"What A Horrible Night To Have A Curse"--Classic Gaming Meets Classic Monsters

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.

To be continued. . .

"I'd Say The Pressure's Finally Gotten To Dad. But...What Pressure?"

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 Halloween Special 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.

An Unforgettable Haunted House

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.

Clive Barker’s Undying: Top Notch Horror Gameplay Meets Abysmal Sales Figures

Not many people got to play Clive Barker’s Undying when it was released in 2001. The game got tons of media coverage throughout its development and debuted to phenomenal reviews, yet almost no one bought it. Sales were so terrible that EA never even bothered to release a planned patch for the game. Indeed, only a few weeks after its release, the game was abandoned forever. By the time I bought it in fall of 2001, only about 6 months after it came out, it was already selling on Amazon for $9.99.

It was a pathetic fate for a game that should be remembered as one of the finest horror games ever made. Clive Barker’s Undying took elements of Gothic horror, the short stories of H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen, and even a dose of old-fashioned swashbuckling adventure and then forced it all through the demented brain of Clive Barker to create an unforgettable gameplay experience. If your idea of horror is crumbling graveyards and spooky mansions populated by hoards of hideous monsters, this is a must-own game.


On the surface, the game is a simple first person shooter, similar to dozens that were being churned out for the PC in the late 90s and early 2000s, before the X-Box arrived on the scene to steal the genre away. You have to worry about collecting ammo, solving simple puzzles to move from room to room, and avoiding and/or shooting armies of enemies. Clive Barker’s Undying sets itself apart from the pack by augmenting the usual array of weapons with magic spells, including the ability to fly and toss around flaming, laughing skulls. While some of the weapons are traditional, like the revolver and the shotgun, there are plenty of more unique choices as well. How many first person shooters let you decapitate your opponent with a giant magical scythe? I can only think of one.

Beyond the gameplay, this is a game that is lovingly crafted from the ground up. Clive Barker’s name isn’t just here as a cheap gimmick to sell games. (Thank God, since it apparently didn’t help sell a single copy). The horror icon was instrumental in developing the games characters and storyline, and it shows. The Covenant family (the game’s main antagonists) are some of the most creepy and disturbed characters I've ever encountered in a game, and solving the mystery behind each of their horrible deaths is never a tedious task. The music and sound effects are excellent across the board, adding greatly to the game’s wonderful atmosphere and the “Standing Stones” music that accompanies the title screen is particularly memorable and frightening. (Somehow, a chorus singing the usually optimistic “While I breathe, I hope” in Latin to creepy violin strings and pounding drums is anything but comforting.)



If possible, even more care and attention was given to the game’s levels. From a haunted crypt to a haunted lighthouse to the haunted Covenant mansion (getting the theme?) all of the game’s locations make the most of their 2001 era graphics to create an unrivaled atmosphere. There’s even a trip to another dimension, and, in my absolute favorite section, a journey back in time to a 12th century monastery during a snowstorm. This game is genuinely frightening on a level few games ever reach, and once you’ve visited these locations and experienced the frights they offer, you’re unlikely to ever forget them.

Set during the 1920s (for some reason, an ideal time for horror stories) the game tells the story of a decayed Irish aristocratic family, the Covenants. Years ago, the family’s five children unwittingly performed an ancient pagan ritual at a group of standing stones on their desolate island home. The ritual gradually drove each of the children mad and sent them all to an early grave. Their spirits have now returned to haunt their one surviving brother, Jeremiah. In desperation, Jeremiah calls on his old WWI buddy, the paranormal expert Patrick Galloway, to lay his sibling’s spirits to rest.


Patrick arrives at the creepy Covenant mansion in the middle of a terrible thunderstorm, and the early part of the game has you exploring the mansion's dark halls and ancient corridors. Even in the first few moments Patrick is already haunted by ghostly visions and eerie noises, and the events just get stranger and stranger.

Like a lot of games, the best and most fleshed out section of the game is the first, when Patrick must track down the spirit of the youngest Covenant sibling, Lizbeth--in life a literary minded socialite, in death a vicious ghoul. The search for Lizbeth will take you all over the mansion, through a haunted cemetery and a ruined crypt, to the site of an ancient monastery, and back in time to obtain the magic scythe needed to decapitate Lizbeth and put her out of her misery. It culminates in an incredibly memorable confrontation involving Lizbeth, Patrick, and the corpse of Lizbeth's mother in an ancient tomb beside the sea. It’s one of the creepiest journeys in gaming and an experience not to be missed.



