There are many things that are integral to Halloween: jack o’ lanterns, ghost stories, Michael Myers and the Great Pumpkin all come to mind. Also, the annual celebration/parodying/lampooning of horror that is the “Treehouse of Horror” episodes of “The Simpsons.”Continue Reading
Ah, the ’80s, when heavy metal music was rotting our brains, and Satanic messages were buried in records, just waiting for some poor schmuck to play the album backwards and succumb to its demonic temptations.Continue Reading
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories A Halloween Thing A DayLeave a comment on A Halloween Thing A Day: A Halloween S.O.S.
Halloween is mostly concerned with made-up horrors—a time to celebrate “safe” scares. However, a CNN article I stumbled across served as a stark reminder that, sometimes, real-life horror intrudes on even the most innocent of occasions.
When I’m writing about Halloween, eventually I’m going to get around to writing about Halloween. While I have a lot of affection for the franchise as a whole—and yes, that includes Rob Zombie’s two entries—my absolute favorite is the original John Carpenter classic.Continue Reading
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories A Halloween Thing A DayLeave a comment on A Halloween Thing A Day: Hellboy Wine
If you read any Hellboy comics, you know he is no stranger to spirits—both the ghostly kind and the alcoholic kind. His tequila-fueled adventures in Mexico alone are the stuff of legend. In fact, it’s mostly hard liquor that I recall Hellboy imbibing…but to be honest, I can’t remember ever seeing him turn down a bottle of wine…Continue Reading
From Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree:
They rounded the far side of the house and stopped. For there was the Tree. And it was such a tree as they had never seen in all their lives.
It stood in the middle of the vast yard behind the terribly strange house. And this tree rose up some one hundred feet in the air, taller than the high roofs and full and round and well branched and covered all over with rich assortments of red and brown and yellow autumn leaves.
“But,” whispered Tom, “oh look. What’s up in that tree?” For the Tree was hung with a variety of pumpkins of every shape and size and a number of tints of hues of smoky yellow or bright orange.
“A pumpkin tree,” someone said. “No,” said Tom. The wind blew among the high branches and tossed their bright burdens, softly. “A Halloween Tree,” said Tom.
And he was right.
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories A Halloween Thing A DayLeave a comment on A Halloween Thing A Day: Halloween Urban Legends
What better time for urban legends—those unproveable, often unbelievable tales that get passed from generation to generation, surviving despite their inherent absurdity—than Halloween? Continue Reading
People spend a lot of money these days to put together scary Halloween costumes. From deluxe masks to professional-grade makeup to screen-ready clothing, it’s easy to drop a bundle if you really want to impress the people at your office costume contest or neighborhood block party.
Back in the day, though, costumes were usually homemade, often assembled with little know-how and not much in the way of supplies. And the effect, in many instances, was far scarier than anything you can buy off the rack today.Continue Reading
Plastic skulls. Ceramic skulls. Candle holder skulls. Skulls that talk. Skulls that glow when you plug ’em in. Right now, you can find just about any kind of skull you want to add to your Halloween decorations.Continue Reading
I think it’s safe to say that the people coming to this site every day to read 0ur stuff (and thanks to all of you for doing so) love Halloween. But, uh, not everybody does.Continue Reading
Edgar Allan Poe is one of the first masters of horror, and, in my opinion, “The Raven” is his masterpiece; for years, it has been captivating and haunting readers with its sense of loss, unease, and mounting dread.Continue Reading
Author Cemetery Dance OnlinePosted on Categories A Halloween Thing A DayLeave a comment on A Halloween Thing A Day: All Hallows Read We all have our Halloween traditions, whether it’s reading certain books, watching certain scary movies, having friends over for a bonfire, setting up a haunted house in your garage…we all have those things we anticipate each year as the scary season rolls around. A few years back, on his blog, Neil Gaiman proposed people adopt a new Halloween tradition: giving someone a scary book to read.Continue Reading
We’ve already done Halloween movies and Halloween television, and you might be listed to death at this point, but I couldn’t in good conscience do this column on a publisher’s website without including a solid list (or three) of Halloween reading recommendations.Continue Reading
Each year, fans from all over the country travel to California to visit a small house in Pasadena. It’s an unremarkable house, save for the fact that it’s immortalized on film as the house where six-year-old Michael Myers killed his sister, Judith.
Most fans are content to pose in front of the house for a few photos, maybe going so far as to do so while wearing a Michael Myers mask. Kenny Caperton took things a little farther. Kenny Caperton, a life-long fan of the Halloween franchise, built an exact replica of the Myers house in North Carolina.Continue Reading
Ed Edmunds. Ben Cooper. Don Post. If these names mean something to you, you’re going to love today’s Halloween Thing.
When I was growing up, choosing a Halloween costume was accomplished by visiting a local store—in my case, the TG&Y—and picking something off the shelves. Back in the day, the costumes, usually vinyl suits with vacuform masks, came in boxes, with the eerily eyeless mask staring up through a cellophane-covered hole in the lid.Continue Reading
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