Big Night and Not so Big Night

And so finally it arrived.  Now we had planned for a big Halloween bonfire, as is our tradition, for Saturday the 29th...but it rained on Friday night and Saturday morning and everything was wet and muddy.  So we had to postpone it.
Halloween night we decided to do something a little different.  Rather than sit at home, watching horror movies and getting maybe 6 trick or treaters the entire evening, we headed over the Frau Punkinstein's parents' house to hand out candy and scare children witless.

Here is Frau Punkinstein prior to leaving Punkinhaus.  She is a punk kitty.

Here I am, haunting her parents' house in my modified bedsheet ghost costume.  I've wanted to do a ghost for some time, but I am afraid that I am allergic to make-up and a good ghost is hard to do, I think.  I wanted a basic bedsheet ghost but it needed some more punch, so I procured this "Skull the Unexpected" mask from a Halloween store and these nifty super long boney gloves.  Apparently I scared some kids.  This is good, they need that in their young lives (see Hauntings Scarred Me for Life, previously posted on this blog for details why).

The pair of us ham it up.

The front lawn, wet with rain.  The Jack O'Lanterns glow as the rain falls past Frau's camera.  You can tell it was Frau Punkinstein that took the picture, as it is in focus, looks clear and is lit properly.  We've all seen my efforts in this arena.  The night was not yet over, as after returning home we put in Trick r Treat and spent an evening with my hero (and yours, I'm sure) Sam.

Enjoy this small, well-shot video clip of Frau Punkinstein approaching the front porch, POV.
It's still before midnight and officially this goes on until dawn, so please, for your own sake...keep your pumpkins lit.

Happy Halloween

Sympathetic Monsters Need Not Apply

There is something about a slasher film that makes it special.  I name that something as the lack of a sympathetic villain.

Older horror movies, or Monster Movies, if you prefer, seemed to favor a sympathetic monster as the villain.  The thing that eventually tied all the Universal Frankenstein pictures together was the Monster, not the creator.  It did not matter if the actor in the makeup was not the same, it was the Frankenstein Monster that people came to see.  The Gillman from The Creature From the Black Lagoon made a total of 3 films, all tied together by the Creature (Gillman) because audiences could identify with the monster.  Film monsters are often either sympathetic, in the case of Chaney's Wolf Man or Karloff's Frankenstein Monster or fulfill some fantastic desire, such as vampires seem to have become since the Victorians made them sexy.  In fact this very point is put forth in the film Nightbreed by the character Rachel, explaining to Lori that humans seek to destroy the Breed, but we really envy them as when we dream we dream of flying, shapeshifting, or living forever.  Sympathetic monsters, Mr. Barker you did not invent them, but you certainly did a great job of making them simultaneously sympathetic and badass.

Nightbreed is, in fact, a good example of my first point concerning slasher films.  As part of his grand point, Mr. Barker's villain in Nightbreed, aside from the prejudice of humanity, which is in no way subtly used, is the psychotic psychiatrist Decker.

Seriously, how does he see?  See how scary that shit is?  It's like the mask sees 'for him'...

SHUDDER
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, zilch, zip, nada, 0.00%, S.F.A. sympathetic about Dr. Phillip Decker.  He kills, he blames others, he is driven by sick needs we are not supposed to admire, understand or accept.
That's great.  Truly.
The slasher genre features psycho killers, which are by their very natures not sympathetic.  By employing such monsters we are faced with truly terrifying beings.  Once, perhaps, that would have been the role of demons or things from beyond space that man was not meant to know, but since the late 1970s it has been the slasher-killer who fulfills that role.  What makes them so scary?

