It’s finally Halloween! Time to get dressed up, go out to parties, and eat candy corn until you throw up! (Tip: To throw up faster, try those delicious candy corn pumpkins.)
Now it occurs to me that even at this late hour some people might be thinking about costumes. Since I used to be an expert (and still am, when the situation demands it) at putting Halloween costumes together at the last possible second, I thought I would dedicate my last Halloween post to sharing some of the costume ideas I’ve thrown together over the years, just in case there’s anyone out there who needs a quick last minute fix. (As a guy, these will be guy costumes, but I think girls are pretty set for costumes as it is. Girl’s Guide to Halloween Costumes: Get some clothes, then take 75-90% of them off.) Unfortunately photos of all these monstrosities have been lost to the ages, so this will require a bit of imagination.
1. Thomas Jefferson/Alexander Hamilton/Generic 18th Century Fop I’m a big fan of our Founding Fathers, but some of them were, to modern eyes at least, a bit “fancy” which makes them perfect for Halloween. I think I originally intended to be Thomas Jefferson as part of a senior class costume contest. Later some friends decided I looked more like Alexander Hamilton on the recently redesigned ten dollar bill, so when this costume appeared later it morphed into an Alexander Hamilton ensemble.
How to Make It: It helps to have really long hair to start with. Ask a girl to share some of her face powder with you (Warning: She won’t get much back), then powder your hair like crazy. This is the most important element. Then simply tie your hair back into a pony tail with a frilly lace or ribbon, wear a long overcoat, stick some Kleenex in your sleeves to double as distinctive sleeve ruffles, pull your socks up high to look like tights, and you’re off to the races. For an added punch of Revolutionary flavor you can steal a golf club (I use a five iron) to use as a makeshift walking stick. Put on your best dandified foppish accent for a little extra sex appeal.
2. John Lennon/The Beatles Some friends and I went as The Beatles (White Album era) during the height of my Beatles obsession. I was John, and even perfected an amusing Beatle accent to go along with the outfit. Everyone loves The Beatles, so it’s a great way to bring smiles to the faces of young and old alike, and very easy to pull off.
How to Make It: All you need to look like John Lennon is long hair and glasses. No matter how much you do or do not look like him, long hair and glasses is so tied to John Lennon in pop culture that people will immediately draw their own conclusions. Then wear whatever you want, because, hey, you’ve got long hair and glasses, you must be John Lennon. Just make sure you keep the other Beatles close by, otherwise you might be mistaken for another long haired, glasses wearing musician, such as Rush frontman Geddy Lee. Nobody wants to be Geddy Lee.
3. The Headless HorsemanThis is probably my proudest Halloween accomplishment, and winner of the coveted Northern Middle School Costume Contest. It’s a classic monster from a classic story, so you really can’t go wrong. I was due at the school Halloween party in half an hour when my dad and I threw this together from scratch, so you can never say it’s too late to put together a great costume. It earned me a $15 dollar gift certificate to the mall, so who knows what wonders it will work for you?
How to Make It: The main ingredient here is a nice vampire cape with a high collar—it really sells the whole headless look. Then just put on any shirt and use some newspaper to puff up the shoulders to the proper level, and viola: homemade headless horseman. One caveat: I never figured out how to see out of the costume. I spent most of trick-or-treat night trapped in a small forest of bushes until my friend’s dad found me and fished me out. But other than that, it’s a great idea.
4. Darth VaderThere was a time before the Star Wars prequels when Darth Vader was universally cool. I dreamed of a Darth Vader Halloween costume for years and years before I finally got the chance to portray the Lord of the Sith in 7th grade. Darth Vader is the owner of the greatest mask ever made, and I can’t image anyone not wanting to try it on, at least for an evening.
How to Make It: Go to a Halloween costume store. Purchase a Darth Vader mask. Then wear all black and a cape, which you should probably also buy at the store.
5. Skeletor If I’m not mistaken, this was the first Halloween costume I picked out totally on my own, without any input from my parents. As a kid I always felt bad for Skeletor—he just couldn’t win. Who doesn’t identify with a scrappy loser like that? No matter how many times his schemes were foiled, he just kept trying again. By taking Skeletor into my own hands, I thought perhaps I could redeem him. Show up to a Halloween party dressed as the Master of Snake Mountain, and you’re bound to attract some approving murmurs from the ladies. Many a successful relationship began with one of the parties dressed as Skeletor.
How to Make It: Invent time travel. Travel back in time to 1986. Go to a Halloween costume store. Purchase Skeletor costume.
There you have it, a small sampling of sure-fire Halloween party hits. So get dressed up, get out there, and have a crazy, safe, and happy Halloween!!
Adult fears are very concrete: where our next paycheck is coming from, whether our relationships will hold up, how successful we’re going to be, and all of that troubling but not really frightening nonsense that runs through our minds every day. There are lots of scary movies and books, and it’s possible to be freaked out or disturbed, but adulthood leaves little time for pure, undiluted, leave-all-the-lights-on-and-pray-to-every-god-ever-dreamed-up-for-morning terror. That seems to belong to children alone, and though I guess I miss the imagination required for such fears, I’m alright with not keeping myself awake night after night imagining being brutally murdered in my bed.
For many children of my generation, there was no greater source of sleepless nights and absolute nausea-inducing horror than the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books. These are three books, released during the 80s, that absolutely mortified every child who ever read them. I remember trembling under my covers as the stories ran through my brain, wondering why a kind and merciful God would have ever let such unmitigated evil out into the world at all, let alone on the innocent shelves of an elementary school library.
As anyone familiar with these books knows, it wasn’t the stories themselves that were the scary part. They were reasonably frightening, sure, very short and to the point, each of them written by Alvin Schwartz, a professional folklorist. I was a little frightened as a child that every single one had extensive footnotes—it made me feel like somewhere, somehow, these horrible events might have actually happened. But the stories were hardly enough to terrify even the most squeamish children. What got us was the illustrations.
