Halloween Haunts Postscript: 364 Days to Go Until Halloween By Kevin Wetmore, Halloween Haunts Curator   Chicagoland artist, actor and poet Tony Fitzpatrick, who sadly passed away on October 11 of this year, once said, “Few memories evoke as much giddy joy for me as Halloween. For myself and the collection of miscreants, juvenile delinquents and future felons that comprised my peer group, Halloween meant that we owed our community some smashed pumpkins, obscene renderings, trees full of toilet paper and of course the odd flaming bag of dog shit  on the front stoop. Halloween untethered us. It was the…

Halloween Haunts: Halloween People Forever & FTW! by Angela Yuriko Smith I’ve always loved the name Halloween People, the title Kevin Wetmore’s wife gave us a few years ago. It somehow fits better than any academic label or literary genre ever could. It speaks to something beyond horror or fantasy, beyond books or films. It speaks to us: the people who live for the magic between the shadows, the ones who find beauty in what others fear. To me, the Halloween People represent the kindest genre of them all. We recognize that in Halloween Town there is room for everyone no matter…

Halloween Haunts: HALLOWEEN, MY PAL MERV, AND THE SHADOW BEHIND THE WHEEL By Cullen Bunn   Damn it, Merv. You nearly got us all killed. On Halloween night, 1980. As ya do. Back in those days, my friend Vardell threw these awesome Halloween parties. Vardell was the son of a reverend, and he lived in this sprawling old house with far too many rooms, some of which were secret. He would invite dozens of kids, all dressed in homegrown costumes or Ben Cooper masks or sometimes a clever combination of the two, to celebrate the spookiest of nights. Some years,…

Halloween Haunts: A Pre-Halloween Tradition Thankfully Extinct:  Moving Night By Ray Van Horn, Jr.   Commonly, it was known as Mischief Night.  Detroit hellraisers called it Devil’s Night.  In Michigan, New York and the Dakotas, it was referred to as Gate’s Night.  All around the American northeast, you heard it riotously called “Goosey Night” or “Cabbage Night. In my native area of Baltimore, Maryland, two words during the Halloween season struck palpable fear amongst adults and teenagers who’d sacrificed their summers working long hours to buy their first wheels. Moving Night. Pranks, sabotage and vandalism abound the night before Halloween. …

Halloween Haunts: Celebrating Halloween when “Every Day is Halloween” By Raven Belasco   I’m not just a goth girl, I’m a vampire author. This means that by two “lifestyle choices” I’ve made, the lyrics to “Every Day is Halloween”—that Ministry song from -1987 that all “children of the night” have danced to at the goth night at their local nightclub—are doubly true for me. What then to do on Halloween itself? For me this is a strangely vital question, every year. On the goth identity level, Halloween can be seen as “amateur night.” When you dress up in a way…

Halloween Haunts: From Trick or Treater to being THAT HOUSE for Trick or Treaters, a Horror Author’s Growth Arc By Brooklyn Ann   Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. Spooky decorations, dressing up as anything you wanted to be, and roaming the streets at night collecting candy and scares, I love it all. And because I’m short and have a babyface, I was able to trick or treat much longer than many. My best friend and I were diehards who’d be out until curfew, patrolled the richest neighborhoods across TWO towns, and came back with pillowcases almost overflowing with…

Halloween Haunts: A DREAM OF VIOLENCE & BLOOD  Rosemary Thorne The first night Lucy slept in the independent town of Cazalia, (Toledo, Spain), she dreamt of a blue bird. Cazalia, my birthplace, is seldom found on maps; its ancient buildings and narrow passageways sit regally on a desolate plain where it guards a dam and a mind-blowing portion of cloudless sky. Lucy’s dream was not surprising, as many birds fly over Cazalia. “What a wondrous jewel!” Lucy exclaimed on her first morning, having mounted the garden ladder. “The horizon is so wide I can cover the whole northern hemisphere with…

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: KINDNESS ABOVE ALL By Naching T. Kassa   Just before my mother passed in June of 1998, she asked me what I wanted to do with my life. At the time, I didn’t understand the importance of the question. I had no way of knowing she wouldn’t be there to see my life unfold. When I told her I wanted to be a writer, it was more dream than reality. After my mom’s death, I told my father of our exchange. My dad understood the value of words and often advised me to keep mine. It was then…

Halloween Haunts: Three Generations of Halloween and Horror Love By Arin Ruhl   A love of horror is my inheritance on my mother’s side, and Halloween is a family extravaganza. We own more Halloween than Christmas decorations, and perhaps the first time I learned what a vampire was came from an old Dracula movie poster that has hung proudly in our dining room every October for as long as I can remember. Since I was eight years old, we’ve hosted an annual costume party for friends and relatives we don’t often see otherwise. As a kid, I got to chase…

Halloween Haunts: How Scary Movies Went Mainstream, and How They Got Sutured to Halloween By Stacie Herrington Halloween and horror movies go together like peanut butter and chocolate. But it wasn’t always that way. Reese’s commercial (1986) Once upon a time, before you were born, horror movies were weird little experiments involving things like cardboard bats and borrowed pipe organs and nonsparkling vampires. They were smoky European imports, trick films, or midnight stage-show extensions of gothic novels—creepy, sure, but about as mainstream as a séance in your great-great aunt’s parlor. Still, for a certain facet of the filmgoing public, they…

Halloween Haunts: When Dreams Turn Prophetic: What My Nightmares Taught Me By KC Grifant   Throughout my life, my dreams have been vivid, inspiring and, even fairly recently, borderline prophetic. Dreams becomes more culturally significant during the Halloween season. Samhain suggests that dreams occurring around Oct 31 are intensified and hold more meaning, as the “veil” between the real world and spirit world is thinned. Those who celebrate Dia de los Muertos hope to commune with passed loved ones during dreams. And the history of Halloween often references visions influenced by spirits. In other words, now is an ideal time…

Halloween Haunts: DON’T SELL SHORT HORROR STORIES SHORT by Paul Lonardo   For me, short stories are a lot like appetizers. They are bite-size, delicious and fulfilling. You can even make a meal out of them. Have you ever gone out to eat with a group of people where each diner would order a different appetizer, and everyone at the table would sample from all the plates to experience an array of savory flavors and tastes? This is exactly what it’s like when I find myself reading either a good collection of tales written by a single author or an…

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…