They have no conscience, no feelings of concern or remorse and a moral compass that, if not missing, is not capable of pointing north.  We may be able to fathom, to some degree or another, the motivations of 'normal' or 'classic' monsters, but the motivations of the sociopathic madman are (or should be) a mystery to us.  Dracula seeks blood to prolong his life, the Wolf Man is driven to kill by his bestial nature, the Mummy and the Gillman seek love, but what does the slasher seek?  To kill, pure and simple.  Some screenwriters and directors have tried to provide plausible motivations for this lust for killing, such as revenge, unrequited love, or mental handicap (not the most popular of reasons due to its decidedly non-p.c. nature).  Sometimes the explanation is just a simple, "He's crazy" and that's that.  Whatever the reason, a good slasher villain is not a sympathetic monster who can win our hearts and make us feel for them.  A good slasher villain inspires in us fear, or awe, or occasionally admiration for their talents (that is just sick), but never sympathy.  I have seen portrayals of slashers that seem sympathetic, such as a film where the killer was wronged in the past and has come to reestablish order in the universe by punishing those who tormented him in the past, but those are not so much sympathetic monsters as they are justified escapist monsters.  What differentiates the avenging slasher from the sympathetic monster is that the slasher does not apologize for what he is.
Ah, the key to the lock.  Look at these two and note the difference: The one on the left does not apologize for his evil or monstrosity, the one on the right is tortured by it.

I keep this picture in my wallet

This is not a confession of admiration, mind you.  When I watch the Carpenter classic Halloween I am not rooting for Mikey Myers in his shocking white Shatner mask.  I am rooting for Dr. Sam Loomis, with his rumpled brown suit and raincoat, sporting a hand cannon and nearly raving to the authorities about "the blackest eyes...the Devil's eyes".  I don't watch Friday the 13th films and root for Jason...wait, I tell a lie, depending on the film I don't root for Jason.  Sometimes those annoying kids NEED to die.

I defy you to watch this film and not want to kill every one of these annoying gits

Since the villain is the franchise in a slasher series it is clear that the fans are tuning in to see the killer at work.  Fans compete over which villain is better and many a single-shot, throwaway villain has come and gone, leaving a very few stars for lack of a better word.  Eventually the fans hunger for information on these villain-heroes of the horror world and back stories are developed, which always threatens to ruin the best part of the villain: his total lack of sympathy.  If films are meant to be cathartic escapist fantasy, the slasher film allows us to either feel the thrill of the final girl as she runs for her life, avoiding death time and again to finally defeat the slasher killer or watch him fall to his own evil until such time as a sequel can bring him back to kill again, or it allows us to take perverse delight in vicariously experiencing the work of the killer.  Lest this seem unhealthy, I should also point out that many of the victims are thoroughly unlikable people with bad habits who probably deserve their grisly fates.
I mean, umm...look, a singing crustacean!

Unda da sea, unda da sea, I'm a distraction, so you don't notice, de Punk is kra-zee.

For anyone who enjoys the gruesome fun of old pre-code horror comics or The Cryptkeeper, the slasher film is a natural fit.  People do stupid things, often unsavory people at that, and meet a (un)timely death at the hands of a visceral killing machine.  It's karmic and it requires little to no explanation.  It's better when the killer doesn't explain his actions, letting them do the talking.  I must stress, however, that the killer is not some righteous tool of parental disapproval seeking to destroy the unrighteous.  As has been stated time and again, the stoned, drunk, INATTENTIVE youth are killed in flagrante delicto precisely because they are inattentive and thus easily caught and dispatched.  The attentive, skilled, or aware character has an improved chance of survival.  At least that is the way it used to be when a final girl really was a final girl and had the scars to prove it.

Just a few of the tortured women who made it all possible for the modern survivors to keep their hair and lipstick perfect while being chased by a psycho killer.  Sisters, we will never forget you.

Because the slasher does not question his motives, actions or even reveal his reasons, he is a true monster, unapologetic, unforgiving, unforgiven and unimpressed by your psychology or your need for an explanation for his actions.  Begging a slasher for mercy is like begging the shark from Jaws for mercy; he just doesn't understand the concept.  This is not so say that the sympathetic or classic monsters are not good too, because they are, but there is something refreshing about not having to question a character's motivations.  Slashers kill, that's what they do.  It is the raison d'etre of the slasher and the slasher film and that is what makes it different from the supernatural and classic monsters.
Monsters sans sympathy...until next time, keep your pumpkins lit.