They’ve lost some of their power over the years (meaning only that now, in my late twenties, I’m finally mature enough to look at them without shaking or throwing away the book in horror) but they’re still the stuff nightmares are made of. I chose the illustration from “The Girl Who Stood On A Grave” to be the title image for my Halloween themed posts this month, and that’s only scratching the surface of how bone-chilling some of the images are. It illustrates a fairly straightforward story, the old tale of a girl scaring herself to death by accidentally pinning her dress to a grave and imagining that a hand is holding her in place, but the image goes far beyond that simple tale. The meandering lines, the indistinct boundaries, the expression on the poor girl's face, even the hazy shapes in the background (what the hell is that, anyway, some kind of horse? I really don’t want to know) are designed with almost fiendish precision to be as frightening as possible.
The illustrator, Stephen Gammell, has illustrated dozens of children’s books, and is as far as I can tell not a hideous creature of unspeakable evil come from beyond the stars to warp the minds of children. But he sure draws like it. This is some of the scariest stuff I’ve ever seen. It’s an often repeated trope that things unseen are scarier than things seen, but Gammell discovered a way to work this concept into his illustrations. The focus of the picture is usually frightening enough, but the way Gammell blurs the edges helps us imagine even more horrific things lurking just beyond our vision. These are not realistic people, they are twisted, misshapen, with the thick pen lines looking almost like roots tethering them to the ground. That a person can imagine such things is at once beautiful and terrifying.
The books were checked out of the elementary school library every week by some children far braver than I. I considered myself sensible for having avoided them, though morbid curiosity occasionally led to me cracking one open, spying one of the terrifying images, and slamming the book back on the shelf before retreating from the library. Imagine my surprise, then, when one Christmas I tore open a package from my grandmother I assumed was some new Nintendo game and discovered a leering skull staring back at me. That’s right, my loving grandmother had voluntarily brought the nightmares into my own house.
I couldn’t help but read and look inside—I don’t think I slept for months, but I couldn’t resist the damn things. The illustrations were so frightening that it was like looking at something from another world, something so profane and forbidden that you had to look and look again just be sure you hadn’t imagined it all. Eventually I couldn’t handle it anymore, and, plucking up my courage, for I was sure the books carried with them an evil curse, I tossed them into the trash. Not even that fully calmed my fears, and I was sure for weeks afterward that I would open my closet and find the books staring back at me, returned from their grave to haunt me for the rest of my days. So far, they haven’t come back.
It’s a decision I’ve regretted ever since. First of all, what kind of lunatic throws away a book? They’re expensive. I could have sold the thing and put the money towards a copy of Shining Force II for Sega Genesis. More importantly, as I’ve matured I’ve been able to appreciate the artistic brilliance behind the illustrations, and the insight into a child’s mind Stephen Gammell must possess to strike just the right note again and again. Adults, with their worries, so quickly forget how easy it was to be afraid of the dark as a child, but looking at these pictures captures some of that fright. Kids can imagine quite a bit, and when one wakes you up in the middle of the night, there’s a good chance what they see in their mind’s eye is at least as frightening as any of Gammell’s illustrations. This is a child’s fear of night and the dark perfectly illustrated, something almost impossible to render visually rendered to perfection. I’ve already talked about “The Girl Who Stood On a Grave” but let’s take a quick look at a few more.
This first lovely lady was from a story called “The Haunted House” about a priest who finds a ghost. She’s become an iconic image for the series, and now graces the cover of the compilation of the three books. This is actually one of the more straightforward of Gammell’s illustrations, but note the use of the different shades of black in the eyes to hint there might be more back there, and the spindly, spider web strands of hair. It looks jagged and unpleasant to the touch, not like real hair at all. In college I stuck a picture of this beauty up beside the kitchen sink with a caption encouraging my roommates to do their dishes. I think it had the opposite effect. Great conversation starter at parties though.
This one is just beautiful. I love the overgrown gravestones in the background, covered with grass that could be hair, and the gnarled, twisting roots near the woman’s hand. The story that went with this, “Rings on her Fingers” was about a girl being buried alive, but this picture is far scarier than the story. Plus it gets bonus points since we can’t tell whether the girl is walking toward us or away. I vote for away, but I’d rather not think about where she might be pointing and why.
I believe this woman was supposed to be a real, living person. That’s right. In the world of Stephen Gammell, real people look like this. Good God, man. Why would you draw this? Why? This was from a story called “The Dream.” It ended with this woman coming up the stairs. That shouldn’t be terrifying in and of itself, but look at her!
Finally we come to “The Bride” and I’m out of things to say. This was the singular image that burned into my brain as a child and kept me afraid of the dark right through adolescence. This is just supposed to a be a picture of a human skeleton to accompany the old story where a bride locks herself in a trunk on her wedding day. But sweet Jesus! What human skeleton looks like this? Look at those teeth! She has fangs! The mature intellectual in me wants to comment on the way the spider web merges with the dress; we’re not sure where one ends and the other begins, which makes the corpse look that much more forlorn. And check out the bizarre way the feet jut out, and think about how uncomfortable such a pose would be. Then close the web browser and pray for morning, because I’ve done about as much after-dark reminiscing about these books as I care to do.
Many of the audio recordings of the books have found their way on to youtube, along with the accompanying images from the stories. One of my favorites, “The Window” involves vampires. As usual, the story is lackluster, but the image has so much unseen horror that it still makes me a little nervous. So if you need more Scary Stories, head on over to youtube. After spending a while writing about them, I’m ready to go to a bright room, watch some innocuous children’s programming, and forget about the spindly, root-encrusted figures that might be lurking in the darkness just outside the window.
Dracula and movies were born out of the same world. The novel came out in 1897, just as moving pictures were attracting crowds at fairs and exhibitions all over Europe and America. Given their common background it's no surprise that the legendary vampire has been the subject of countless films since Nosferatu first appeared in 1922. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the first and only movie to openly acknowledge this relationship with lots of creative visual effects and nods to the film industry of yesteryear. Though this movie was probably a big part in the “emo-ization” of vampires, I love it all the same. Sometimes the crazy story of love and Dracula’s on-again off-again relationship with God really hits home for me, other times I have to laugh the whole thing off. But however I’m feeling about the story (or lack thereof) at any particular moment, I will always love this movie as a great achievement in visual filmmaking.
