Halloween 2023 in a Horror Movie World

I love Halloween. It was much simpler when I was a child than it is now. It makes me dreadfully sad to think about how today’s children cannot experience it the way it used to be. There was a time when one of the coolest things you could do after dressing up and getting a bag full of candy was to stay up late and watch scary movies on television with family and friends.

In the early days of television there was The Vampira Show. This was before my time but I learned about her from the movie Ed Wood.  If you lived in the mid-south region of America in the 1960s you could watch Fantastic Features, with the Monster of Ceremonies, Sivad, a very fun vampire with a southern accent. In other parts of the country there was Creature Feature, with Dr. Paul Bearer, and probably many other scary cool guys who hosted classic horror movies on television. By the 1980s there was Elvira’s Movie Macabre. If this kind of thing still exists, I have not seen it, but even the fake ones like Count Floyd were fun to watch.  The cable networks, Turner Classic Movies and American Movie Classics used to have horror movie marathons during the entire month of October but now many people cannot afford to have cable tv. You would have to look very hard now to find something that isn’t real life horror in a world with terrible wars, people carrying handguns into grocery stores, and human predators who are everywhere with no empathy for anyone, including children.

You can still wear a costume and put on makeup today but you can’t even rent monster movie videos anymore. The makeup now is on par with what SFX artists do for film and television. I’m sure that even Stan Winston would be impressed with what is available to us. My daughter can do wonders with makeup and she is totally self-taught. She has re-created fantastic characters such as the Frankenstein monster and frighteningly real zombies that would scare the hell out of you if you saw them on any night that wasn’t Halloween, but the real monsters now are very much like Wednesday Addams spoke of in the 1990’s film, The Addams Family. They are “homicidal maniacs” who don’t wear a costume because “they look just like everybody else”. They are your coworkers. They are the kids that your children go to school with. They are the kooks who show up at the dollar store in boxer shorts and a tee shirt carrying pepper spray looking for a victim, and they are out there every single day. They make you afraid to participate in life outside of your door and even inside your house when home invasions are rapidly rising everywhere. I haven’t felt comfortable giving out candy on Halloween for years because opening your front door to strangers now is much too risky.

Halloween was taken away from children decades ago by adults. The costume section of any store today has a huge selection of adult costumes and maybe ⅓ of it is for children. The cost of candy has skyrocketed and even though most people would only give out candy that is wrapped, by the 1980’s local hospitals would X-ray your children’s candy for free because by then you couldn’t be sure that it was safe.

This year many people are unable to participate in the holiday because they simply cannot afford to. To be honest, I remember people taking their children out on Halloween when I was a child just so they could get free food. It was junk food for sure, but at least it was something to eat. Many small-town schools back then didn’t have cafeterias and I knew of many children who got an hour for lunch to go home and eat but they lived too far away to get there and back to school within an hour so they stayed at the school playground with nothing to do and nothing to eat during lunch hour. I was too young to think about how tragic this was at the time but I wondered why it was this way. Even now, I hear people complain about schools giving free breakfast and lunch to children. Why would anyone believe that it is ok to deny people something to eat? The dollar menu at fast food restaurants disappeared years ago. SNAP benefits have been cut for people in need and many people still complain that the program even exists. People in war ravaged countries are being denied basic human necessities right now, and though many people are loudly protesting about it there is little being done to change it.

Should we stop celebrating Halloween altogether for safety reasons, or reasons of poverty? Corporate fascists would be more horrified at losing revenue if you do not buy their candy and costumes and home decor than they would be at seeing a zombie apocalypse. I believe that we should continue to celebrate All Hallows Eve but give the day back to the children. We should be able to make it safe for them as well but I fear that we won’t because we have become so selfish and greedy and too many people have never grown up. I don’t know how so many people manage to give their children cell phones when I can barely afford them and internet service but I see children and teens glued to their phones and chattering away incessantly everywhere I go. For some kids this is all their life is. If an adult takes their phone for whatever reason some of them lose their minds and react violently. I recently saw a news story where two underage siblings stole their mother’s car and ran away when she took their phones as punishment for some kind of misbehavior. They managed to get 100s of miles away before they were found.

We have created a world that is more terrifying than any monster movie that I have ever seen. Giant mutated bugs, vampires, hostile aliens, zombies, and ghosts are scary fun to watch, but killer viruses, serial killers, disgruntled employees, spurned suitors, jealous lovers and ex-lovers, citizens with AR-15s and AK-47s are killing us faster than Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger put together and nowhere near as predictably as the fictional monsters. To live in a safer world will require so much more work on everyone’s part than many people are willing to do. If you happened to see a real ghost or noticed demonic behavior in the people you know you would get up off your backside and find a ghost hunter or a priest lightning fast, but we allow war and violence every single day from people with political power and authority. As long as we worship these kinds of people in societies and fear that they are better than us there isn’t much hope for waking up from the “nightmare” on our streets. Doesn’t this scare you? It should. Human monsters are running amuck all over the planet and it isn’t likely that you will wake up on November 1st with a sigh of relief. It isn’t fiction any more. It is a reality that we literally gave our blessing to because we didn’t see the signs of our own demise coming as a result of our preference for ignorance. There will be no happy ending here for far too many, but some will believe that they are immune. Why do we allow that?

Tired of Halloween and “kiddie spook stories”? Look around. The horror is real and in your town. You cannot turn it off or leave the theater. We fear information that tells us how things really are and how we became the way we are. Vaping is viewed as more dangerous than a gun. Being honest with ourselves about our history is something that cannot be allowed. There are people who want to ban Halloween but the annihilation of entire cultures is acceptable. Think it over this coming Tuesday night and ask yourself why we are willing to take all of the fun out of life for our children and are willing to replace it with untruths and virtual reality.

“What kind of sick mind operates like that?!” - Dolores Fuller from the movie Ed Wood