I have had enough of the crazy zombie bastards

Are zombies the new vampires?
Is so, then f%*# 'em.  With a chainsaw.  Up a tree. Backwards.

I used to like zombie movies, zombie comics, and zombie games quite a bit.  Zombies were the ultimate monster to me because you could destroy them with absolutely NO remorse.  At all.  Hell, it might even be better because they are so disgusting.
Now with your free-willed, intelligent monsters you always run the risk of them talking you to death.  Vampires always want to justify their existence and shite.
Sod 'em all.  I got a stake that needs justifying, mate.

But zombies were different.  They hobbled around and moaned a bit and you could enjoy shooting them and chopping them up and just, you know, destroying them with absolute moral conviction in the rightness of your cause.  All was right with the world.

But then the bastards became POPULAR.  I mean, prom queen popular.  Suddenly everybody with a half-assed zombie book is getting a publishing deal and just as suddenly everybody is a bloody zombie expert.

Oh, my weapon of choice?  I'd use a basket hilt backsword, it has wonderful chopping action and protects your hand.

Oh that's just foolish, you'd need a smoother blade to prevent it getting stuck in bone.

Hmmmm.

Piss off.
Zombies are now getting the "vampire treatment" which means that "scholars" are trying to make them some ancient concept.  So when you watch the zombie documentaries you see the ancient monsters that the "scholars" were calling vampires five years ago, but now they are proto-zombies.  Well, they are not.  A draugr is a draugr.  Like how a camel is not a ship, no matter how many metaphors you apply to it.

What I really hate.  I mean HATE with the very marrow that runs through my non-zombie bones and produces the non-zombie blood cells that power my non-zombie body is this whole zombie virus fad.  Are we that scientifically inept?  Are we that unwilling to admit our desire for a magical world that we would talk about zombies as a virus?  The whole bit with the eating people and the viruses and the shambling and all...it is so done.

Now Return of the Living Dead...fast moving, indestructible zombies fighting punks.  What a film.  A perfect film for the 80s.  Even better is that the only way to become a living dead is to be exposed to the 245 Trioxin.  None of this, "Oh, I've been bitten don't let me become one...of...those..........THINGS!".  Slap her.  Yes, I know she's a he, but slap it anyway.  Histrionic loony.
See, I've watched Night of the Living Dead about 16.4 million times and nothing, and I mean, NOTHING in the movie says or even suggests that a zombie bite creates another zombie.  All the recently deceased, UNBURIED (very important point that) dead came back to life.  That little girl in the basement was going to come back because all the dead were coming back, the bite was just part of the wounds that killed her.  Johnny came back to attack at the end and his death was due to head trauma.  HEAD TRAUMA.
So it was really Dawn of the Dead and other films that started this mess.
But now everyone thinks they know everything about zombies, and that's bollocks.  Go watch Return of the Living Dead and tell me again how much you know about zombies.

Here is a picture of a skeletal undead pirate because that is not a zombie but that is BADASS personified.

Keep your pumpkins lit.

ZOMBIES ATE MY NEIGHBORS!

I've sort of done this one before.  A few years back, in another blog, I spoke of my love for this astoundingly wonderful game.
I'm gonna do it again.

THIS image, the box cover of the Genesis edition is WHY I BOUGHT THE GAME.  Is that not the sweetest cover?  It says everything you need to know.  This game comes with everything but tongue-in-cheek, you supply that, mate.

First the official stuff- Zombies Ate My Neighbors is a 3rd person, top-down, run-and-gun style video game released in 1993 by Konami.  It was developed by LucasArts.  The game was pre-ESRB and as a result was censored in Europe and in the SNES version because Nintendo has no problem whatsoever with human bondage by reptiles, abuse of fungi, or allowing elves to smash up people's crockery and shrubs to steal their jewels, but for the love of Gort don't have any of that filthy BLOOD, it sends a bad message.