I seem to recall a lot of marketing hoopla around this movie when it first came out in November of 1992, but at the time I was more interested in Aladdin and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. But Dracula provided excellent adult counter programming for that holiday season and did pretty good business at the box office. In my adolescent years boys were always watching it at sleepovers thanks to some generous nude scenes, but I missed it during those years, too. I only finally saw it when I was a junior in high school, after finding it in a VHS bargain bin a few days after Halloween. I was going through a period of life at the moment when a big Gothic love story was right up my alley, plus I’ve always been a huge history buff, so when I finally popped the movie into the VCR and saw the cross tumble from the roof of Hagia Sofia as the Turks conquered Constantinople, it was love at first sight.
This movie is over the top in every way possible, and that only makes it better. In the first four minutes alone you get a Turkish invasion of Romania, a puppet-show battle scene, shots of brutal impalement, a gorgeous shot of Dracula’s bride plunging what appears to be a million feet to her death in the river, statues crying bloody tears, and finally a giant explosion of blood. This movie uses every cinematic trick in the book to create an experience unlike any other.
When movies first started they owed as much to magicians as to actors and directors; some of the earliest film makers were also professional magicians. They saw the medium as a way to expand on the visual illusions they employed in their magic acts, and thus special effects were born. Bram Stoker’s Dracula indulges in these old school effects with fiendish relish, giving the film an antiquated feeling that perfectly fits with the Dracula storyline. It’s almost as if you’re watching an elaborate Victorian era carnival attraction whirl to life with music, bells, and an organ grinder’s monkey. Almost every effect is done live on set, from the aforementioned death of Princess Elisabeta to Jonathan Harker’s carriage ride to Dracula’s castle; even the multitudinous explosions of blood are all happening for real. There’s not a single “location” used in this movie—every leaf, every waterway, every castle and manor house is constructed on a soundstage, allowing the creators to preserve that old-school cinema look.
The story of Dracula is well known enough that I won’t go into it here. What the movie adds to an otherwise faithful adaptation of the book is a love story between Dracula and Mina. I still don’t quite understand whether Mina is meant to be the reincarnation of Dracula’s dead wife, or just look like her enough that the resemblance shocks his soul towards salvation, but like I’ve said the story is really a moot point. Like the book, the best part of the story is Jonathan Harker’s journey to Dracula’s castle in Romania. After that, the book descends sharply into Victorian heroic clichés as Dracula sneaks around London, but the movie keeps on wowing us with new locations, special effects, and montages. The sequence in the final third of the film, clearly modeled after the successful montage that concluded The Godfather, is equally entertaining and a whole lot more fun. On one hand, you have the marriage of Jonathan and Mina Harker in a beautiful Eastern Orthodox ceremony, and, at the same time, poor Lucy Westenra’s neck being torn open by wolf-Dracula. It’s so over the top that in any other movie it might make you laugh, but in this film it’s perfect.
But this movie isn’t about the story, it’s about visuals and raw emotions. Gary Oldman’s performance is so tortured and sinister without creeping into parody that he carries the whole film on his shoulders. We feel for Dracula not because the story gives us a lot of reason to, but because Oldman infuses the character with such a sadness and sense of loss. His expressions and mannerisms are perfect for a man who has been at war with God for 400 years, conveying all the anger, hurt, and betrayal that would fill such a life.Is Gary Oldman the best Dracula ever? I guess that's debatable (though if you argued he wasn't, I think you'd lose the debate.) He is unarguably the best actor ever to play Dracula, so it only stands to reason that he brings far more to the part than any actor before him. If he hasn't replaced Bela Lugosi yet as the definitive image of Dracula, he sure should.
The other actors are all fine. Winona Ryder makes a suitably naïve Mina, and Sadie Frost is fun as the vampire-in-waiting Lucy. Anthony Hopkins really seems to find the fun in Van Helsing, and plays him as a man far crazier than Dracula. In the old Dracula movies Van Helsing was always rather stern and humorless—Hopkin’s makes him into a wild eccentric with a twisted sense of humor. Sorry Hugh Jackman, but this Van Helsing has you far outclassed.
And then there’s Keanu Reeves. Sweet, lovable Keanu. His performance in this film might be one of the worst ever recorded. From the moment he utters his first line you’ll be in stitches. It’s as if he was a foreign actor trained to read English for the first time just for this film. He suffers through the only slightly archaic dialogue like it was completely unknown to him, and seeing his bizarre reactions and truly terrible accent is a sheer delight. He’s so out of place, just looking at him is funny. In one scene near the beginning of the film, Mina types in her diary while looking at a framed photo of her Jonathan. It’s not supposed to be funny, but I dare you to look at a 19th century photograph of Ted Theodore Logan wearing period clothes and a blank, emotionless expression and not crack a smile. Keanu Reeves’ performance in this film ranks right up there with Coppola’s other casting disaster, Sophia Coppola in Godfather III, but this one is a million times funnier. Coppola couldn’t have gotten it more wrong if he’d cast an anteater.
But despite that rather gigantic fault the movie is amazing. It’s easily in my top ten of all time, for sheer audacity if nothing else. I know I’ve bad mouthed the story from time to time, but there are definitely days when it does work for me. It’s a story told in images and emotions rather than words, but if you let it wash over you it can raise a lot of questions about God and man and forgiveness and sin and evil. God definitely exists in Dracula’s world, and we’re left with the question of why a divine being would allow Dracula to live so far outside of God’s mercy and allow all the evil Dracula causes. Is it just to teach him a lesson? Or is the movie essentially a retelling of the prodigal son story, but with more blood and vampires? Or is it all about the redemptive power of love, divine or otherwise? It was honestly the hopeless love story element that made this movie so appealing to me in high school. There are moments in everyone’s life when a love so powerful it can survive the grave seems like a mighty entertaining notion, and the romantic sucker in me still enjoys watching Gary Oldman’s Dracula pine away for his Mina.
