Halloween, or Hallowe’en

It’s October 1st, which means it’s time to begin my preparations for Halloween.

I put out my Jack O’Lanterns today. These are realistic foam pumpkins that I’ve painted black Jack O’Lantern faces onto. They go next to my front door, in the little cluster of bushes underneath the big window.

I lined the front walk with tin candle holders, that all have Jack O’Lantern faces on them. Starting a week before Halloween, I’ll light candles in them every evening, so passers-by will see twenty smiling faces flickering at them from my walkway.

I began to go through my annual set of Halloween books and movies:

  • A Halloween Reader a collection of early poems, short stories, and plays about Halloween written before 1920
  • October Dreams, a collection of short stories, poems, and personal reflections on Halloween by modern authors
  • Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree, in which a group of boys are sucked through the millenia in search of a lost friend, and witness Halloweens throughout time, borne on Bradbury’s peerless prose
  • The original 1978 Halloween, still a fantastic (and chilling) film. This is probably a primary reason for increased safety concerns these days.
  • The 1922 Nosferatu, which shows its age after repeated vieweings
  • It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
  • Garfield’s Halloween Adventure, which scores points for one of the freakiest animated sequences in any primetime animated series ever
  • Something Wicked This Way Comes, which has some fantastic scenes and cinematography, but doesn’t hold together as a movie as well as I’d like
  • Ernest Scared Stupid. Okay, I watched this when I was a kid, and it’s always been special for me. It’s not at all scary, but it’s goofy fun. And there are a few good moments.

I’m always looking for recommendations….

Comments:

AndreDeLimburger Too bad we don’t halloween over here in the netherlands :(
Brennen You’ve actually covered most of my picks, I guess. There was that one movie that had a bunch of kids fighting a collection of the stereotypical monsters (the Universal movie monsters, maybe?). But I’ve never quite been sure what that one was called.

War of the Worlds?

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