Now the personal stuff- I love this game.  This game is one of those things that manages to hit on several subjects I like, including campy, Z-Grade, drive-in double feature style monster movies.  There is a definite vibe going on that is inspired by sci-fi, horror and monster movies and comics from the 50s through the 80s.

These Chainsaw Guys are pretty tough.  I usually just freeze them and run because I have seen enough movies to know you don't get into a melee with the crazy

There is an example of an 80's moment.  Hockey masked chainsaw killer.  They first appear in a level titled "Chainsaw Hedgemaze Mayhem".  Retro level titling is one of the many great things about the game.  Let's list a few:
1. The Titles.  The levels are titled and themed like classic horror movies with such classics as "Evening of the Undead" (that's the first level), "Chainsaw Hedgemaze Mayhem", "Invasion of the Snakeoids" and the ever popular "Mars Needs Cheerleaders".  When the game is called "Zombies Ate My Neighbors" you should expect no less from the levels.
2. The Monsters.  Despite the name of the game there are so many more monsters than simple zombies with which to deal, although there are plenty of those as well.  The monsters are clearly inspired by sci-fi and monster movies and include zombies, werewolves, blobs, plants/pods, pod people (clones of the players), chainsaw killers, killer dolls, giant ants, fishmen, mummies, heck, even martians and football players.  Some monsters are easily dispatched by specific weapons while being resistant to others, which adds to the fun/difficulty of the game.
3. The weapons.  Any game that is called 'run and gun' by a reviewer must, by necessity, have some sort of weapons, right?  Of course, and ZAMN has plenty.  The default weapon your character has is a water gun, in keeping with the general zany theme of the game, but alternate weapons are found readily and include fire extinguishers (good for killing blobs or freezing other foes to temporarily stop them in their tracks), silverware (good for werewolves), tomatoes (Martians hate these for some reason), soda cans (shake and chuck like a grenade), a bazooka, a weed whacker and a few more.  Each weapon has its own damage, special features and such (bazookas open doors and breakable walls) and come in limited supplies.
4. The Music.  From the creepy tones playing at the opening screen

to the sing-song taunting melody playing while running from killer dolls, the music is a simple but enjoyable aspect of the game.
5. The Story.  A simple story, a little ditty, if you will, about Zeke and Julie.

3-D glasses?  Yep, that's all part of Zeke's charm.  Julie, on the other hand, doesn't quite look like a youth, does she?  Kinda looks like a 40 year old woman who is trying DESPERATELY to look like a high school girl.   Kinda looks like Peg Bundy now that I look at it closer.  

Yes, that's them, right up there, in all their 16-bit glory.  These guys are on a quest to save their neighbors, find the villain, Dr. Tongue, and put an end to all this monster business.  Actually, I get the distinct impression that Zeke wouldn't care one way or another if they stopped all this monster business.  He looks like the kind of guy that not only has a plan for the zombie apocalypse, but is LOOKING FORWARD TO IT.  Or maybe I'm projecting.  Okay, I'm talking about me now, I admit it.
6. The Fun/Challenge.  ZAMN was released in 1993, back when video games were actually challenging.  Modern games are often difficult, which is not to say they are challenging.  Back in the 8-bit era the NES games were often hard because they were hard to play.  I don't mean that they were challenging or anything, I mean that they were just bloody hard.  A good example of this was Zanac, a 1986 game where the player pilots a spaceship against a never ending wave of enemy fighters.  The game touted an artificial intelligence that adjusted the game's enemy patterns and output based upon the players tactics and skill.  Or, if you prefer, the better you played the harder the game became.  This was a common tactic in the old days, along with pixel abuse (what, I have to stand just a R.C.H. off the edge of the platform in order to make the jump?) and puzzle solutions no living person would ever think to try (equip what and kneel where again?).  By comparison modern games often have so many control options and buttons that not only do they have a 'tutorial' level, but often provide a perpetual tutorial to remind the player how to play whenever a "special" move is needed.  This is difficulty without challenge.  Difficulty with challenge is trying to complete a game with only 2-4 damn buttons or by typing in sentences of no more than 4 sodding words.  ZAMN has a simple control scheme, a simple mechanic, and a manic pace.  All of this equates to a challenging, fun, bloody, good time.

