Happy Halloween Itself

October 31, 2011 — For a lot of people, today is the only day they celebrate Halloween. Here, we’ve been doing it for more than a month and a half. But one day or 50, the season still flies by so…freaking…fast. And ellipses don’t slow it down one…freaking…bit.

We squeezed a lot in this season, though. Graves of werewolves and vampires, Ouija boards and mediums, movies and candy, corn mazes and road trips, Sleepy Hollow and Salem, Vincent Price and Edgar Allan Poe, haunted houses and murder houses. So much more. Forty-four posts’ worth, in fact. My favorite posts had to be the stuff I didn’t see coming, like the October snow or seeing the Tim Burton exhibit in L.A. (I didn’t know that was happening until ten minutes before we arrived at the museum).

But I don’t want to spend the last post of the Halloween 2011 Blog summarizing or trying to wring just one more page view from you guys. Like a mummy straight out of its sarcophagus, I want to tie up some loose ends:

• For instance, here lies Rotbert this Halloween, just ten days after we last saw him.

• Also, even though we acknowledged our Halloween fallen already, that doesn’t mean we stopped eating cool candy. Here’s a sample: 

• So far, the Ouija board session doesn’t seem to have unleashed anything too horrible in the house, although, admittedly, my washing machine seems a little more unbalanced than usual.

• After posting the Grave of a Werewolf video about the first actor to play a werewolf in a Hollywood picture, an anonymous commentator pointed us to his nearby house, as well.

• I posted a bunch of random graves of the famous that I’ve visited in my life, but here is one I saw just this month:

• Finally, I ended up having a funny story as a result of visiting the Lily Dale medium. If you’ll recall, the medium kept seeing a caterpillar and chalked it up to my sweater for whatever reason. When my mother-in-law read the posted transcript, she told us that she had just picked up the materials for a nursery room theme just in case we ever decided to have a second child (also a medium prediction). That room theme? Eric Carle’s children’s book, The Hungry Caterpillar. Oh, and the sweater was a gift from my mother-in-law, in the first place. That’s how those things work, I guess. 

So I think that does it for the Halloween 2011 Blog. If I do this next year for the third year in a row, I’m really going to need to come up with a less generic name for it.

Anyway, nothing left to do but to appease trick-or-treaters, hang out with friends, and watch the witches on their brooms hand off the baton to Santa on his sleigh.

Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoyed it. Happy Halloween, everybody.

Scared Out of Our Heads

October 30, 2011 — Haunted house attractions are among my pet proofs that actual haunted houses don’t exist. You see, if someone came out and said, “This house is definitely haunted. If you enter, you are guaranteed to see harrowing stuff and things from another world will jump out at you. I would suggest hitting a Dairy Queen, instead,” there would be long lines of excited, cider chugging people wrapped around the block waiting to get in.

Haunted house attractions, or haunts as they're often referred to in the industry, are places set up to scare you for money. Kind of like rollercoasters, but with more blood. Unless it's an Action Park coaster, then about equal blood.

I’ve seen my share of these haunts, from the movie studio quality ones at Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights in Florida to the high-quality amusement park-level ones like at Cedar Point Halloweekends in Ohio. I’ve been to attractions in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania that have showed up on Top 10 Travel Channel shows. I’ve been to a couple in Virginia that are open year-round. Heck, I even went through one in Maryland that was entirely contained within a single school bus. That was the season I attended thirty haunted houses. Just because that’s how the season worked out.

I know that sounds like I’m obsessed with them, but in other Halloween seasons, I’ve skipped them entirely. I mean, I feel guilty if I don’t read a Bradbury story or eat a caramel apple during Halloween, but if I miss out on a haunted house, I can still move on to Thanksgiving, no problem.

Philipsburg Manor in the daytime.

This season, we visited one haunted house attraction, Horseman’s Hollow in Sleepy Hollow, New York. We did this because, well, we were there, and because the other two major events of the night in the area, the Great Jack-O-Lantern Blaze and Irving’s Legend were both sold out. That says a lot of good things about your town’s Halloween cred when your signature haunted house is the last thing to sell out.