The Lizbeth section makes up the largest part of the game, and I imagine that before it was rushed to release each sibling had an equally lengthy buildup. As it stands now, once Lizbeth is out of the picture the other siblings go down far too quickly, and you’ll find yourself at the end of the game before you know it. It’s a fun ride the whole way through, but it never really reclaims the glory of those first few hours of gameplay. I don’t know much about game production, but I get the feeling that, unlike movies, they must be made linearly—it always seems that in the games that are rushed to release, it’s the later sections that suffer.

Nevermind the faults, though. When I think of Halloween of 2001 I immediately think of Clive Barker’s Undying. Sure, some people might consider it a waste of your college years to sit in a dank underground dorm room playing a computer game, but obviously those people have never played the game. I’ve played through it about three times since (regrettably, I never brought it to CA with me so I haven't played it for a few years) and if possible it’s gotten better every time. It’s one of those games where you’ll notice a new detail or some new wrinkle in the plot each time you play it, and the different weapons, spells, power levels, and difficulties provide plenty of replay options. Like all good old PC games, the box also came with extensive documentation, including a classy journal written by Jeremiah Covenant detailing the sibling’s backstory. (One of the many casualties with the rising popularity of video games has been these little extras that used to come with many old PC games. These days you’re lucky if you get an instruction manual.)


There’s not much left of Clive Barker’s Undying, even on the internet. A fan site, Standing Stones, has existed forever, but even that venerable site seems to have finally run out of juice. (You can find your way to a demo of the game by going there.) There are plenty of videos on youtube, and used copies are still fairly easy to come by, but by and large it’s a game that is mostly forgotten. It’s a shame. If you’re looking for a great scary story this Halloween, in any medium, this game is well worth a look.

The Disney Halloween Specials

Back in the 80s Halloween meant, among other things, lots of Halloween specials on TV. One I made sure to catch every year was A Disney Halloween. It was on in the background at Halloween parties, at Cub Scout meetings as we stuffed scarecrows to decorate our front porches, and after coming home from a night of Trick-or-Treat.



After doing a bit of research, I discovered that when I think of A Disney Halloween, I’m actually remembering bits and pieces of three different specials: Disney’s Halloween Hall O’ Fame, Disney’s Halloween Treat, and A Disney Halloween. A Disney Halloween was the longest, and more or less incorporated all the material from the other two, so for the sake of convenience I’ll use it here to refer to all three shows. Essentially the show was a compilation of a whole bunch of scary moments in Disney shorts and movies from the 1930s all the way up to the 1980s. In an era before most of these movies were easily available on VHS, it was my first exposure to a lot of the classic Disney movies: The Sword in the Stone, Peter Pan, Snow White, The Aristocats, and many others.

Watching these specials now, it’s fun to see how freaky and weird a lot of these old cartoons were. In one episode, for instance, Donald Duck takes gleeful, sadistic pleasure in handing out firecrackers to his own nephews for Trick-or-Treat. How they survived such reckless abuse is far beyond me, but in this particular cartoon they get back at Donald through the help of a devious witch named Hazel and cheerful pop-swing music.

In another cartoon Pluto is condemned to death by a council of vicious cats (who live in a giant stone cat head not at all unlike the Cave of Wonders in Aladdin). After being found guilty, Pluto is nearly burned alive by demonic, pitchfork wielding felines before waking from the dream. I’m glad to see children’s programming that’s not afraid to be so out there. I could be wrong, since I'm looking at it from an adult's eyes, but I feel like kid's entertainment has gotten tamer over the years.

But I didn’t watch the specials for the weird 40s cartoons, or even the clips of Disney villains through the years. What I looked forward to the most were the two segments that scared my Kindergarten mind the worst: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Night on Bald Mountain.



I’ll admit that these days Sleepy Hollow feels a little tame. The final chase with Ichabod and the horseman is still thrilling. (The TV specials tended to cut out the rather grim ending of the tale where Ichabod vanishes forever, perhaps spirited away to hell by the horseman). Disney’s Horseman is clearly supernatural. No matter how many times my parents tried to calm me by insisting the Headless Horseman was just Brom Bones in disguise, I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now. The Headless Horseman is real, damn it!

