Tag: Halloween

Hallowe’en Rules: Revised and Revisited

I don’t know what it is about Hallowe’en that short circuits the short-term memory, but every year rational, reasonable people go nuts.  Maybe it’s the sugar high from eating too much of the kids’ candy before they get there or just the excitement of being allowed to play dress-up as an adult — without the “Eww! That’s weird” part.  Whatever!  Either way, we need to stop for a moment, take three deep breaths and remember the true spirit (pun intended) of Hallowe’en.  So let’s just revisit some of the guidelines of All Hallow’s Eve so we can all have a good time and not look like a bunch of nutbars.

First and foremost, Halloween is scary, not gory.  I cannot emphasize this enough.  If your costume comes with a warning label “Viewer discretion is advised” leave it on the shelf.

Ladies, a one-piece French-cut bathing suit is not a costume.  I don’t care what colour fishnet stockings you have or what kind of a tail you put on it.  Nor do furry ears, a black nose and magic marker whiskers turn you into a cat, dog, bunny, wolverine or dingo.   And that goes double for those little red rayon devil horns.

If Mother Nature and Happy Meals™ have made you the Fat Elvis, do not dress up as the skinny Elvis.  That just looks sorry.  Go for the sequins — not the leather.  Otherwise, you just look like a hyper-extended Italian handbag.

Don’t dress your kids in something you wouldn’t wear.  If, for example, you think you’d look stupid in a traffic cone Madonna bra, don’t let Jane Jr. wear one.

Couples!  The Nut ‘n’ Bolt or Plug ‘n’ Socket costumes are totally overdone — unless you’re gay — then you’re just providing way too much information.

Do not, under any circumstances, put a costume on your pet.  That is just mean.  Dogs, cats, ferrets, budgies and, smart as they are, even pot bellied pigs don’t know it’s Halloween, and they trust you.  Don’t make them look stupid.  (Where the hell is PETA when you need them?)

If you have to explain your costume more than twice, you either have simple friends or you don’t know what you’re doing.  Costumes should be recognizable. Remember, there’s a big difference between Chewbacca and Bach – nobody’s going to know which Bach you’re trying to be.

Cross-dressing is fine, as long as you’re not a transvestite.  If you are, that’s cheating.

I don’t care what Anne Rice or what’s-her-name from Twilight says, vampires are not gentle souls.  Nobody should cuddle up with a vampire and watch Dancing with the Stars.  If you do, you deserve everything you get.  Therefore, if you’re going to do vampires this Hallowe’en, put some heft into it: look the part, and a little Euro-trash accent wouldn’t hurt.

Always remember there is a noticeable difference between sexy and smutty.  If the button-down woman from Accounting comes to the party as Scheherazade — that’s sexy.  If Roger from sales shows up as a Genie with a magic lamp glued to his crotch, that’s just smut.

Speaking of sexy, Little Bo Peep, Little Red Riding Hood and Little Miss Muffet are not sluts – they’re storybook characters.  The operative word here is “little.”  There’s nothing wrong with risque on Hallowe’en, but there are plenty of grown up women to choose from, like Pocahontas, Maid Marian or that scary chick from The Avengers.

Building is better than buying.  Part of the buzz of Hallowe’en is putting together a costume.  Any fool with a credit card can be Snow White or the Wicked Witch, but it takes real imagination to go as the Apple.

Priests, nuns and the Pope are not costumes – they’re part of a religion.  Honestly, would you go to the Hallowe’en party as a Lutheran or the Archbishop of Canterbury?  If you’re going to make fun of somebody’s faith, pick on the Moslems: they bite back.

If kids still come to your door on Halloween, it is never acceptable to give out lame treats.  I don’t care how committed you are to a better society; one night a year, you can lighten up, for God’s sake!  For example, do not give out toothbrushes, dental floss or mouthwash.  Organic Free Range oatcakes are okay — if you just shut up about it.

Likewise, October 31st is the wrong time of the month to start lecturing people on the long and unfortunate history of witches and warlocks, or the minutiae of Wicca folklore.  You’ve got 364 other nights of the year to be a pain in the ass; choose one!

