The Halloween Report

I can admit with full candor that I am an adult Halloween lover. It’s probably not something that I need to admit to; likely pretty obvious. Nevertheless I am happy to admit it. I like almost everything about Halloween. I like that it spans witch hunter gothicism to plasticky candy-corn kitsch. I like that everyone sheepishly rides the train to their parties in full costume. I like the movie Halloween and the movie Trick r Treat and I even like the movies I don’t like that much like the V/H/S series or Terrifier. I really can’t stop finding new things to like about Halloween. It’s just awesome.

Even in years where I don’t lean into the spooky spirit I almost always find myself, at the last minute, frantically trying to cram Halloween vibes into the last few days of October. One of my Halloween traditions is to watch the movie Halloween on Halloween. Usually I end up doing this first thing in the morning, to make room for the rest of what I want to do. I like handing out candy to trick or treaters, and the really cute kids in costume are usually out early, so you gotta get out there in the afternoon. Then, at night, there’s usually some kind of thing going on that I want to stay open to. So, movie in the morning, then maybe watch it again at night if I have time.

Halloween is a movie that, like its holiday namesake, grows with you. I remember watching it for the first time and thinking, boy, the whole ending part was awesome but the beginning was boring AF! But with watch after watch I find myself as captivated by the understated 1970s hangout vibes as I do by the senseless murders. I feel like this runs parallel to starting out as a trick or treater, rabid for candy, fake blood smeared on everythang, and growing into a candy-hander-outer, content to just sit on the porch and drink in the ambience. I have to imagine there is a similar aspect to Christmas, becoming Santa to your own children, but I don’t have kids, and honestly, fuck Christmas 🖕

Halloween is really such an awesome movie. There’s something mystical about the shape of it, in addition to The Shape of it. It feels like such a perfect object to me. It’s symmetrical, not in narrative or composition or any measurable way, but in a metaphysical sense. Maybe it’s just because I’ve seen it a hundred times but I feel like there is no edge out of place, everything lines up just so, and it encapsulates its genre and the act of filmmaking in a wonderful, transcendent way. It has a quality that I’ve never been able to put words to, beyond simply “magic”.

Another, newer, October tradition I adhere to is Erictober, a full month of Twitch streaming Eric Roberts movies on Monday nights (if you aren’t tuning into Movie Mondays, you’re missing out). This year we watched the modern classics My Last Best Friend, where Eric plays dual roles as a mobster in hiding and a landlord with Covid, My Dinner With Eric, a My Dinner With André riff where Eric eats ‘vegan osso buco’ with his insufferable cardiologist-turned-’actor’, Santa’s Cousin, a Hallmark movie where Eric and his wife Eliza play Santa and Mrs. Claus, and finally Wolves of Wall Street, a surprisingly coherent David DeCoteau werewolf movie where Eric pees on a guy to show dominance.

Erictober has become a Halloween highlight for me, even when the movies aren’t Halloweeny themselves. We’ve dove into some truly outstanding stuff, from the Stalked By My Doctor series to Mr. Birthday to The Elevator, a movie so absolutely deranged that you can count on me someday putting down 10,000 words about it on this blog. This year we programmed our Eric movies with preshow shorts by ‘The Family Roberto’, a husband and wife (I think?) duo of children’s YouTubers who set fairy tales to home-recorded music and Unreal Engine esque animation with horrid shaders. Little Red Riding Hood in Shroomville is a must-watch.

I bring up The Family Roberto because I almost paid homage to them with my Halloween costume this year. I really couldn’t decide what I wanted to be at all, and the only thing that was popping out to me was to be this chicken from The Family Roberto’s Jack and the Beanstalk video.

I basically envisioned painting my face completely white (maybe painting my nose yellow as a beak, even though it wouldn’t be accurate) and then wearing a white swim cap to cover my hair and somehow attaching a red rubber glove to the top as a cockscomb. Then I guess wearing normal clothes, white t-shirt and jeans. I lay awake in bed for many cumulative hours over the first few weeks of October, envisioning various ways I might be able to affix a glove to a swim cap without it either flopping pathetically to the side or breaching the integrity of the cap. I basically arrived at no conclusion and forgot to order the components of this chicken costume in time, so I couldn’t even experiment with any of my mental blueprints.

Instead of being a Family Roberto chicken, I ended up dressing as JFK post-assassination which I felt was in pretty poor taste and didn’t really want to do. The costume was really just a suit. To render the disgusting cavernous wound in Kennedy’s skull I simply taped a piece of black paper to my right temple that said ‘CENSORED’ in big white letters.

Now, I figure it might be hard to believe based on the general qualities of the way I am and how I do things, but this costume really was not my idea. My wife, who had originally planned on dressing up as a Trollz doll, told me a couple days before our Halloween party that she was changing her costume to be Jackie O. Now look, as many people have said to me when I trot out this gripe, “Jackie O stands on her own”. And sure, she had to, after JFK’s head blew up like dat. But if a wife is dressed as Jackie O and the husband is dressed as something completely different (perhaps a horrifying humanoid chicken), wouldn’t it seem like he had ducked a couples costume in a rude way? Of course it would. So I was forced to dress up as an assassinated president.