Now, I don’t go to haunted houses for the thrill. Sure, if someone jumps out of at me from the left while I’m looking at a severed head dangling from a hook on the right, I’ll jump. But that’s not why I’m there. I go because I dig the atmosphere, the effects, the effort.

I also like to see other people get scared. Ideally, it’s someone who is in my party. These days, I don’t get that too often because I’m usually going through them with my wife and I can’t count on her for that role. She hates haunted house attractions, but not in the fun way where she screams and clings to the closest masculine presence. She just shuts down and walks through as fast as she can while I try to keep up saying, “You just missed a way cool killer clown. Did you see that exploded torso? Hold on, this skull-faced gentleman wants a word with you.”

Horseman’s Hollow is held at Philipsburg Manor, a 300-year-old farm and mill complex near the Old Dutch Church and Headless Horseman bridge. Even though they still had tickets available, it was only for the first slot at 6:30 and the final slot at 9:30 (like most Sleepy Hollow events, you have to buy tickets in advance). We chose the 9:30 slot because it would give us a chance for some pre-haunt libations, even though we knew that after three hours of spooking, most of the actors would probably be doing more yawning than screaming.

The worst thing about any haunted house attraction is the lines, but since they assigned timeslots to groups, this one was managed better than most. Also, I think those libations were speeding time for me a bit.

Of course, those group timeslots still encompassed hundreds of people, so that meant they had to send everybody through the narrow path of the attraction in a constant stream of bodies, meaning at no time were we not surrounded by 20 other people. As a result, our chances of being focused on by the spooks, surprised by timed effects, or witnessing the wife run through a fake wall just to get to the end of it all were nil.

Ideally, haunted houses would only let a few victims in at a time (ideally just one) to maximize the fright, but with a business model that gets only about 10 days to turn a profit (since weekends are often the only time people will got to these things), you need to shunt as many people through it as you can.

Still, what it lacked in isolation it made up for in style. The length was excellent, the spooks varied, the effects toggled between the gory and the classic, and its best feature was that the course alternated between indoor and outdoor areas, including woodland trails. No empty retail space or tent set up in a parking lot for this haunt. And yes, there was a headless horseman on a real horse. You’re a big-leaguer if you’re hiring livestock just to scare people, I assume.

I tried to capture pics of the event as best I could. They’re blurry for all the reasons you’d think, extremely dark, too much to drink, and moving at a speed concurrent with the weighty awareness that there are 100 people behind you.

In the end, since haunts like these won’t frighten me primally, I just ask that they provide an adventure. Horseman’s Hollow certainly did…at least from what the sambuca lets me remember. 

Buffy the Halloween Celebrator

October 29, 2011 — I owe Mark Beard an apology, wherever he is. Mark was a friend from my college days who kept trying to get me to watch some series called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I refused, citing various legal precedents, but mostly because I couldn’t believe that somebody decided it was a good idea to stretch what was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek, one-off movie gag into a serialized semi-drama on the WB network.

Fast forward a decade or so, and I’m 13 states away from where I went to college, WB has further devolved into the CW, Mark has gone on to whatever fortune that such strong critical insights into teen-marketed television has gotten him, and me and my wife discover that all seven seasons of Buffy were on Netflix streaming and we weren’t dating any other shows seriously at the time.

Oh, and most important, in that intervening decade, we’d watched Firefly, and, as a result, were willing to give any show Joss Whedon put together an honest try.

By the end of that first 11-episode season, we were hooked. Over the course of the next ten months, we watched all seven seasons. It was our go-to when there was nothing else to watch or do. “How about Buffy?” became almost a mantra in our house, and not just in the realm of our television habits. It’s a pretty flexible question.

Now, that’s not to say the series is as great as I’d been led to believe by Mark and all the Internet references that had flown over my head in the intervening years. I now dig it enough to fight someone to, if not quite death, at least a coma over it, but it really is almost a more frustrating series than it is excellent. The show never quite rose to a potential it had.