I’ve watched this movie at least once during the fall for over ten years now—it’s become an essential part of the Halloween season. This is the movie that turned Dracula into a sympathetic monster and unfortunately started vampires on their journey to harmless if sensual romantic leading men. But Bram Stoker’s Dracula still has it all—creepy tombs, haunted castles, obsessive love, a vengeful God, and oodles of impressive special effects and gorgeous cinematography. This is Gothic horror done to absolute perfection. See it. See it now.
After Super Castlevania IV the series took a hiatus for a few years. As a loyal Sega Genesis owner, I loved the next entry in the series, 1994’s Castlevania: Bloodlines, the first to appear for the Sega. The music and graphics were slightly behind the SNES, of course, but the game made up for it by letting you choose from two characters and amping up the gore levels to Sega standards. Even the plot tied into real world history—on the eve of World War I, an evil sorcerer revives Elizabeth Bathory, who in turn starts a plan to revive Dracula himself. The heroes, John Morris and Eric Lecarde, equipped with the classic whip and a super-deadly spear, respectively, set off across real European locations, such as the Leaning Tower of Pisa and Versailles Palace on a mission to once again put Dracula to rest. It’s chock full of typical Castlevania action, and many purists consider this the last “true” Castlevania game.
To many, the series achieved perfection with 1997’s Symphony of the Night for the original Playstation. Here the series returned to the ideas in Castlevania II and crafted a non-linear, go anywhere game filled to the brim with weapons, power ups , and unlockable secrets. This time you played not as a Belmont, but as Alucard (get it?), the super emo-goth son of Dracula (who made his first appearance in Castlevania III). Alucard could turn into a wolf, a bat, or mist, and was an all around badass. So much so, in fact, that the game is ridiculously easy. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a blast from start to finish and deserves its reputation as one of the greatest games ever made, but there’s simply no difficulty. By the time you get to the end, Alucard will be so powerful that he could brush off a nuclear war with the wave of his sword. Not even his dad Dracula can stand up to him.
Symphony of the Night is worth playing now for the cheesy voice acting alone. You’ve never heard bad acting until you hear Dracula speak the immortal line, “What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets!” Voice acting aside, the game’s presentation is top notch, and despite my love for old school CV, if you play just one game in the series, it should probably be this one.
I am probably alone in my enjoyment of Castlevania for Nintendo 64. This was the series’ first excursion into 3D, and a lot of the jumping and fighting was indeed awkward. But the game also had a lot of fun adventure elements, the chance to fight vampires other than just Dracula, and many endings and ways to play. Running through a hedge maze while being chased by a chainsaw wielding Frankenstein’s Monster is easily worth fifty bucks, if you ask me. If you bother to check game reviews from the time the game came out, you’ll find that they’re almost universally positive, but today game writers would have you believe they hated the 3D Castlevania from day one. Not so, I’m afraid. Chastised by the failure (imagined or otherwise) of Castlevania 64, the game retreated to the world of the 2D handheld platforms—the Game Boy Advance and the Nintendo DS. For the last ten years, with the exception of a few mediocre PS2/X-Box games and an ill-advised fighting game for the Wii, Konami has simply copied Symphony of the Night again and again and again for the portable platforms, and the character designs have gotten farther and farther away from their Gothic horror roots. Current Castlevania “men” are designed to look prettier than any girl I’ve ever met—I understand that that’s popular in Japan, but it’s starting to get more than a little weird.
At E3 a few months ago, Konami announced an all new 3D Castlevania game for X-Box 360 and PS3, Lords of Shadow, that promises to be more than another Symphony of the Night clone. With professional voice acting, a gritty medieval setting, and a promise to take the series back to the action oriented roots of Castlevania and Super Castlevania IV, this game is certainly one to watch. (Though it could just be terrible again, resulting in another glut of Symphony of the Nightclones and possibly the death ofCastlevania on the mainstream consoles. So let’s hope it’s good!)
That got very lengthy, but I’ve been waiting to write about these games for a while. What better time than Halloween to recall the glory days of opening the classic silver Konami box and taking an 8-bit trip to Transylvania?
When I was in elementary school, fantasizing about the long distant day when the Super Nintendo would become a reality, Super Castlevania IV was one of those games that kept me up at night with anticipation. I saw pictures in magazines, but I really didn’t believe any game, on any system, could look anywhere near that good.
But it did. It may seem old-fashioned now, but when it came out in late 1991 it was a showpiece game for the Super Nintendo. Some of the extra graphical touches are a little gratuitous—I’ve yet to figure out exactly what I’m inside when the room is spinning like a barrel in the fourth level. It looks cool, but that’s about it. No matter what you think of the some of the graphical bells and whistles, there’s no question that this game is visually leaps and bounds ahead of the NES games. The transition from 8-bit to 16-bit was as revolutionary in its time as the change from 2D to 3D gaming would be a few years later, and one need look no further than Super Castlevania IV for evidence.
It remains unclear exactly what the storyline of this game was supposed to be, but most agree that it is essentially a remake and expansion of the first game. You again play as Simon Belmont on a quest to kill Dracula. This time Simon’s hair is brown both in the game and on the box, plus he’s upgraded his wardrobe to a suit of stylish black armor. For some reason, instead of leg armor he wears a very short armored skirt, but we can forgive him. I guess fighting Dracula requires a lot of flexibility. Thanks to the Super Nintendo’s power the new Simon is also several times taller than his NES incarnation. He actually looks like a human being, his animation is much improved, and he moves less like a bag of rocks. Outside of Simon the game sports great new graphical touches all over. From the ghostly horses in the background of stable level to the eerie dining tables in the first level of Dracula’s castle, the designers put in so many little flourishes that you’ll be noticing something new on every playthrough.
