Pumpkins, Ghosts and Things that Go Bump in the Night

I LOVE HALLOWEEN!!!!  I cannot say it enough.  It is my favorite holiday of all time.  It is perfect!  Family does not come in from far-flung locations and stay at your house so you can’t walk around in a t-shirt with holes in it; you don’t have to cook for days on end; you can eat all the chocolate you want and nobody gives you a second glance; and it’s okay to scare the beJesus out of people.  Truly, its perfection does not even compare to other holidays, like Christmas (nerve-wrecking), Thanksgiving (exhausting), or Easter (actually, I really like Easter too, so maybe I need to rethink that one).

It makes me happy to hear the Monster Mash on the radio and see the old B movie vampires and creatures from the black lagoon wrecking havoc on unsuspecting town folk.  I love the creepiness of a good scary movie and I have been known to sit-up late at night to watch a documentary on monster hunting.  I even like candy corn… and that’s saying something.  It is my favorite time of year.

I know I tend to wax poetic about Fall and all that jazz, but Halloween is something entirely different!  Nothing says class like a bunch of pumpkins sitting on your porch in various states of decay.  Nothing says awesome like a pile of leaves waiting for a child to jump into.  Nothing says Halloween like October 31!

Maybe its immaturity on my part, but I enjoy a good costume party!  I love to get all gobbed up into someone else’s personality for the evening.  This year, I was Maleficient - the evil Queen of the Fairies from Sleeping Beauty.  This may be the best costume I have ever had… it is complete with the wicked headdress and crow on a stick.  I looked good in it too… in fact, I looked so good, that my Mom says that I am scary.  Like I know enough to be Maleficient.  I took it as a compliment, but it was a back-handed insult.  My Mom is good at those, bless her heart!  But my constant fascination with Halloween has unnerved her for many years.  Let’s begin at the beginning…

I was one of those weird kids that could read before they were two years old.  Granted, my Mom influenced my sense of the macabre since she used to read Edgar Allen Poe to me as a child.  The tell-tale heart made goosebumps go up my spine.  The melodies of Poe’s language and the thump-thump beating of the imagined heart were enough to inspire my young self to take up pencil in hand and draw pictures that I can only imagine were illustrations to this masterpiece.  She took me to see Psycho AT THE MOVIES when I was three.  She wonders why I was an insomniac for most of my childhood…

As I grew up, I became completely, utterly fascinated with all things vampire.  Bela Lugosi made a dapper count with his heavy accent and piercing eyes.  I saw Dracula before Nosferatu, which scared the beJesus out of me.  I was lucky enough to see the movie “Dracula” with Frank Langella, fresh off-Broadway.  He oozed sex appeal and created a neo-romantic count in my imagination.  My cousin David was a comic book nut and had a copy of Vampirella.  Elvira was a constant fixture of the 80′s.  And, then came Anne Rice’s Vampire Lestat when I was 16 and at Governor’s Scholars at the University of Kentucky.  I devoured that book in two days.   When Bram Stoker's Dracula came out in the 90′s, I was there for the first midnight showing.  And Shadow of a Vampire, the pseudo-documentary of Nosferatu, chilled my heart but in a good way.  I suppose I was a traditionalist.  When True Blood began appearing on HBO, I was there from Day 1!  I read the books, I watched each episode, and I even found myself scouring the internet for minisodes.  I do love vampires.

But another booming facet of Halloween is the misunderstood monster – take zombies for example.  What are they but folks just trying to get along the best they can, dealing with that they have to deal with?  So they eat a few brains?  No big deal… TV does that on a daily basis.  As far as the best flicks go – Shaun of the Dead is a classic and Zombieland was hilarious!  Twinkie anyone?  Other misunderstood monsters are the werewolves – and I must admit, the whole idea of the shapeshifter is something that I find very compelling.

Flashback to young adulthood when I found the most terrifying story I have ever read – Peter Straub’s “Ghost Story.”  Although it was made into a movie, that didn’t totally suck, there is nothing that compares to the book.  The feral nature of the ghosts and the legend created by four friends who managed to get themselves into a situation that they could not escape throughout their very old lives.  There is a Biblical passage that says something to the effect of children paying for the sins of their fathers… this book has an arc that pays homage to that idea.  There is Native American mythology wrapped around the plot as well – it’s definitely a wonderful book.  Much like “Wolfen” – another interesting take on the werewolf myth.  Of course, popular films like “Silver Bullet,” “The Howling,” and “Wolf” continue to bring new fans to the genre, they are missing that subtlety that really claims attention.

Perhaps in a very real way I find that I can identify with these monsters.  Their social outcasts 9 times out of 10, they are loners, they are looking for some sort of fulfillment that is missing from their lives – undead or quasi-real.  Perhaps it is that loneliness about them that draws me to them, that element of danger that they all possess, something akin to a kid playing with matches that doesn’t fear them until he’s burned but just stares in fascination at the fire.  I will continue to be fascinated!