The group just never gelled. Buffy was mopey and inconsistent, everybody was too self-centered at odd times to really get what they were doing, and too much unnecessary drama came from within the team, wasting screen time that could’ve been invested in the actual story lines. And that trend just got worse, instead of better, as the series progressed to the much lower-quality of its later seasons.

Still, a bunch of kids in a high-school library making jokes with a seemingly harmless British librarian about how to bring down the powers of darkness ended up being a real good time and made me sorry I was late to the party.

Anyway, the Buffy era of my life is over, but before completely locking it away in a place I visit rarely and only when I’m alone, I went back a few weeks ago and rewatched its three Halloween episodes.

Season 2, Episode 6: Halloween

Ah, the glory days of Buffy. Everybody’s in high school, Spike’s a bad guy, Buffy and Angel are still trying to stick square pegs into their respective round holes, Cordelia’s becoming more interesting, Oz is finally on the scene, and Xander has an unrequited thing for Buffy.

Basically, this episode sets up the idea that real spooks don’t spook on Halloween. They don’t explain why, really. It’s alluded to that they find it tawdry or beneath them, that maybe its union rules, etc. But the why doesn’t really matter. No self-respecting ghoul would be caught out on such a night.

However, that rule apparently doesn’t apply to human wizards. One such named Ethan Rayne opens up costume shop full of enchanted costumes. Everyone who wears one on Halloween night becomes what they are dressed up as. Which is overall fine and not too panic-inducing, except that the sworn protector against evil that is Buffy basically dressed up as a damsel in distress.

Once a humble frat house, now a place where Dylan McDermott walks around nude a lot.

I’m a fan of any variation on the Halloween fundamentals, which this is, and even though I feel like I’ve probably seen this concept before, it worked well, especially in that it shifted everybody’s usual roles in the group. Buffy doesn’t save the day, Xander and Willow, who dress as a military figure and a ghost, respectively, both access an inner confidence that, being in the shadow of a super-powered stake-driver like Buffy, doesn’t often have the opportunity to thrive.

The shift even, in a thematic sense and not a literal one, affects the character of Giles, who we learn might not be as porridge-like as we’d been led to believe so far. The episode also becomes an official plot point going forward, since Xander retains some of that military knowledge for future Scooby Gang capers.

Season 4, Episode 4: Fear, Itself

Now we’re in the first year of college, Buffy is reeling from learning that some dudes just want sex, Willow’s in her cute stage of witchery and Oz has wolfed out (and they’re both monster mashing that together in a relationship), the ex-vengeance demon that is Anya has become post-coital with Xander, and Giles is in his unemployed phase since the burning down of the high school.

And all of us viewers are acutely homesick for the high school library.

In this episode, instead of costumes becoming the real thing, we have a frat-sponsored haunted house attraction becoming the real thing when the boys accidentally use real demonic symbols alongside the fake cobwebs and bowls of peeled grapes. Again, a variation on a Halloween fundamental.

Still unsure of that ending...

This time, anybody who enters the house ends up having to face their worst fears about themselves, all of which are pretty much just versions of losing control of their lives. Xander goes invisible, Oz wolfs out, Willow's magic overwhelms her, Buffy fights what she does every episode...being trapped in her unenviable role as the Slayer (also monsters).

Oh, and Willow and Oz pick one of the best "couples" costumes I've seen: Joan of Arc and God.

It’s the best of the Halloween episodes and one of the show's better ones overall in its ability to balance comedy and horror, although I still haven’t decided what I think of the ending. Mostly, though, the episode illustrates how much the show suffered by the departure of Oz when Seth Green left Buffy shortly thereafter.

As a side note, the exterior of the house used as the haunted house is the same one used as the much more vicious haunted house from the new American Horror Story series, which just recently debuted this month. Oh, and the original black Power Ranger is in this episode.

Season 6, Episode 6: All the Way

The series is dizzying down its quality spiral by this time, even though the very next episode is the series highlight Once More, with Feeling. Xander and Anya are engaged, Giles runs a magic shop, Buffy is recently returned from the dead for, I think, the third time, Spike’s character has been completely eviscerated of all interest, Willow’s firmly a lesbian and firmly abusing her witch powers (I guess. This is one of my pet peeves with the series. Buffy is supernatural, Giles runs a magic shop, and they rely on Willow’s magic countless times…but they all get pissed when she decorates with it. Again, more unnecessary internal drama).

