Posts in the "Halloween" Category

• Say Hello to the Monster: What Halloween Has to do with Occupy Oakland

  Halloween
  

  Photo by AJStream, from Flickr.

  When I was a kid, I never really cared what I was for Halloween, as long as it got to kill people.

  More often than not, I dressed up as the characters I thought were having a way more exciting life than me: guys in the Army.

  Yeah, I know (now) that guys in the Army don’t have it all that good. It’s not all ultra-cool stuff like crouching in a rice paddy eating baked beans from a can off the end of your still-bloody bayonet. It’s, like, paperwork and saluting and stuff, and trying to get your mortgage paid on a salary that dwindles every year. It probably sucked then and it probably sucks now, but I was a kid, WTF did I know? I thought it was all John Wayne in The Longest Day and Bob Crane in Hogan’s Heroes, romancing German girls and giving Gestapo guys wedgies. That’s what war is, right?

  My father is a hardcore military nerd, just like me, so he helped me hugely with his vast stores of knowledge on uniforms and gear from his eight years as a mortarman in the National Guard, an early-’40s childhood spent watching newsreels from the war, and his compulsive reading in contemporary military history. He explained to me the exact shape and configuration of a white phosphorous grenade (armed forces designation AN-M14, in case you’re wondering) and helped me figure out how a Shasta Cola can could be turned into one and exactly what it would do to the interior of a tank with a crew of Hans-es and Gunther-s in it, which I thought was friggin’ awesome. Death! Murder! Mayhem! Burn those Nazis alive! Fry up some German sausage! Freedom forever! God Bless America! All enemies, foreign and domestic! Eat lead, suckers!

  What’s that, you say? Didn’t I want to be an astronaut? Sure, I would have dressed up as an astronaut…as soon as those pansies in Congress started arming NASA! Seriously, they were sending people into orbit without even sidearms? Hell, you think the Russies are that stupid? I don’t think so, hippie! What happens when the space zombies come…you gonna hit ‘em with algebra? Slap ‘em around with your Master’s degree? Only wimps dressed up as astronauts for Halloween. (more…)

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• The Halloween Party Is Good For You. So Is The Candy. OK, Maybe Not The Candy.

  Halloween

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that all the best parties happen on those two most glorious of holidays – Halloween and New Years.  Labor day and Memorial Day aren’t bad for barbeques, but Halloween has it all – costumes, candy, spooky crap, and an excellent excuse for a really crazy bash.   I like to go have breakfast on All Saint’s Day at Kerbey Lane, our groovy 24-hour diner chain here in Austin, because there really is nothing that warms the heart like a restaurant full of people shambling around like zombies in the smeary tattered remains of their brilliant costume from last night, not meeting anyone’s eye for fear of being recognized as that fool dancing on the tables last night.  At least, I like to do that when I am not the smeary fool limping from whatever stupid thing I thought would be wicked funny in the wee hours.

  In a minute I’ll think of some astute and writerly thing to say about Halloween, but first let me tell you about my friend, Melody.  Melody is an accountant who throws the best Halloween parties in the universe. Look, she made a frickin’ video invite for this years shindig. (more…)

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• The Perky Goth Manifesto

  Halloween

  Right. Halloween. What do I like about it? To begin with, everything. I was a very shy kid. So, putting on a mask meant I got to be daring for a day. I love elaborate costumes. Oddly, I didn’t discover the goth scene until I was an adult and the whole scene was at an ebb. While I understand it isn’t fashionable to call yourself a goth anymore, I don’t care. I’m used to being out of step. For one thing, I’m a Perky Goth(tm) and proud. I shall skip and jump and laugh and be silly and otherwise not take myself seriously while wearing black. I plan on doing so until I die. So there. Oh, and one day I want to live in this house. (It’s the one from the film Practical Magic.) Note: it isn’t black. In fact, I’d probably paint it purple, blue and green in the Victorian Painted Lady style. [sigh] One day. Yes, Morticia Addams was my role model. (Carolyn Jones, that is.) Unfortunately, my inner Morticia Addams has to fight for control with my inner TankGirl. (Now, there’s a combo for you.)

  For me, Halloween isn’t about death. It’s about remembering where you came from–your ancestors for example–and understanding where you’re headed–that is, your goals for the year. Also, Halloween is my wedding anniversary. I celebrate all month long in one way or another. I read Bradbury’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes” and “Carrie” and cuddle up with my husband while watching a long list of films like the one on IO9 today. We also walk our neighborhood and make note of all the wonderful decorations. (My neighborhood is very into Halloween and Christmas.) The only tough thing about Halloween is deciding how we’ll celebrate on the day–whether our anniversary will take priority or Halloween will. (Something I should’ve really thought about when we scheduled our wedding. Oh, well.) As an extra-added complication, there’s World Fantasy Convention. All in all, Halloween is a very busy time for me.

  Fun Halloween things:

  How to Make Spooky Haunted House Silhouettes

  Free Halloween Wallpaper for your computer from Tor.com.

  If Martha Stewart Gothic Style is your thing, here’s a link to some photos as well as the online catalog.

  Lastly, how about some Halloween-themed music? Try Halloween Radio.

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• If I Only Were A Goth

  Halloween

  Halloween! I love Halloween. It inspires my inner goth to come out and play. (Because I’m totally a goth at heart. Love the music, love the aesthetic…but sadly, I’m cursed with an utter lack of fashion sense and an inability to put on make-up. So I cling to my Suspiria, Rosetta Stone, and Mission UK CDs, and only on special occasions do I make the effort to dress the part. Like in my pic for this post, which is from an interpretive skating program I did at Adult Nationals in 2007 to ThouShaltNot’s “If I Only Were A Goth.”)

