HALLOWEEN IS OVER...
As I write this, it is 10:31am on October 31...and Halloween is over.
Well, not really of course. We still have the rest of the day and the night. I will dress up like Michael Myers (as usual), and roam around our neighborhood scaring kids and adults alike. But yet I cannot escape this sense of finality to another season already.
The thing about Halloween—or the entire Halloween season at least—is that everyone is in on it. For the entire month of October, and the better part of September, most everyone is in the spirit of Halloween. Commercials are spooky-themed, FearFest plays on AMC, Spirit stores are open, and decorations are up. Even those who couldn’t care less about horror might put up a little ghost lawn ornament for a month or so. It’s that collective attention of the vast majority of people focused on this day that I mourn most when it’s over.
As horror fans, we know that Halloween is not one day of the year; it’s not even one month. It’s literally every day for us. It could be the middle of February and we are still waving our horror flag proudly. But when everyone joins the party, even if for a little while, it just makes it more fun. They say Halloween is the day when the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest, and the dead can cross over… I think Halloween season is when the veil between the horror fan and the “everyday person” is thinnest, when we all can celebrate spooky season together. There is something comforting about that. Perhaps as a horror fan, we felt a little left out when we were younger. Though I cannot speak for every fan, I do feel as though most found comfort in the genre because they were disenfranchised. As a kid, I wasn’t the most popular, and I took solace in my love for horror films. Even in my closest friend group, there were only a couple of us that loved horror and the other guys didn’t seem to care about it. Except for October.
I’ll never forget one morning, three of my friends and I were walking to school. My one friend Tim and I were the horror guys; but the other two weren’t into it. Our friend Mike (sort of the pack leader) said to me and Tim, “Hey guys, look what I’m wearing”. We both looked but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, so we said “Umm…what?”. Mike said, “It’s October first so I wore all black!” The way he said it, it was as if he was proud that he was donning a look that matched what we were into; almost like he wanted to be part of our thing. That feeling was different for me, because I usually wanted to be a part of that everyone else was doing most of the time and horror was something no one else liked.
You could argue that he and everyone else into it in October are just posers, and they weren’t real fans. Sure, that’s fair. But it was still cool to have everyone love what you loved, even just for a short time. We see it on a grander scale these days with films. Every other year, horror is in the headlines. A movie comes out of nowhere and is a hit (at the time of this writing, Terrifier 3 is the largest grossing unrated film of all time), and everyone is talking about horror is “big now”. Um…it’s been “big” for a long time. There has been no shortage of horror coming out on every platform, and in every iteration. It hasn’t gone anywhere, and it’s not going to either.
Yes, it can get frustrating to explain this to “normies” all the time. Part of that is what keeps horror fans separate in their own “community” (I use that term loosely…but that will be a topic for another blog). It’s easy to see it as “us vs them” but I choose not to. The last thing we need in this world is more division. So if you are one of those people who only hang up a cobweb or hang up a skeleton in October, then that’s just fine. Welcome to our party…we have blood filled doughnuts. And when November 1 rolls around and you’re already queuing up Mariah Carey on your holiday playlist, know that we will be here, keeping the black flame of horror alive until next year.
- Ben