But of course she proposed an alternative. As we watched Haunted Mansion (the Eddie Murphy one, not the newer one that apparently has Jared Leto in it) she turned to me and exclaimed that I should dress as Ramsley for Halloween. Now, you’re probably asking yourself, who was Ramsley in the Haunted Mansion again? EXACTLY! And last year she said I should be Lucius Malfoy, because she wanted to be Dobby the Elf. Can you imagine being dressed as Lucius Malfoy? Having to explain that you’re Lucius Malfoy? I’m still thinking about it a year later.

In the end, I’m glad I did not get any pictures of myself as JFK. It was not a respectful costume. I really wish I had been that chicken. If anyone has any genius methods for sticking red rubber gloves onto white swim caps please send me a diagram before next year. Maybe I can just wear it for another holiday like New Year’s Eve or something. I’ll probably have forgotten the idea by next Halloween.

To try and get in the festive spirit this October I also watched some movies that could be deemed Halloweeny. I wasn’t a huge fan of Sleepwalkers. I don’t think Mick Garris is a person that humans were meant to have an opinion on, and I don’t really, except that I’ve always considered him to be a hack just mostly because of the way he looks. I think this was actually the first movie I’ve seen that he’s directed that wasn’t a Masters of Horror episode. Both Chocolate and Valerie on the Stairs I remember nothing about except disliking. And even though I’ve watched pretty much all the episodes, I can’t say I want to give much credit to Mick for creating the series. It’s very hit-or-miss-or-miss-or-miss.

Anyway, I didn’t think there was anything too distinctly wrong with Sleepwalkers, I just have this deep-seated aversion to Stephen King stories like a kid who refuses to eat a hot dog after one made him throw up a year ago. I think I can pinpoint the exact moment King started making me nauseous and it was when I was like 500 pages into Insomnia during a completionist Dark Tower readthrough in 2020. I can imagine a context in which the fake-mythology cryptid predator-race of Sleepwalkers really tickled me, but a Mick Garris-directed Stephen King-written movie was not it.

I also watched Tobe Hooper’s Toolbox Murders remake. The original Toolbox Murders never did too much for me, besides the eye-poppingly maximalist poster that makes you feel like you’re going to get in trouble just for looking at it. This remake, though, was awesome. Hooper really was the master of slashers, from the get-go he understood tone, setting, and atmosphere better than any other horror director ever has, and even into his ‘late-style’ movies he was still leveraging that understanding to unbelievable effect.

Anybody who tells you that Hooper started sucking in the 90s and aughts never understood what made him tick in the first place. His Toolbox Murders is a grimy, upsetting slasher romp suffused with Hooper’s typical brand of True American Horror; the evil is living in the walls, the evil is the walls, and the walls are all around you. Highly recommend, though if you are reading this blog hopefully I don’t have to spend too much effort convincing you to watch a Tobe Hooper movie.

My other Halloween season indulgence (besides V/H/S Halloween which I may write more about at another time) has been Resident Evil 1. I’d only ever played RE4 before, and a little bit of 7, so I’m intending to play through all the original (mainline) entries in order as I did for Silent Hill. I’m so happy to be plunged back into the world of tank controls and fixed camera angles, which may sound sarcastic, but it’s completely earnest. I think fixed camera angles in video games are hugely underrated and lead to some of the most striking and beautiful moments visually in games. Tank controls are a necessary evil to maintain the flow of a fixed-camera game and thus I accept them radically. There is really no feeling like in Silent Hill when you walk down a narrow hallway toward the camera, your chest-mounted flashlight throwing a huge lens flare, and as you walk the camera twirls around and settles at your back. Even through the jittering PlayStation 1 graphics it looks like you’re watching a movie. I’m also such a sucker for anything with pre-rendered backgrounds and FMV cutscenes, so just having that is enough for me to accept any quality-of-life blunders that come along with it.

I opted to play the Director’s Cut version of Resident Evil; why is a mystery even to me. But I’m not the type of guy who is going to consume a remake before the original. I just can’t do that. The Director’s Cut seems like a happy medium between QOL and authenticity. Right now, I’m at the part where you have to fight a giant plant. I didn’t know that was going to be in the game. All I really know about RE1 is from Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Sweet Home and Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil, and as far I can remember there aren’t many giant plants in those. I’m enjoying the game so far, especially the few puzzles. They ruined survival horror when they made it so you can’t just methodically kill every single enemy in the entire map and then lazily wander around obsessively checking your map and inventory. Resident Evil is fun but I’m definitely more of a Silent Hill guy. I’m gonna spend the rest of my life praying for an overhaul remake of The Room. That game fucking ROCKS.

Well, that’s the Halloween Report for this year. See you in 365 days. Happy Halloween!