“I was asked to
write about what Halloween means to me. I’m sure The Son Of Celluloid was
thinking that I was going to gush over the Holiday that so many of us in the
horror industry enjoy and wait for all year long. It used to be exactly like
that when I was six years old. I would go shopping with my dad for one of those
terrible plastic facemasks with the rubber band stapled to it to hold it onto
your face and the flimsy plastic raincoat with the Chinese stamp of some
character,or even a logo of a TV series character; so, for one night, once a
year, you can parade around pretending to be that (often lame) character from
that old defunct TV show asking for candy from your neighbors… and getting it.
The shock and surprise of finally getting home and dumping out all of that free
candy. Letting your parents inspect it
for razorblades and LSD, then give it back to you. As a child, that three to
five pounds of candy was like a gift from Heaven. Manna from the skies… and you
just never wanted it to end.
Those were
different times. They were wonderful times, and little did I know back then
that I was a walking billboard for Frankenberry Cereal. Yes, either at seven or
eight years old, I chose to be Frankenberry, and that stamp on my plastic
pajamas I so proudly walked around the neighborhood in had a box of
Frankenberry as my super hero emblem. I didn’t know it at the time. I was
innocent and I loved the cereal. Dammit,
I was going to be the strawberry flavored Frankenstein monster that was a part
of a nutritious breakfast while stomping around the neighborhood; demanding
everything that was never even close to a vitamin-fortified piece of
red-dyed-funky-marshmallow or a stale, processed piece of wheat coated with
sugar and passed off as part of my daily food group.
As I grew older, the girls began to
dress sluttier and the parties became wilder and Halloween was good again. Once
you pass the section of teenage-hood where you can’t bang on doors and demand sugar
encrusted treats but you couldn’t go out and party yet - the years between
fourteen and seventeen - usually
sucked. Then the drugs, booze, and
sluts took the place of candy consumption.
Then Halloween was good again.
Halloween began to take a turn in the early nineties and began to become
fashionable, or should I really say, profitable? As a child, you may not notice
that you’re a walking billboard for a cereal company. But as you get older, you start to see it for what it is; a huge
money cash grab that Americans were not only falling for, but were too stupid
to realize. The adults were drawn into hosting adult costume parties. We have parades, haunted houses, make up,
costumes, designer jewels, and slut uniforms as far as the eyes can see. Sugar
soaked dementia fills the coffers of the candy companies, who only work for
that one-month a year where candy sales are thru the roof. There are specialty
stores that only open once month a year to sell us rubber spiders, eyeball
keychains, plastic wire zombies crawling out of the ground, fog machines, smoke
machines, strobe lights, Halloween lights, fake fangs, fake hands, fake wounds,
fake smiles, and all of the spooky stuff that we as a society are willing to
buy in the name of fun, laughter, merriment and surprise.
Halloween has
never been a big seller for horror companies who release movies, because
everyone and their mother release as much horror product into the septic pool I
call the retail market that sales are the same. What I am bitching about is the
wholesale destruction of a holiday that used to be fun. It was the last Holiday
that suddenly began to become so commercialized that it makes me sick. Fifteen
years ago, if you wanted a haunted house, you had to make it, props and
all. And if you had a strobe light, you
were ahead of the game; especially if you had some sheets to turn into ghosts.
Now you can buy inflatable cats as big as Ford trucks, Styrofoam gravestones,
mechanical zombies, and even bubbling radioactive barrels with moaning, melting
zombies pulling themselves out for a measly $250.00
I long for the
days when I could dress up as Frankenberry and parade around as a child, not
knowing I was a walking billboard. A part of an ever growing system of checks
and dollars, corporate strategies and manipulations that would always increase,
taking away that wonder and innocence of youth that I try to relive and can
never, ever put it back into the box it was once in.
Now if you will excuse me, I have a two story
inflatable cat and ten styro-foam gravestones I need to set up in the front
yard.”9 more days 'til Halloween, Halloween, Halloween. 9 more days 'til Halloween. Silver Shamrock.
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