Oh, and Buffy’s mom is dead and Buffy suddenly has an annoying sister in an actually clever twist that should have only lasted a few episodes and not the rest of the series.

Basically, a lot that’s annoying about this episode is what’s annoying about every Buffy episode from the later years. Everybody is self-centered, petty, and a little pathetic. Nothing really happens of interest except for a badly used red herring. The main drama is people hanging out at an impromptu engagement party while a bunch of teenage vampires break the tacit rule of staying in your crypt and watching telly on Halloween.

I did appreciate Xander’s pirate costume foreshadowing, though.

Basically, the three Buffy Halloween episodes form kind of a microcosm of the timeline of the show. In the first, you see the huge potential of it, in the second you’re excited by what seems like a show that’s finally coming into its own, and in the third you stand appalled by how far off the series went.

And I still haven’t watched any episode of Angel. I mean, a spin-off of a semi-drama on the WB network that was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek, one-off movie gag? Please.

Grr. Argh.

Walking in a Wicked Wonderland

October 28, 2011 — Sorry to post about this again, but I just can’t shake the October snow from the shoulders of my vampire cape. At this point, it’s all melted, but they’re predicting an actual snowstorm this weekend for my neck of the woods, which is really going to hurt the skimpy costume quotient of our local Halloween parties and make all the ghosts extremely hard to pick out.

All my pics from last night’s snowfall are, naturally, night pics. But my wife woke up early this morning to get some pretty awesome daytime shots of the October snow paying its respects at our neighboring graveyards (here’s her Tumblr for more of her Fall pics from this year). I thought I’d go ahead and post them here and push back Buffy for yet another day. I should probably just start writing about her Christmas episode, I guess.

With the impending white-out, it’s certainly shaping up to be a weird weekend. Like weirder than the “normal weird” of children dressed as psycho killers asking strangers for candy. I might have to throw a few extra candles in the jack-o-lanterns to keep up my Halloween spirit. At the very least I’ll be practicing on working the phrase, “a snowball’s chance in Halloween” into my lingual repertoire.

Still, these pictures make the strange harmony of snow and autumn foliage a difficult thing to deny.

A steaming tree...

Oct-snow-ber

October 27, 2011 — This evening I spent about an hour making screencaps of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Halloween episodes for tonight’s post, but that’s all been preempted. It’s snowing. Right now. Four days before Halloween.

We were all settled in to watch It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. My wife had made a batch of mulled port. All our spooky decorations were lit. It was going to be a great Halloween night.

Then Santa flew by overhead and made it snow. Suddenly it was the last scene from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Glowing orange was giving way to reflective white.

I realize there are places on this planet that are always knee-deep in snow by this time of year, but I consider those locales alternate universes. Fun science fiction, but not real. To me, snow in October is special. Heck, up until a few years ago, I thought it was impossible.

That crummy cardboard casket is a lot cooler with the snowy backdrop.

Then I learned it sometimes happens in New England. When it does, they call it snowliage. It’s a dumb name, but we humans are often not up to describing events that are gigantic. Heck, a second world-encompassing war elicited from us a mere “World War II” moniker, like it was some mere Sylvester Stallone movie sequel.

Man, the possibilities of a snowy October are endless. Witches riding snow shovels, making snow devils in the yard, snowmen with jack-o-lantern heads, ushankas as viable costume elements.

Still, I’m hoping the snow goes away by tomorrow. I need the moment to stay rare and unique.

But please return come December.

For my Christmas cards.

Poor Rotbert.

We're jerks and don't decorate the outside of our house,
so I had to take these last ones at a neighbor's house.

Archer-Gilligan Murder House

October 26, 2011 — I think the one thing that’ll get humanity into the Universe Hall of Fame is that we can take shameful and inhuman acts of depravity and turn them into light comedy farce for the enjoyment of all. That takes talent. And some other things, probably. Take for example the horrid Archer-Gilligan murders, in which a nursing care provider in the early 1900s went on a decade-long killing spree of her wards, inspiring the fun-for-all-ages Broadway play and movie adaptation, Arsenic and Old Lace.

