Halloween Haunts: SPIDER SEASON By Evan Baughfman   Recently, I picked Arachnophobia for our Family Movie Night, and my kids (over)reacted as if I’d told them we’d be bobbing for egg sacs inside a squirming tub of tarantulas. They begged for Ghostface, Annabelle, and KPop demons. Anyone or anything but SPIDERS! Arachnids have been creeping through my brain since end-of-summer. (To be honest, they’re always there, just out of view. Spiders like to crawl into my horror fiction, whether it be a twisted fairy tale or a dark Christmas entry.) It’s that time of year when orb-weaver species are on…

Halloween Haunts: Married to Horror: Perspectives of a Collaborating Couple By Stephen H. Provost   Writers often approach horror from one of two perspectives: Either they’re writers who discover horror, or they’re horror lovers who find an outlet in writing. My wife, Sharon Marie Provost, was a horror fan from childhood. She’s a voracious reader who grew up on Stephen King, and she wrote a vampire-themed short story when she was in grade school. If you ask her whether she’s seen a specific horror film, chances are the answer will be “yes.” I, on the other hand, was a journalist…

Halloween Haunts: In Adolescent Clouds of Gloom By Sumiko Saulson 16-year-old Sumiko Saulson standing on the lanai of their apartment at Atkinson Plaza in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1984. Photo taken by their father, Robert Saulson. I landed at the Ambassador Hotel, in the historical Transgender District (where the Compton Cafeteria Riots took place in August 1966). The Ambassador was in the Tenderloin, San Francisco’s red light district, a rough-and-tumble 50-square-block ghetto rising up from the front doorsteps of City Hall, filled with single room occupancy (SRO) hotels like my new home, where the City’s poorest could rent a room in…

Halloween Haunts: This Haunted House Will Save You By Henry Corrigan   Everything we do, tends to have a purpose behind it. We humans might be weird, but we don’t really do random. That’s because randomness is risky. It invites chaos and if there’s one thing that both scares and offends us, it’s that something could be done to us, and we’re left with no recourse. We’re just done. So, to deal with this inescapable fact, we do what we do best. We play pretend. We create stories, structures and scenarios where we can come to grips with it safely.…

Halloween Haunts: Samhain By Brooke MacKenzie   During my senior year of high school, I had become a devout practitioner of Wicca, and I made sure everyone around me knew it.  I would offer “Blessed Be” as a standard farewell, and even the occasional, “Goddess Bless” when someone sneezed.  I performed love spells for romantically challenged friends, crafted prosperity dolls as Christmas presents, and self-righteously preached about the destructiveness of patriarchal religion.  I dyed my hair blue and then green and then purple, spilled wax all over the carpet during full moon rituals and bogarted my mom’s stock pot to…

Halloween Haunts: An HWA Halloween By Robert Cabeen Instead of promoting my own dark doings, I’m going to provide photographic evidence that HWA members deserve Kevin Wetmore’s moniker, “Halloween People.” Our annual Halloween galas provided HWA members, from across the country, the chance to give their shadows the night off and go wild. Warning: to those of you who have been caught in the act here—this will now go down on your permanent HWA record. Our last Halloween party was in the before times, but we plan to carry on the tradition in the future—maybe next year. Will you dare…

Halloween Haunts: “Was I Supposed to be Scared?” By J.B. Corso     This is the worst question a horror reader can ask themselves. If you or your reader asked this, at least one of two things is likely true. The narrative failed to connect because: it lacked the necessary emotional charge to be scary, and/ or the storyline, horror, and/ or theme was too familiar So, what might’ve gone wrong? Here are 6 challenges a horror story faces and what can be done to correct them. Let’s go! Over-saturated Market (Problem #2) Humans have evolved over the millennia to…

Halloween Haunts: Horror Influences By Dean Cade I never planned on becoming a writer. The seeds were planted since I was a horror fan from a young age. My earliest memory of being scared in a theater was seeing the horror film, Prophecy, in the early summer of 1979. There was a scene towards the end that changed my life. The survivors were hiding in some kind of underground chamber, whispering and debating about the mutant bear somewhere up above. I wanted them to stay where it was safe and not open the trapdoor, but characters never listen and do dumb…

Halloween Haunts: The Frog and The Scorpion Go to Universal Studios By Michael Subjack   “I know you’re going to tell people about that shit.” We were barely out of the parking lot when Brian delivered this statement with a weary certainty. “I would never do that to you, buddy,” I assured him. “This stays between us.” It was a genuine promise. Too bad it only lasted a night.   We had just spent the evening at Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights, a tradition that began when I moved to the West Coast in 2010. The 2013 line-up wasn’t among the…

Halloween Haunts: My Season as a Scareactor By Rob Tiemstra   It’s September of 2018. At Universal Studios Hollywood, rehearsal is underway for this year’s Halloween Horror Nights. My friend Noelle walks out onto the deserted upper lot and pantomimes howling at the moon. The rest of her cast converges behind her as the soundtrack kicks into high gear and they charge forward. Even without anyone in costume or makeup, the staging is a thrill to witness. This act will become the Opening Scare-emony of HHN 2018. The inhabitants of the Upper Lot Scare Zone — themed after Michael Dougherty’s…

Halloween Haunts: When the Line Between the Living and the Dead is at its Thinnest By Amanda Worthington   My mom had had a good day the day before and we were all unusually optimistic. The strains of my conversation alone with her drifted back to me – “If it ever comes to life-saving measures versus comfort measures, I want comfort-measures.” Those words were heavy, but I drudged them up from the deep as the heart monitor let out its disparaging whine. The next moments are a blur, even now. Cancer is a bitch. And it made her a corpse…