Like the very first Castlevania, this game is completely linear, though like Castlevania II and III some of the stages take place outside of the castle itself. If losing the freedom of Castlevania II and the choices and companions from Castlevania III seems like a step back for the series, Castlevania IV makes up for it with absolutely stellar side scrolling action. This is the only Castlevania game ever where Simon’s whip actually works like a whip instead of just a long stick. You can attack with the whip in any direction, and even, in some instances, swing from it like Indiana Jones (though why Dracula would fill his castle with objects specifically designed for whip swinging is beyond me). All this versatility makes the game slightly easier than the NES classics, but there are still plenty of opportunities for the gnashing of teeth.
Enemy design really shines in Castlevania IV as well, once again owing to the Super Nintendo’s improved capabilities. By this time it was finally possible to have giant bosses that take up the entire screen, and some of the boss monsters, like the giant golem and the twin sea serpents, are particularly memorable. I personally enjoy the bizarre creepiness of the dancing ghosts at the end of level 6. There’s something about a ghostly couple who are equally intent on dancing as they are on murdering the player that’s very effective. Only Dracula himself is a little disappointing. After so many innovative bosses, the fight with Dracula, who has essentially one form (he even gives you life, for the love of God!) is pretty anticlimactic, as is the overused “collapsing castle” ending. At least in Castlevania II and III we got a little bit of badly translated text to go with the scene.
Last but not least, special mention goes to the music. The Super Nintendo’s music chip was one of the big reasons it finally won out against the Genesis, and with the already stellar tunes of Castlevania the system really delivered. “Vampire Killer,” “Bloody Tears,” and “The Beginning” from the previous three games all make their triumphant return here, each one more fleshed out and powerful than ever before. In addition there are plenty of new tracks, each one just right for the level. The standout from this game is probably “Simon’s Theme”—it accompanies the very first level, and puts one in the mood for some cheesy Universal Monster slaying adventures.
Castlevania IV is one of the best games for Super Nintendo, but it was the end of an era. Soon the popular series would go off in a new direction once more, and these classic action games of the past would be forgotten.
This game is widely, and with good cause, considered to be the greatest of the NES Castlevanias and one of the greatest NES games, period. IGN recently voted it 5th in its list of the Top 100 Nintendo Games of All Time. It’s easy to see why. This game took the series back to its level-based, side scrolling roots, then cranked that up to 11. If anything, this game is even harder than the original Castlevania; fortunately, as in Castlevania II, there are passwords to help ease the pain of failure. No longer did you have to leave your Nintendo turned on for hours to beat the game.
Instead you have to leave it turned on for hours to get through the punishing and lengthy stages. Whereas the original game had only six, Dracula’s Curse has nearly three times that many, depending on how you play the game, and they are all much, much longer than in Castlevania. Luckily, and here is where the series took another innovative turn, you don’t play through every level in every play through. After completing certain stages, you are given a choice of where to go next. This isn’t just a matter of picking which order you do the levels, like in Mega Man. By picking certain stages, you effectively block off others, and it might take as many as four times through to see all the game has to offer.
This story takes place 200 years before the original Castlevania and introduces a new member of the Belmont family, Trevor. You wouldn’t be able to tell that from looking at him, though. Trevor’s sprite is almost exactly like Simon’s from the original game. Back is the drab brown costume and brown hair, and back is the inability to jump worth a damn. But in Castlevania IIIyou’re not limited to one character. Depending on which path through the game you choose, you might run into Syfa, a wizard, Grant, a high jumping pirate, or Alucard, the son of Dracula who would later appear in his own game, the classicSymphony of the Night for the PSX in 1997. Each of these companions had their own abilities to help make things a little easier, and since you could only have one with you at a time the feature offered even more incentive to play through the game multiple times.
And you’ll definitely want to play through the game multiple times. Everything is improved from the first game. The graphics are more intense (just check out the stained glass cathedral in the very first level) the bosses are bigger and more challenging, and the music is the best ever—so far. This is one of the most difficult games on the NES (out of the ones that are realistically possible to beat, anyway) and it took me years of trial and error to finally take down Dracula. (This time, you have to fight three of his forms!) What’s great about the NES Castlevanias is that no matter how punishingly difficult they can get, there always is a way out, and you’ll rarely feel cheated. There’re still those rare instances, of course, where you’ll throw the controller at the screen after an unavoidable bat slams you off a platform to your death.
Dracula’s Curse was a great swan song for series on the NES. It took the excellent platforming of the first game, mixed in a touch of the choose-your-own adventure feel of the second, and added a whole lot of little touches of its own to create a classic. Time would tell if the first game on Nintendo’s new Super Nintendo system could fill Castlevania III’s colossal boots.
Alone among my friends, I liked Simon’s Quest more than the original Castlevania, and not just because it was much easier. Like Zelda II and Super Mario Brothers 2, Castlevania II took the series in a completely different direction. It’s my understanding that at the time, companies were still unsure how to deliver sequels—whether gamers were attracted to the style of game itself or to the characters and setting, and so many of these early sequels diverged mightily from their predecessors.
The plot was a direct continuation of the first game. After killing Dracula, Simon Belmont discovers that the power of Dracula is still alive and well throughout Transylvania. It just so happened that Dracula put a curse on Simon with his dying breath, a kind of vampire failsafe if you will, that if Dracula died Simon, along with all of Transylvania, would fall ill and die. The only way to break the curse? Resurrect Dracula and kill him again! So Simon sets off on a quest (get it?) to collect the scattered remains of Dracula, put him back together, and kill him once and for all (or until the next game in the chronology.)
Castlevania II was the first game I ever played without levels. Instead of progressing through a six-stage castle, Simon had the whole Transylvanian countryside to explore. There were forests, caves, villages, swamps, haunted mansions, deserted cliffs, and, only at the end, the ruins of Dracula’s castle. This time around there were more adventure and RPG elements in the mix. You had to figure out where to go and what to do (not a simple task, and almost impossible without a good Nintendo Power at your side. God Bless the marketing geniuses at Nintendo Power, huh?). The actual gameplay might not have been as hard, but figuring out where to go next sure was. The pathetic translation didn’t help either. Townspeople were supposed to give you clues, but they ended up referring to things that aren’t even in the game, when they make sense at all.