Finally, Halloween is not carte blanche to be a jerk.  Scaring the bejesus out of your adult friends is one thing, but pulling that crap on little kids isn’t very nice.  Remember, you’re the adult here.

So — if we all follow these few simple guidelines, we can all have a ghoulish good time.

Happy Halloween, everybody!

What Ever Happened to Spooky — Part II

In our relentless campaign to Care Bear each and every unpleasantness out of our society, in the last few decades, we have literally kicked the hell out of Hallowe’en.  We have turned witches into kindly grandmas, ghosts into benign (and oddly talkative) spirits, ghouls no longer eat the dead, and God only knows what happened to zombies.  (The Apocalypse may be upon us, but, people, those aren’t zombies!)  So, now, having glossed over all the best bits of October 31st, we’re left with nothing more than a gross-out Gorefest.  All Hallow’s Eve has become a do-it-yourself Slasher Movie, complete with severed arteries, pulsing internal organs and body parts hacked off or hanging open.  Unfortunately, these things aren’t scary.  They’re disgusting — an adolescent attempt at grotesque.  In our zeal to make sure everybody gets a rainbow, we missed the point, with disastrous results – again.  Hallowe’en was never about monsters; it’s was about embodying evil so we could cope with it.  So how did we go so wrong, so fast?  Vampires!  The minute we turned vampires into gentle, misunderstood creatures of the slightly cloudy afternoon, we were paving the road to hell with our good intentions.

Contrary to popular belief, Bram Stoker did not invent vampires in 1897; vampires have been around in folktales for centuries.  Stoker invented Dracula, who was a vampire.  He gave him all the bibs and bobs that we commonly associate with vampires — like bats and Transylvania — but Stoker got most of his ideas from another author and therein lies a tale.

A couple of centuries ago, in 1816 (the notorious Year Without Summer) a bunch of English somebodies were hanging out in a house in Geneva, bored out of their skulls.  It was too cold and rainy to go outside and play, so they were spending their days getting wasted on claret (red wine) and laudanum (a very legal 19th century opium concoction.)  They were, in no particular order, Lord Bryon; his personal physician, John Polidori; Percy Shelley; his fiancée, Mary Godwin; and a bunch of other revolving also-rans.  Given the big brains on these folks, I imagine their slightly inebriated conversations were something to behold!  Anyway, one afternoon/evening they got to talking about the nature of horror: what is evil and why are people both revolted and attracted to it?  It was decided that rather than just sitting around jawing about it, they would all write a horror story, check and compare, and see what they’d come up with.   The two big Kahunias, Bryon and Shelley, wrote perfectly acceptable, ultimately forgettable stories, but Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley) went all out and wrote Frankenstein.  Not to be outdone — except by word count — John Polidori wrote a long short story called The Vampyre.  Each tale was published soon after, and each was a huge popular success.  It turns out people are, indeed, both revolted and attracted by horror.

Pretty much everybody knows the Frankenstein story — if only in its various misinterpretations.  Actually, the horror of it was never simply the nameless monster, who, quite frankly, has a case against Victor Frankenstein, his creator.  The horror was the complexity of the creation of life itself and the perversion of self awareness made hideous without a governing soul.  Hard to translate into a 90 minute movie or a two-hour stage play, so most people just went with killer/monster and got it over with.

The Vampyre story, however, was a completely different beast.  Lord Ruthven is a member of the British aristocracy — a gentleman who travels in the best London society.  Yet he is not.  He is a vampyre, a man undead, refused by heaven and hell.  A soulless horror, he hunts from the shadows, preying on the innocent, drawing them to him and seducing them to satisfy his bloodlust.  He exists undetected and unwatched — a nameless evil that walks among us, haunting the night and quietly waiting for his chance to strike.

Now why would we turn that guy into a brooding teenager with bad hair?  That’s like turning Odin’s wolves into Paris Hilton’s Chihuahua.