Peg Bundy, a strange meteorite, deadly plants and a hapless soldier...just some of the fun you can have in ZAMN

Summing Up: You have many choices for your gaming pleasure during Halloween if you are trying to play a theme-game.  You could play any of the Resident Evil games, or maybe fire up an emulator and play Atari's Haunted House (now updated for the Wii), or you could play one of the many Castlevania games on the market.  That doesn't even begin to the scratch the surface of the horror and monster games that make a good Halloween season gaming choice.  I recommend ZAMN if you have a Sega Genesis lying about and the means to acquire it.  If you have a Wii you could download it on your virtual console, but I am afraid that the Wii edition is the compromised (read censored) SNES version of the game.  Still a good game, but it disappoints me so to think that something as innocent and fun as a Genesis B-Movie game would be censored and disappoints me even more that the Wii edition couldn't be given an "uncut" upgrade in this more enlightened day and age.
Zombies Ate My Neighbors a classic game that appeals to me on many, many levels.  An action adventure game that manages to be action packed and the MST3K of video games at the same time.  Ed Wood would be proud.
I give it:

That's right baby, 4 Eds and a DIO!

Out of a possible 4 Ed Woods.

Until next time, keep your water guns full and your pumpkins lit.

Shamelessly cross-promoting

http://rikensteinslab.blogspot.com/2011/06/dodge-and-kal-go-to-spookshow-pt-1.html

Halloween Iconography: the Vampire

DISCLAIMER: Unfortunately this post may be marred by a few puns.  This is unavoidable given elements of both my speech and writing patterns.  In order to avoid having to stop and say "Pardon the pun" or "pun intended" all the time, let's just take it as red, yeah?  For my part I promise not to say anything really tacky like "Fangs for reading" or "Fang-tastic!"  That would most likely make me, and you, vomit in our own mouths.
 
I suppose I had to do this eventually, as much as it pains me to do so.
I hate vampires.  I really do.  I want to not hate vampires, but the more I try not to do the more I do.  I think the problem isn't the concept of vampires so much as it is the annoying vampire fans that make me hate the vampires.  No matter how much I hate vampires, however, they are a part of the Halloween Monster Set, so I have to give them their due.
If I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do it right, by golly.
Vampires are undead monsters that drink the blood of the living.  Probably.  See, it is really hard to say just what a vampire is anymore.  It is hard to say what one is historically, since so much scholarship is bogged down by pet theories and attempts to make something far older and more developed than it ever was.
We can say that blood drinking demonic entities of some form or another have existed since before written history.  We can also say that such are not vampires.  Much like the Chinese Hopping Ghost is not a vampire or a zombie, but gets described as such, it is far too easy to equate a cultural bogeyman from one culture with the cultural bogeyman of some other culture on the flimsiest of evidence.  I mean, mosquitoes drink blood, we don't call them vampires.
I've digressed.
Okay, let's start again...
The vampire is a popular horror monster running the gamut from extremely ugly monster to inhumanly sexy and attractive seductress of death, and has a veritable lunchbox of powers ranging from simple enhanced strength and immortality to the full Superman set with shapeshifting, mesmerism, flight, and maybe laser eye-beams.  The most commonly accepted set of vampire characteristics are as follows:
1. Immortal
2. Mind-control
3. Super fast
4. Super strong
5. Drinks blood
6. Burns up in sunlight
7. Aversion to holy icons
Any given work of fiction will, invariably, find a way to make its vampires "unique".  This is quite alright really as vampire fiction has been making the monster "unique" since it first became a viable commercial possibility.  Varney the Vampire had different powers than Dracula.  Both V and D were fully capable of walking in the sunlight, I should point out.  Vampires are clearly Halloween icons because they are spooky.  They are part of the undead crowd and as Halloween is about the time when the worlds conjoin and the dead walk among the living, it seems natural to associate vampires with the event.  When we think of a classic Halloween vampire, especially as a marketing ploy, we are probably thinking of Dracula as portrayed by Bela Lugosi.