But this game had a lot going for it that often gets overlooked by people put off by the change in style. I loved exploring a haunted, storybook version of 17th century Romania. With a little imagination, it was easy to transfer the confusing 2d game map into a full scale world. When you’re a kid, the best games are the ones that provide a great jumping off point for imaginary elaboration. The game had a day night cycle, and every time it switched the music changed and the enemies got tougher. Even the towns were no longer safe, as the once friendly and poorly translated villagers were replaced with putrid zombies. (As a child, I thought the townspeople transformed into zombies, making the game all the more creepy, but it turns out they’re meant to be hiding in their homes while unrelated zombies ravage the city.) Part of the strategy was getting through the game in a set number of game dies. If you took too long, Simon could actually die of his wounds in one of the first instances of a game having multiple endings.
The game had a very limited soundtrack, but it did introduce “Bloody Tears” one of my favorite Castlevania tracks. The graphics are a bit more generic than in Castlevania—all of the mansions look the same, but the forests and mountains of the countryside are appropriately atmospheric. Simon himself has gotten a nice visual upgrade, with a svelte red suit and a new black hairstyle. (Although on the game box he’s a blond, after appearing to have brown hair on the first Castlevania’s box. The series has never been big on consistency. I think in his latest appearance his hair was bright red).
Castlevania II is often considered the black sheep of the NES Castlevanias, but it’s one of my favorites. I love the time factor, the giant world map, and the challenge of having to figure out where to go next. It’s one of the main contributing factors to my love of vampires and Dracula in particular. It might feel quaint now, but at the time this game laid out a huge, haunted, and mysterious world, and left the player free to go where they wanted. It was a design ahead of its time, and though it is quite popular now, Castlevania would return to a more traditional style for Castlevania III.
In the days when NES ruled the world, the Castlevania series was the best place to go for slaying ghosts, zombies, and other horrors. Despite their fiendish difficulty, the games are well deserving of their status as classics of the NES era. The plot was fairly simple: A guy with a whip sets out to fight his way through the monsters of Dracula’s castle and finally kill the Lord of the Vampires himself. For a young fan of Universal Horror monsters and all things Gothic and spooky the series was a no-brainer. I have great memories of going down to a friend’s unfinished basement to play the original Castlevania for the first time—if the shiny silver box and the cheesy picture of Dracula on the cover didn’t hook me, the game itself quickly removed any doubts. The atmosphere, the music, the gameplay, and yes, even the challenge made the experience memorable. In honor of Halloween I’m going to take a look back at the three NES Castlevanias, and even discuss the series’ triumphant entry into the newfangled sixteen bit era with Super Castlevania IV before examining where the series has gone since its heyday.
Castlevania (1987)
It started with Dracula, a castle, and some dude with a whip. If you read the instructions, you learned that the hero’s name was Simon Belmont, scion of a long line of vampire-fighters, and the whip was actually an enchanted artifact designed for one purpose—the eradication of vampires everywhere. Konami was already on my radar in a big way in the late 80s/early 90s when I first played this game. As the makers of Contra and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle arcade game, they were, as far as I was concerned, the only major 3rd party developer in town. Here was a game that had everything. Zombies? Check. Ghosts? Check. Medusa? Check. Dracula? Of course. The first Castlevania was only six stages, and if you’re a pro it can probably be beaten in about half an hour. But most of us were not pros at age 8, and in those early NES days six stages was more than worth the game’s fifty dollar pricetag. I was no terrible Nintendo player, but it took me years (years!) to finally beat the Grim Reaper and move on to stage six, and that’s when I was lucky enough even to get that far.
The game had no passwords, so if you turned off your Nintendo you were stuck going all the way back to beginning. Cheap deaths were common: Many times, fully powered up and charging through mighty enemies left and right, Simon Belmont found himself knocked off a platform by a run-of-the-mill bat, at which point he would plummet like a rock to his death. That’s right. Simon Belmont must have weighed somewhere in the vicinity of 500 pounds, because even a fall from a low platform would send him hurtling to the ground as though sucked there with a vacuum.
But aside from the punishing mechanics, the game was a blast to play. In addition to the whip, Simon could grab four subweapons—the useless knife, the axe, the cross shaped boomerang (I guess the cross helped put some added hurt on the legions of the damned), and the all powerful holy water, a weapon so mighty that proper use of it could even render the impossible Grim Reaper boss helpless. The levels themselves, all of which took place inside different parts of Dracula’s castle, were appropriately spooky, with ruined statues, crumbling walls and faded curtains making excellent use (for the time) of the Nintendo’s capabilities. Only Simon, who was a squat, all brown little blob, got less than stellar treatment from the graphics folks, but he serves his purpose well enough. Then of course there’s the wonderful music. Konami went all out with this, and it remains one of the series’ hallmarks. Sure, the Mario and Zelda themes were more iconic, but Castlevania managed to evoke the sound and fury of a full on pipe-organ into the tiny NES cartridge, and that’s just during the first stage. The music is evocative even today, and I’ve heard plenty of full orchestral soundtracks that don’t come close to matching its 8-bit simplicity.
If you somehow managed to climb through Dracula’s castle and defeat the Count himself in both his forms, you were treated to one of the most anticlimactic endings in an era of anticlimactic endings. The castle just falls down. That’s it.
That’s okay, though. Castlevania II was on its way.
When I was a kid, trick-or-treat night was inseparable from The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror. Our neighborhood had trick-or-treat on Thursdays, and in the early 90s The Simpsons aired on Thursday nights, presumably in a vainglorious attempt to compete with NBC’s must-see-TV. For a few years, trick-or-treat would wrap up just in time to come home, take off any uncomfortable masks (as a “method trick-or-treater” I refused to remove any element of my costume until I was back at the house, no matter how many trees I crashed into from poor vision) turn on The Simpsons, and chow down on bags upon bags of candy.