  Aside from the fun of dressing up, as someone who loves all things fantastical I can’t help but find Halloween fascinating: the time when we let our imaginations run wild over what might be lurking out there in the dark, away from rationality and science. Magic and goblins and ghosts and creeping horrors…I love stories that portray the world as a far wilder, more dangerous place than we’d like to believe.

  As a kid my favorite Halloween story was the animated Disney version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (narrated by Bing Crosby).  The movie might be Disney, but it’s not at all saccharine, and in Ichabod’s ride through the forest it does a stellar segue from hilarity into horror.

  Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas came out when I was in my teens, and that’s been a Halloween tradition for me ever since. (Along with Beetlejuice, and Addams Family Values. For all that I enjoy actual horror movies, it’s the Halloween-themed comedies I end up watching over and over.)

  When it comes to stories and novels, I tend to prefer psychological horror over splatterfests. Creepy stuff, like the good old classic The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson. I’d like to say something deep and meaningful about Halloween and horror here, but since I’m still recovering from attending MileHiCon this past weekend and in a rush to prepare for going to World Fantasy in two days (woo hoo!), I’m going to cheat and just give a short list of books I’d recommend for Halloween reading: (more…)

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• Believing the Impossible

  Halloween

  So, here we are. There is more chocolate in my house than will ever be eaten and half a dozen gourds scattered across the porch and in the garden. This is my first real Halloween in the new house (we were still in a state of move-in panic last October), and I wanted to go all out with the full graveyard and giant roof spider and fog machine, but I’ve got a fence to put up next year around this wild third of an acre compound, so all extra $$ are going toward that between now and April.

  I have a fondness for fall holidays. From now til the first of January, there is food and merriment and pretty lights and décor that help bring a bit of fantasy into the otherwise pretty normal little life I’ve got out here in the wilds of Ohio.

  Holidays are good for shocking us out of the everyday, for helping us look at our lives and our spaces differently. I honestly wish we had more of them, though I’d prefer that they concentrated more on encouraging us to take about three times as much time off and spend about three times less on crap. Next year, I’d even like to have planted my own fine gourds.

  But let’s get back to the fantasy.

  I was a big believer in all things fantastic when I was a kid. Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, unicorns – you name it, and I tried to think up logical ways it could possibly exist. It turned out this was really good practice for worldbuilding in later life, because even as all my fantastical impossibilities were dismantled one by one, I started creating more explicitly fictional ones.

  Perhaps it’s no coincidence that about the time I stopped believing the world was full of magic creatures, I started writing about worlds where different types of fantastic creatures could believably live. Houses really were haunted, and unicorns and red bulls really did fight, and troll’s blood and dragon’s blood really could cure any sort of ill imaginable.

  I’ve gone back-and-forth on the morality of encouraging children to believe in fantastical creatures. The letdown when I finally let go of Santa at the ripe old age of 12 was pretty shitty (I believed in Santa longer than I believed in God, if you can wrap your head around that), but what researching and understanding those phenomenon did was give me a taste for all things unexplainable; all things impossible. It wasn’t just trolls and tooth fairies I started researching, but spontaneous combustion and the origin of the universe. The world was full of mysteries.

  It was that love of the unknown and impossible that drew me to reading fantasy and science fiction, and traveling, and a master’s degree in history. I wanted to know more about how the world worked, and how we understood it, and what we could do with it. And once I knew what was possible, I was able to extrapolate from that to the nearly-possible, and then the fantastically-possible. I started using fiction to explore that nearly-possible place, and I’ve been happily doing it ever since.

  Today, I think everyone should believe in magic, if only for a short while. It can force you to challenge your preconceptions, broaden your view of the world, and question everything you see and hear. And if there’s one thing we need more of these days, it’s folks questioning what is possible. Maybe magic isn’t about troll’s blood and dragon’s gold – maybe it’s about artificially created viruses and bacteria. Maybe there’s no guy living at the north pole flying around on a sled – maybe there’s a giant alien craft spreading contagion across the stars.

  You’ll never know unless you steep yourself in the fantasy first. It’s the fantasy that helps you question the reality.

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• Mazarkis Williams on Halloween

  Guest Post

  Mazarkis Williams has degrees in history and physics, and a passion for cooking and cats. Mazarkis has roots in both Britain and America, having been educated and working in both, and now divides time between Bristol and Boston.

  First, a recognition that Halloween, or Samhain, is a high holiday for many of my friends. It is for honoring the dead, recognizing the end of the year, and putting forward hopes for the next. With apologies, in this post I will write instead of the Halloween we see on television.

  The television specials that pop up around the year reflect our own understanding and our own hopes for the holidays. We want to start fresh at the New Year, make dates for Valentine’s, and gather together with our families for Thanksgiving, and TV faithfully represents that—usually in a banal, comforting way. But Halloween is not suited to pat answers and easy emotional resolutions, so there were never many shows for Halloween until recently.

  During my childhood there was only It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, which shows Linus waiting all night for the spirit of the pumpkin patch to appear. I knew it had a deeper message to share about faith and patience, something I was too young and areligious to understand, but it also had Snoopy, and that was enough for me. By the time my kids were old enough to watch it, it came so early in relation to the holiday, and was so peppered with commercial breaks, that something felt lost. Whatever cultural relevance it would have offered my children had vanished.

  My children found their own way to Halloween on TV. They found Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (more…)

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