Amy Archer-Gilligan had a knack for caring for the elderly and opened her own private nursing home in 1907 in a large brick house in the town of Windsor, CT, with her husband, James Archer (later on, we’ll redefine knack a bit). James died three years later, leaving behind a nice insurance settlement, and Amy remarried in 1913 to Michael Gilligan, who died three months after the ceremony, leaving her with enough money in the will to continue her nursing home business. So that’s kind of a happily ever after (later on, we’ll redefine happily ever after a bit). In hindsight, many believe that her hyphenated surname was less of a moniker and more of a hit list.

Meanwhile, over the course of 10 years from the time she opened the Archer Home for the Elderly and Infirm, some 60 people died in the house, most of them after 1910. Seems like a high turnover rate, but old people die, right?

Yup, especially if they are fed arsenic.

Eventually, the body count got too high to ignore, corpses were exhumed and tested, purchase records of toxic substances were examined, and Archer-Gilligan was indicted on five counts of poisoning, including that of her second husband.

Only one count stuck, a resident of the home, but many believe that the stats on the back of her official serial killer card might be grossly underestimated and that most of the 60 deaths were due to her arsenic-tipped scythe.

Some people say her motives were economical. Every empty bed in the house was the chance for a new customer, and money makes the retirement home go round. Of course, murder’s never purely economical. Especially serial murder. You also have to be absolutely demented (no redefining the term, there).

Archer-Gilligan was sent to prison, and then moved to a psychiatric hospital, where she died in 1962 in her late 80s. She never got herself a slick serial killer name, but her nickname in real life was “Sister Amy” due to her standing in the community, and that’s as good a serial killer name as anybody’s ever come up with.

Oh, and this is what she looked like.

Two major memorials still stand to her atrocities. The first is the murder house itself, which sits in the idyllic town of Windsor at 37 Prospect St. The large brick house, like the other large houses in the neighborhood, has since been turned into apartment units, and the way it looms there seems to be the architectural equivalent of whistling innocently, with nothing really to give a clue as to the gentle violence that happened under its roof.

A strip of discolored brick that runs the width of the façade of the house reveals the location of what was probably an overhang of some sort and one of the second-floor windows has been bricked solid in a permanent wink. But other than these two changes, most of the large house hasn’t changed. I assume fewer people die there these days, of course.

The other, more well-known testament to Sister Amy’s crimes is Arsenic and Old Lace. The story started out as a Broadway play in the early 40s, but gained even more attention as a Frank Capra movie released in 1944 (while Sister Amy was still alive) and starring Cary Grant, Peter Lorre, and a Boris Karloff look-a-like, a role Boris Karloff himself played for the stage version.

In the story, which takes place on a single Halloween night, the nursing home has been turned into a pseudo-boarding house, Windsor has been turned into Brooklyn, and Archer-Gilligan has been turned into two old aunts named Brewster with a reputation for being the nicest old spinsters that anybody would ever have the pleasure of being buried by.

In fact, they’re so dedicated to kindness that they end up putting old, lonely men out of their misery by lacing homemade elderberry wine with a mixture of arsenic, strychnine, and cyanide, all meted out with the care of an old family recipe and killing about a dozen men in the course of their polite reign of terror.

Actually, the entire Brewster family is a bit batty. Besides the two killers, there’s Teddy, who thinks that he’s Theodore Roosevelt, and Jonathan, a sadistic serial killer of the more classic sort who escapes from prison with Peter Lorre and holes up in his childhood home.

What happens next is a comedy of corpses, often over the top and just as often charming and witty, if stretched too long at two hours and centering on a miscast and mugging Cary Grant, the one saniac in the family.

Overall, the movie makes light of murder, mental illness, loneliness, and the Panama Canal. It’s a good time that’s made even better knowing it was based on the life of an actual serial killer, one whose house you can still trick-or-treat at.

Nobody will ever make a movie about your good deeds.