Last year when I wrote about The Simpsons, I claimed my favorite Treehouse of Horror episode was the 5th one, but in my orgy of Halloween nostalgia I’ve been rethinking things a bit. By the time that episode came out I was in 7th grade, The Simpsons had moved back to Sunday night and even trick-or-treat was starting to lose some of its luster. Those early Halloween episodes were helped by the thrill of watching them with a big group of other kids, eating candy and reminiscing about the night’s adventure.
These shows were my first introduction to a lot of classic horror stories, from the Monkey’s Paw to The Raven to The Night of the Living Dead. "Bart Simpson’s Dracula" was even the first adaptation of Dracula I remember ever watching. The Simpsons was great for introducing a young audience to stories, movies, and other pop culture phenomenon that we wouldn’t have known about if not for the show. I doubt anyone can really say their life was enriched by watching Full House, but with The Simpsons I was often learning more about the world as I watched them mock it.
In re-watching these episodes (particularly Treehouse II, III, and IV) I’m astounded by just how much they remind me of Halloweens past. All the early framing stories, except the delightfully ludicrous, Conan O’Brien penned art gallery sequence, dealt with real American suburban Halloween traditions—trick-or-treat, ghost stories in the tree house, or a kid’s Halloween party. Something that The Simpsons has lost is that sense of realism—we all remember hanging out at a house while some adult forced us through silly Halloween games, and as much as triggering my own memories, these early shows do a great job of depicting being a kid of Halloween in the 1990s for millions of American children. Some of the jokes on these shows have yet to be topped, and I’m glad I got to experience them when they first aired with a group of like minded friends. There have been funny movies and TV shows since, sure, but I’ll never experience anything like sitting around the living room with my elementary school friends and watching the classic “zombie Flanders” bit for the first time.
Bart: Dad, you killed the zombie Flanders!
Homer: He was a zombie?
I don’t think I heard the next two of three minutes of the episode; we were all laughing too hard. After those initial great Halloween specials the Treehouse of Horror shows began to decline with the rest of the series. I’ll admit that it’s been several years since I’ve watched one. Tonight at 8pm Fox will air the 20th Halloween Special, and I might just give it a shot. They’ve apparently cycled back to doing another zombie episode, and I have to assume that it won’t live up to “Dial Z for Zombie,” but I am interested to see where the show goes with it, twenty years on, and how they do the segments now that they’ve moved into the new four act structure. Even though it still exists, for me The Simpsons HalloweenSpecial will always belong back with cheap rubber masks and super-sugary gum, with chilly east coast autumns and sneaky ploys to get as much candy as possible from gullible neighbors. Though the new episodes don’t quite cut it for me, whenever I see that old graveyard introduction and hear the “spooky” version of The Simpsons theme I’m immediately taken back to the time when Halloween was fun, and when moments of sitting around laughing at great jokes with great friends were a dime a dozen. Just watching Homer Simpson battle an evil Krusty the Clown doll makes me hungry for a mini Snickers bar.
One of the best things about being a kid on Halloween was how scared you could get. As adults we can still get startled, still get nervous, still be worried, but it’s difficult to have that kind of fear that comes with a child’s overactive imagination. To a kid, there’s always the possibility, however remote, that things aren’t just make believe, that the next person you see dressed as a witch or goblin might be the real thing, waiting to sneak in through your bedroom window and drag you off into the night.
I grew up in western Maryland, which in its rural sections is creepy enough as it is—lots of ruined barns, isolated farms, and abandoned houses. Just south of the border with Pennsylvania is an especially small town called Leitersburg. Its single main street is lined with old early 20th century houses, their backyards opening up into sprawling, oftentimes abandoned farmland. On one of these neglected plots of land, in the shell of an old World War I era school house, a creepy building if there ever was one, sat the Leitersburg Haunted House. No Halloween was complete without it.
I first went in 6th grade, and to my young mind it was the most terrifying place on earth. Though my conscious brain knew I was dealing with a community spook house run by a bunch of slightly artsy teenagers and others at home in the volunteer-dress-up-in-costumes-and-scare-the-bejesus-out-of-children business, I believed them when they told me the house stood on the gateway to Hell.
Before going into the house, the guests waited in a long (sometimes two hours or more!) line out in front of the old schoolhouse. Teens in various costumes would parade around, trying to startle people who weren’t paying attention and trying to avoid the older, drunker haunted house goers who enjoyed nothing more than tripping, kicking, or otherwise harassing the poor performers. Personally, and in hindsight rather foolishly, I was far more terrified of the performers in hoods than their tormentors.
Waiting outside the house there were a few attractions, like black robed figures digging graves, and a blood filled bathtub that occasionally bubbled up with a loose (rubber) body part or two. To soften the mood a bit there was a trailer where you could buy carnival type food (including my beloved funnel cakes) and Leitersburg Haunted House T-Shirts. Most nights there was also a booth set up for the local radio station to play music and have contests. It was a very festive environment, year after year, even when the house itself stopped being quite as terrifying. It was also, without fail, bitterly cold every single year. In my opinion it's not Halloween if it's not freezing outside--what fun is being scared in the heat?
Once we finally got in the old schoolhouse (after God knows how many hours of waiting—if you didn’t enjoy waiting in lines, this probably wasn’t the right Halloween event for you) we were greeted with pounding bass music and strobe lights (this would become a recurring motif). The music was some vaguely Souixsie and the Banshees or Nick Cave concoction of strange vocals and sternum-shaking bass that I’ve tried in vain for the last fifteen years or so to identify without any luck. Guests were seated on rickety wooden benches in a small black box theater that stank of rot. I’m not sure how they generated the disgusting smell. Perhaps the cast members ran around smearing the place with rancid meat before the show.