Awww, so cute, where's my special little stake?

Opera cloak, widow's peak, maybe some fangs...it is an iconic bit of visual shorthand, easily recognized when slapped on a package or worn as a costume.

Sure as hell looks like a Draclia to me!

A LITTLE HISTORY
Prior to John Polidori's "The Vampyre" in 1819, vampires were peasants.  There, I've said it, so all you Queen of Diggity Damned guys can fume a bit, but you will have to accept it.  This aristocratic vampire bullshit is just that, bullshit.  Vampirism was a condition restricted to the poor classes.  This was because vampirism arose from conditions of disease, poor health and improper burial practices.  The wealthy (nobles, for example) did not suffer from these problems.  Now the Wikipedia will tell you that notions of creatures that existed by feeding off of life energies, such as blood, are beyond ancient, but dammit we have to draw a line somewhere in making these definitions.  Here is my line: if a culture has yet to conceive of an afterlife then it cannot have undead and just using demonic spirits in general is too broad.  Got it?  Good.
So as I have noted, vampires come from the poor, rural classes.  This is important to note.  Cities were known for poor sanitation and packed living conditions.  A disease or plague would spread easily through the poorly ventilated streets.  People did not immediately cry "Upir!" when someone died.  In the rural areas where an entire village was serviced by a single churchyard and death (and subsequent burial) was far more personal, we find reports of vampires.  It seems only logical if we consider that living in an urban area you are not likely to be allowed to dig up the graves of the deceased to check for signs of undeath.  In a small community not only were such practices suffered to occur, they were positively indulged.  A typical comparison case would work as follows:

URBAN CASE

An individual, say a father, dies.  His body is turned over to a mortician if the family is moderately middle class, or kept at the home if they are poor.  For burial it must be taken to a churchyard or a graveyard if the city is large enough.  If very poor the corpse will be put in a pauper's grave or communal grave, left uncovered and dusted with quicklime (to speed up decomposition of the soft tissues) until the grave is filled.  It was common practice to unearth graves after several years (7 is a good number), remove the bones, clean them and place them in ossuaries.  Ground space recycling, man were our ancestors green or what?  If a close family member then fell ill suspicion fell not upon the deceased father, but rather on crap living conditions.  Things are tough all over, Osrick.  Since going to the public cemetery to exhume the corpse was not a realistic possibility, vampires just weren't on the menu of explanations for the "sudden" sickness of the family members.

RURAL CASE      

An individual, say a father, dies.  His family cleans the body, sews a burial shroud, the church sexton (if it has one) digs a grave.  After the wake and visitations the body is interred.  Shortly thereafter the family members become sick.  Clearly the spirit of the dead father has come to haunt the living, as no one else in the village is sick.  Despite the fresher air and cleaner living conditions the family is getting sick and wasting away.  Could it be a lack of knowledge about communicable diseases?  Well, to be sure we should dig up the father's corpse and check to see if it is decomposing properly.  Of course we aren't experts on decomposition, so when the village priest agrees to the exhumation and we publicly dig up the corpse of the father and find him uncorrupted (not likely, but again we are not experts) and swollen with blood, his nails and hair having grown!  A strigoi!  An upir!  A vampire!  Now that we have seen this "evidence" we need look no further for our explanations and can begin the process of ridding our village of the threat.