The rest of the segment hasn’t aged well; most of the time it has nothing to do with the Horseman or the actual “legend” of Sleepy Hollow. Instead we get the chipper voice of Bing Crosby as our narrator and several 1940s era boogie-woogie music numbers that blunt a lot of the terror. It’s hard to be frightened by the Headless Horseman when we learn about him through a jaunty Bing Crosby sing-along.

Night on Bald Mountain, on the other hand, remains just as beautiful, frightening, and eerie as it did when I first watched it. Originally the climax to Disney’s Fantasia, I was first exposed to the segment on A Disney Halloween, and while other kids found it boring, stupid, or slow (criticisms which are unfairly lobbed at the whole of Fantasia to this day) I was transfixed. The animation is phenomenal—I’d say it’s one of the most beautiful hand drawn shorts ever: from the ethereal movements of the ghosts to the spastic flight of the harpies and the impressive, powerful movements of Chernabog atop the mountain, the segment pushed the boundariess of what cartoon animation had been up to that point.



Unlike so many of the other cartoons, there are no heroes in Night on Bald Mountain (described as “the world’s first Halloween party” by the show’s narrator). There is nothing to stand up against the evil of the demon Chernabog. Indeed, he has this night, and presumably every night, free to do what he wants, to raise the dead and cavort with flaming demons and flying harpies without a soul to oppose him. With power like that at his disposal, what earthly force could stop him?

In Fantasia, Chernabog is defeated at dawn by the ringing of the church bell and horrible night of Bald Mountain gives way to the gorgeous Ave Maria sequence. In the Disney Halloween specials, oddly enough, they would cut away before Chernabog’s defeat, leaving him in power on Bald Mountain and presumably prepared to destroy the town and the world. As a kid who was already plenty afraid of the night, it gave me the sense that somewhere in the world something like this could happen unchecked—that the night brought on things so frightening and so otherworldly that it was never a good idea to venture too far from home after dark. Who knew which of the mountains I could see from by bedroom was home to a terrible demon and the dance of the dead?

And while I no longer believe there are mountains where demons dance to classical music, Night on Bald Mountain still reminds me of the days when I did. From that beautiful nightmare to Huey, Dewey, and Louie’s quest for candy, there’s something about A Disney Halloween that perfectly captures the fun and fright of Halloween in the 1980s for those of us who were there. I wonder what the kids are watching now?

Happy October! Welcome to the Hill of Screams

In honor of October and the imminent arrival of one of my favorite holidays, Halloween, I've decided to redo the blog with a new title and a Stephen Gammell drawing from the terrifying Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books. All this month I'll be talking about a whole bunch of scary, spooky, or otherwise Halloween related movies, books, TV shows, and more. These won't necessarily be the most popular or widely known Halloween phenomenon, but they are all an important part of my own memories of October, autumn, and Halloween.

Enjoy!

Wake Me Up When September Ends

September has always been one of those unpleasant months. When I was a kid, of course, it meant the end of summer and the start of school. Once you get older and "summer" starts to lose it's meaning (especially in L.A.--who knows what season it is out here?), it still has very little personality. Like many across the country, I've spent September of 2009 in an unsuccessful search for employment, so the month has been even duller than usual.

There's a lot of depression that goes with unemployment, especially in a country where the good ole Protestant Work Ethic (harder workers must be better people) is still so entrenched. I can't speak for everyone, but it has definitely helped me to keep reminding myself that who I am isn't necessarily tied to what I do (or don't do) for money. I've been writing a lot (not on this blog, obviously, but I'm working to remedy that) and even if I haven't seen a cent for all the work, it still goes a long way to stave off the fears and depression that go along with having to worry about where my next meal is coming from.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to be making money right now, at writing or anything else. But it helps to get away from thinking that the merit of an activity is tied into the financial reward. Unemployment is a scary thing, poverty is a terrifying thing, but neither one has to steal the things that matter.

October is going to be another tough month for sure; there's a very real possibility that I might go from simply unemployed to homeless and unemployed. It's happening to so many people my age who piled up the student loans thinking for sure there would be something out there for them, only to find themselves with piles of debt and no job prospects. Poverty takes an awful lot from us, but what I keep telling myself, and what I would tell any of the millions of people struggling though a similar situation, is that it doesn't have to take away who you are. It's a tired old cliche, but the important things in life don't come included in a paycheck.

So I will keep writing and keep searching and keep hoping. September's over at last. It can't get any worse, can it?