Eventually the music died down and the show began. It would change every year, but my first year is the only one I clearly remember. A man dressed as a crazy old person emerged from the darkness and ranted in a terrifying (or, at the least, loud) voice about how the school in which we now sat was inadvertently constructed right on top of the gateway to Hell. This led, in time, to the school children going crazy, losing their hair, mutating, eating each other, and so on. The school was finally closed, only to be reopened for the purposes of allowing us to take a tour. When this chilling revelation was announced, the old man was confronted by a set of evil cultists that wanted to reopen the gateway. He was then put on a rack and tortured in some kind of over the top Alice Cooper manner. Then things got interesting.
The details have slipped away, but there was a severed head, a woman making out with a man and biting off his tongue in the process, a crucifix burned to a ghoul’s face—you know, the sort of things you would expect to go on above the gateway to Hell.
Eventually (and this next part was the same every year, no matter what the show’s theme was) the monsters decided that a sacrifice was needed. Gibbering performers would run around the audience, screaming in our faces in search of an ideal candidate. Eventually, a struggling girl was pulled from the crowd screaming and dragged to a large grate in the middle of the theater. It opened with a terrible sound of rusty hinges, the petrified girl was tossed inside, and the grate was closed again with a thunderous clang.
Of course, local folklore held that the girl was not a plant, that she was actually ripped unsuspecting from the audience every show. It seemed logical in 6th grade. After all, everyone I knew knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who had been tossed in the pit, and they insisted it was for real. Apparently it was as wonderful as being spirited away by the Pied Piper—once underground, the victim was given free tickets to the haunted house, lots of food and drinks, and got to explore the inner workings of the show. I know it was a little rural town in the middle of nowhere, but I have to suspect that the entire thing was staged every night. Imagine the law suits if the performers grabbed onto a girl with an irregular heartbeat. But it greatly amplified the haunted house’s mystique. As a kid, I was fully prepared to believe that no one was safe inside the walls.
Every year the show ended with some sort of demon rising up from the grate and threatening to kill us all. Often he was painted blue with long tentacle arms and a deformed face. His voice (which clearly came from the lighting booth and not the actor) was a deep, warped growl that still sends shivers down my spine when I think of it. I’m not sure why he didn’t simply murder the entire crowd outright, but I’m glad he didn’t. Instead one of the actors warned us to “flee while you can!” and we were led into a dark maze.
Here things became much more like a traditional haunted house, though it was still frightening. We walked through dark hallways and encountered occasional horrific sights –inmates, murderers, and middle aged men with flashlights and black windbreakers that said “staff”. At that time, about 60 people went through the maze in one massive group, all holding on to the person in front of them. Later on they wised up and started holding people in a little room after the show, only letting groups of about ten or fifteen people in the maze at a time. It lessened the conga-line feel, and was probably a hell of a lot safer. Sometimes you were forced to duck under hanging bodies or low doors, and occasionally one of the ghouls would pop out of nowhere and scare the entire party. Fortunately I never had to lead the conga line through the maze—that took way too much courage. Plus you got all the blame if you hit a dead end.
The night ended with a super fun happy slide out of the house. The safety precautions here hurt the illusion a bit, as one of the middle aged “staff” fellows had to monitor the line and make sure no one got on the slide too soon. The slide went through a long dark tunnel with some lighting effects before dumping you out behind the schoolhouse. But the terrors weren’t over. The haunted house staff delighted in torturing children and there were a few performers left to leap out as you walked back to the front of the house.
During that first visit, I was scared out of mind and was having none of it. On the way out a guy dressed in a werewolf mask emerged from a trap door in the floor and started growling at me. Wasting no time, I kicked him as hard as I could in the face with my high top sneakers. He fell back into the pit, and the trap door slammed down on top of him. Like I said, the place was a law suit waiting to happen. If that werewolf guy is still out there, I would like to send my heartfelt apologies for kicking him in the face. If he survived, that is.
I went just about every year from then on. It gradually became less about being scared than about just having fun with a big group of people. By high school, certainly, a big part of the trip was trying to line yourself up so the right girl would be behind you in the maze, holding onto your waist for guidance. I’ve been to a lot of haunted attractions since, but they’ve never held the same magic as that creepy abandoned schoolhouse.
The Leitersburg Haunted House finally closed down in 2007. I imagine the increasing litigiousness of society and growing safety concerns from the century old school house became too much for the youth group that ran it to afford. It's a shame, but it's very understandable. Astonishing amounts of planning must have been involved in putting the thing together every year—each time, the show just got better and better, the effects more convincing, the strobe lights more blinding. After thirty years, it just became too much.
In a lot of ways it was a relic of a more old fashioned Halloween experience, when making sure people felt safe was the absolute last priority. This was a haunted house after all. You weren’t supposed to feel safe or coddled. You were supposed to feel like the monsters could reach out and grab you at any moment, that you might never find your way out of the maze, or that a single false move could send you screaming down some forgotten pit, never to be heard from again.
1. Thomas Jefferson/Alexander Hamilton/Generic 18th Century Fop 
How to Make It:
Some friends and I went as The Beatles (White Album era) during the height of my Beatles obsession. I was John, and even perfected an amusing Beatle accent to go along with the outfit. Everyone loves The Beatles, so it’s a great way to bring smiles to the faces of young and old alike, and very easy to pull off.
This is probably my proudest Halloween accomplishment, and winner of the coveted Northern Middle School Costume Contest. It’s a classic monster from a classic story, so you really can’t go wrong. I was due at the school Halloween party in half an hour when my dad and I threw this together from scratch, so you can never say it’s too late to put together a great costume. It earned me a $15 dollar gift certificate to the mall, so who knows what wonders it will work for you?
There was a time before the Star Wars prequels when Darth Vader was universally cool. I dreamed of a Darth Vader Halloween costume for years and years before I finally got the chance to portray the Lord of the Sith in 7th grade. Darth Vader is the owner of the greatest mask ever made, and I can’t image anyone not wanting to try it on, at least for an evening.
5. Skeletor 