If we lived in an urban area we'd not have vampire problems.  We'd have sanitation, employment, scurvy and rickets problems, but not vampire problems.  We'd also more easily accept the passing of someone as we would be moving farther and farther away from the intimate rural lifestyle.  Despite these ignoble origins, vampires captured the imaginations of the inhabitants of the English speaking world, as evidenced by the publication of Polidori's story, the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire, and Stoker's Dracula.  Although vampire stories are rarely set at Halloween, or exclusively so, they are monsters and therefore  part of the whole Halloween package.  When we look at Halloween costumes we see a wide array of choices, including the cheap (in quality, price or both), the classic and the popular.  The popular costumes each year will reflect a certain amount of media influence.  That is to say that top grossing movies that can produce costumes (like Pirates of the Caribbean or Twilight) will and those will be popular in the Halloween following their debut (Iron Men and Spider-Men and Hulks abound, and a Harry Potter or Voldemort is never far behind).  The classics include ghosts, Frankenstein's monsters, werewolves and "Dracula's".  Vampires are a perennial favorite and come in many varieties and the influences of pop culture will always be present.  As such they can look like any of the examples below:

Number 3 turn to the right please and read the card.  "Bitch better have my money, yo."  Thank you number 3, back in  line.

See how they are so varied but all still vampires?  What is really required for a vampire?
Fangs?  Optional actually.
Undead?  Pretty much, but the idea of "living vampires" exists in Slavic peoples.
Sleep in a coffin?  See "Undead" above.
Turn into bats? Optional.
Drink blood?  Basically, yeah, but it doesn't have to be drinking blood.
Burn up in the sunlight?  Not originally, not in Dracula even, but post-Dracula yes, usually.
I could keep going, but the gist of it is that there are many accepted vampire traits and you can use any of them or discard them as you like.  With so much variation it is no wonder that modern "scholars" feel justified in "tracing" the "origin" of the vampire back to Ancient Egypt and before, even though such evidence either does not exist or has been "found" by liberal research practices.  The name is very young, probably of Slavic origin, maybe through Greek, and the concept is not much older.  Certainly demons, some that drink blood, others that destroy life, have existed for as long as man has conceived of death, but this does not make them vampires.
The popularity of vampires is such that they have made the transition from monster to hero, in a manner of speaking.  There are superhero vampires, sexy vampires and morally ambiguous vampire protagonists who are iconoclastic individualists who nevertheless manage to win over the hearts of otherwise normal but poetically justified social outcasts.  We could write a book, nay volumes about bloody vampires, but I've only so much space or interest personally, so let's wrap up by saying that vampires are as much a part of the modern Halloween setting as Jack O Lanterns, witches, bedsheet ghosts and trick 'r treating.  Whether they are silly fun:

Teenage fantasy whiner:

Or classic Lugosi

They remain a popular image in art, decorations and costumes for the Halloween season.  Sometimes it's cheapass (a 'costume' from the drug store consisting of a plastic Dracula medallion and some fake blood) and other times it is elaborate and expensive made of crushed velvet and leather, but no matter what, the vampire has been a popular choice since at least the mid 20th century and will likely remain so for a long time to come.


There, that wasn't so hard, now was it.  Bloody vampires.

Until next time, keep those pumpkins lit...and some garlic handy as well.


        

October 1987

I was staying with Aldo that weekend, my parents gone on some trip that did not require my presence.  The Creels were close friends of my family.  I had spent two years of my life, every afternoon on school days, with them.  Mrs. Creel was like a second mother to me, and Aldo was that older brother figure.  Only six months separated our birthdays, but Aldo was a year ahead of me in school.  At turns he was my protector and my tormenter. 

On this occasion there was a fair being held in an open field a few miles from Aldo’s house.  As fairs go it was small; a few rides, some games of chance and a snack cart selling sausages, cotton candy and corn dogs made up the meager offerings.  It was our habit to take walks in the afternoon.  We’d often walk to a local convenience store for a soda and candy; a walk of some 8 miles round trip.  It was exercise of a sort, but more importantly it was a time to be away from the house.  Regardless what snacks were at hand in the house, the walk was made under the pretext that we needed Raisenettes. 