A society without fear has let its ego run rampant.  It has become so self absorbed that even its imagination has been confined to the boundaries of its own existence.  Our greatest fear, as demonstrated by the scariest night of the year, is now bodily harm.  It’s not the corruption of the soul, nor the torment of a life squandered, nor the dark loneliness of our isolated existence.  It’s a cut, or a wound, or an injury (however serious) treatable by our science and technology.  We are turning our individual bits of time, a mere blink of the eye of eternity, into the pinnacle of all creation.  Unable to comprehend the vastness beyond our own lives, we have reduced its frightening power to a lunatic in a hockey mask.

From the beginning, Hallowe’en was the contemplation of the unrecognizable fear of what lay beyond the reach of our understanding.  We shaped it into a child’s game to treat its terror with nervous laughter.  But we need to keep its eerie foreboding to simply remind us that “there are more things in heaven and earth … than are dreamt of in [our] philosophy.”

What Ever Happened to Spooky — Part I

As I’ve said before, Hallowe’en is one of my favourite occasions.  However, I’m starting to get a little disappointed with the whole business.  For the last several years, I’ve been seeing an increasing number of costumes that are, at best, inappropriate and, at worst, downright disgusting.  I’m not talking about the tawdry sexual innuendo that populates Generation Y’s trick or treat choices.  Hallowe’en has always had sexual undertones; this current crowd is just so repressed they can’t control themselves.  Honestly, if you need a child’s holiday to justify unleashing your libido once a year – well, so be it — I don’t care.  No, it’s more than that, getting reflected in how we conduct ourselves on All Hallow’s Eve.

I’ve seen little kids walking around with great huge spikes in their heads, or bloody ax blades sprouting from their stomachs.  I’ve seen their older brothers and sisters as amputee Bo Peeps and their parents as various fairy tales gut-shot and/or eviscerated.  This isn’t right.  There’s nothing frightening about a bad night in the emergency ward.  Vital organs flung around promiscuously aren’t scary; they’re grotesque.  It’s like slowing down to rubber neck an accident: we’re not afraid; we’re curious.  So how did Hallowe’en go from spooky to sickening?  I blame the vampires.

Sometime in the last 30 or so years (oddly enough, the tenure of Generation Y) vampires became cozy.  They lost their edge.  They went from that sinister thing that moves in the night like a dry whisper to the guy next door, lighting his barbeque.  These days, vampires are no more dangerous than the neighbourhood Rottweiler, and quite a bit less likely to bite you.  They (vampires, not Rottweilers) hang out at sporting events and go to high school dances.  They host dinner parties and probably haul out the Trivial Pursuit™ on sunny Sunday afternoons when they can’t go outside and play.  They aren’t evil anymore.  Nobody’s scared of vampires.  In fact, there are battalions of young girls who think it would be cool to marry one.  No big deal, you say?  Crap!  If the evilest of all the evil things human beings have ever thought up in all of our history isn’t evil anymore, then what is?

By teaching an entire generation that vampires are just misunderstood creatures of the slightly cloudy day, our society has, once again, shot itself in the foot — and this time we used a silver bullet.  Like it or not, we need evil and vampires are the embodiment of it.  They haunt the night.  They creep into our dreams.  They coerce our thoughts to satisfy their lust.  They live off the very lifeblood of you, me, Winona Ryder and the kid who delivers the newspaper in the winter morning darkness.  They are supposed to scare the bejesus out of us.  That’s they’re job.

Humans are the dominant species on this planet.  We have no natural predators, so we had to invent some to keep our egos under control.  That’s why we have folktales.  They tell us there are still things that live beyond the reach of our intellectual fires — things that we neither know nor understand.  They are the shadows that shift in the darkness, the glint of momentary eyes and that faint sound of leaves, dry in their rustle.  Without them, we, bold in our knowledge and technology, become godlike in our conceit.

Our ancestors understood that humans are puny in the face of an overwhelming universe.  They honoured their gods and were afraid of their demons.  As we systematically Care Bear that universe we are losing our natural wariness.  If we fear nothing, it’s not because we are brave or there is nothing to fear; it’s because we are childlike in our arrogance.  Vampires and their ilk remind us that “there are more things in heaven and earth” than we, 21st century humans, can possibly understand.  We need them to keep us humble.

Monday: Where did vampires come from and why we still need spooky.