anyway, then stop back here on October 1st, and find out how.

If you'll excuse me, I've got a lot of work to do to in order to be prepared.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 1

Welcome to my fifteenth, and final, Countdown to Halloween. While my love of the holiday has not diminished, a number of factors have led me to giving up all my ghosts when it comes to this annual event. The first one of these took place in October 2006, and serendipitously, there were a handful of other people doing this too and we became a supportive, like-minded community, and eventually turned it into an organized online event, The Countdown to Halloween , (where you can sign up to participate yourself, or simply find lots of cool blogs to check out for all of your Halloween treats and tricks). I have also stepped aside as organizer of this event. I think all of the other early pioneers of this event have long stopped participating, and I am the last holdout. I had toyed with trying to make it an even twenty years, but after the last few realized that it would only lead to a lot of stress and disappointment. Even this final year, where I'd hoped to go out with a bang with five different types of posts each day, ended up being a compromised effort, which will have three daily posts, a daily movie, a daily book, and a random post made up of what were going to be the other three categories, including some original Halloween art I made and which will be available for sale. Over the course of fifteen years, and with literally hundreds of participating blogs also osting daily each October for most of those years led me to decide that it was getting more and more difficult to offer up anything that everyone hasn't already seen. While I will continue my tradition of watching a horror movie everyday throughout October, not wanting to repeat myself here meant that if I felt like watching The Wolfman during the month of October, I couldn't. After this year I can watch whatever i want without feeling obliged to keep offering something new each day. Time commitments were the biggest factor in my decision to stop. Between work, family, and other obligations, it's harder and harder to make time to put together the material to share here. Finally, the shifting nature of what people pay attention to on the internet has made me consider that blogs now reside off a hidden back hallway of popular culture, and that most people now don't want to look past image heavy places such as Instagram and Tik-Tok. For the first few years, every post got at least a handful of comments, making it feel like the effort of putting this together was actually reaching people. In the past few years, while page visit traffic remained steady (and always much higher for October), almost no one leaves a comment anymore, so I have no idea if people actually even enjoy seeing this stuff anymore. So, now that all the whys are out of the way, onward to the treats. While, this final Countdown is not all that I wanted it to be, I still managed to pull together some full size candy bars to hand out, including original art which will be made available for sale the day it is posted over at my store. I will have three posts up every day, so keep checking back. Also, if you like monsters, my companion blog, The Grim Gallery, not only has images of monsters from movies, art, and popular culture up every day through October, but every day of the year. The Grim Gallery is now in it's tenth year, so there are plenty of monsters for you to find just by scrolling through the old posts. Speaking of which, I have 15 years of old Countdown posts that you can investigate, if you wish tom do so, by clicking on the month of October under each year in the Blog Archive to the right. Grab a mug of hot apple cider, or pumpkin spice latte, slip on your mask and let the month of Halloween begin.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 31

Here, without too much commentary, is what I think would make the perfect Halloween movie marathon. On other years, I may substitute one or two movies, but this pretty much makes up what I think captures the essence, in spirit, mood, imagery, and feeling, about the holiday.

You'll no doubt notice that the most recent movie on the list was made in 1968. Many of you will comlain and wonder where's that John Carpenter movie? For some reason, movies made after 1970 don't evoke the same feelings in me that go along with the holiday.














The Ichabod Crane half of Disney's "The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad" (1949). I wanted to start off with something that properly set the mood, and this classic animated retelling of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" seems to be the perfect choice. The other shorts on the list (save "The Skeleton Dance") are too funny, friendly, or stylized to do the trick.
































"Frankenstein" (1931) and "Bride of Frankenstein" (1935) not only perfectly evoke the dreary wind swept castle and monster mood of Halloween, but also represent the Universal monster series at its very best.





















I could have picked a number of Looney Tunes cartoons, but "Water, Water, Every Hare" (1952) starring Bugs Bunny seemed to be a perfect transition cartoon here.





















"The Wolf Man" (1941) Other Universal movies may be better, but this one is probably my favorite. It not only captures the flavor of the holiday, including a man transforming into a monster, just like normal kids getting ready to trick-or-treat, but poor Larry Talbott may be the most sympathetic monster in movie history. Plus, it co-stars Evelyn Ankers.
















"It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" (1966)

"The House On Haunted Hill" (1959) is one of my favorite horror movies. It's a lot of fun and it stars Vincent Price.

"The Tell-Tale Heart" (1953) Narrated by James Mason, this UPA animated short is incredibly designed and disturbing. My kids found it to be pretty darned scary when we watched it a few days ago.





















If I had to choose a favorite monster movie, it would probably be "Brides of Dracula" (1960). This Hammer film, in which Dracula is nowhere to be scene, has so many great inventive bits that I'd love to steal for my own work, its astounding.
















"Trick Or Treat" (1952) This short animated Disney film, starring Donald Duck, and its catchy song, may have actually made trick-or-treating a popular Halloween activity.
















"Night of the Living Dead" (1968) Is a pretty perfect horror movie. It feels both modern and really antiquated at the same time. Timeless I suppose.





















"The Skeleton Dance" (1929) This Disney cartoon has just about all of the Halloween trappings there are; owls, black cats, graveyards, moons, and lots of skeletons.















Finally, either "Nosferatu" (1922) or "Phantom of the Opera" (1925). Silent movies have a dream-like quality to them, making them the perfect way to close a night of marathon movie watching.