With nothing worth watching on television and the restlessness of very early teens Aldo decided we should walk to the fair.  As usual, I agreed.  We donned light jackets, as the October air was crisp.  Alabama weather is strange to those from more temperate states.  The summers are sweltering and humid.  Sweating does little to cool the body in the muggy Alabama summer.  Winters are cold and wet with snow coming in late February if it comes at all.  Mostly it rains in the winter.  It rains in the summer as well.  In Alabama, spring is often missed by the inhabitants; the climate seeming to blend from the cold, wet weather of winter into the hot, humid haze of summer.  Autumn is the best season.  The temperature is hot in the early months during the day and gradually turns into a pleasant coolness just before winter.  Autumn nights are the most magical time in the state.  An abundance of trees changing colors before giving up their last for the winter season gives the day a motley hue, but the nights have a power all their own.  The scent is the key.  Early autumn nights have a special scent that tells the people that the heat wave will break soon.  Soon air conditioners will be turned off for the rest of the year and windows will be thrown open to take full advantage of the cooling breezes.  There is a peculiar silence in the air on autumn nights.  The chirping of crickets, the buzzing of mosquitoes, all the myriad sounds of insect life die away to be replaced by the rustle of squirrels in the trees and across the leaf strewn ground.  As the season moves on into its height one can smell the chill in the air.  A person can sit quietly upon the back porch and enjoy the sunset, and with it comes that old familiar scent.  It is death.  It is decay.  The scent of a million leaves slowly dying mixed with the wood smoke from campfires and outdoor grills.  It is the most wonderful scent in the world and it belongs to the autumn nights of Alabama.

Out into that crisp October night we strode.  Halloween was only two weeks away and the feeling of it saturated the air.  There must be some primitive, instinctive knowledge that comes to the fore of our brains around that time.  Perhaps our instincts, those primal urges and truths we have civilized out of the species, still live deep within us.  At that time of year our human minds open to the oldest thoughts and feelings, triggered by those smells of the cold and decay, reminded by the sounds of the lesser creatures preparing themselves for the coming winter by hording food and stocking dens.  Whatever the cause, I found myself a little more introspective at that time of the season and perhaps a touch more superstitious.  So we walked and talked and laughed as young men do.  Telling one another lies meant to amuse and impress and speaking lightly of deeply held hopes and desires we walked the two miles to the temporary fair grounds.  Aldo was the more practical of us two, always instructing me when he thought I had missed the point or purpose of some esoteric concept.  I was the dreamer, always talking of what could be and what should be, never about what was.  In that way we were a good team, I suppose.  Aldo was decent at drawing, but lacked the soul of the artist.  I was the artist who never had time to practice the skills.  Aldo wanted to be a soldier.  He fancied a life in the Army or Air Force with the grand goal of sergeant.  Not for me.  I wanted a life of adventure and excitement, always hoping against all rationality that monsters and ghosts were real.  Not that I would know what to do if I actually saw one.  Like all young boys I was brave amongst my peers and a coward when alone.  Aldo talked and I listened.  He was always so serious, or so it seemed to me then.  He thought that I was not serious enough, citing my lack of common sense as inferior to his own superb command of conventional wisdom.  I don’t know if it was true, my lack of common sense, I assumed it was true as most people told me that I lacked that most important quality.  Yet I think it served me well, that lack.  It is not good to find yourself so early in life.  It leads to frustration at midlife, when our ancestors would be dying of old age.  In this age of longevity we need to be younger longer to guard against a midlife burnout at the too young age of 40. 

So we walked and talked and smelled the night air with its promises of Jack O Lanterns and ghouls, candy and toilet papered trees, leaf-strewn yards and mysticism.  Past houses lit with families at dinner and houses dark and alone we trudged.  Much of our path was lit by the comforting street lamps of a small town still a decade away from a McDonald’s or Wal-Mart, and only two decades removed from segregation and violence darker than any ghost or monster my child’s mind could conjure.  Shortly we found ourselves within hearing distance to the fair.  The music promised fun and excitement.  The smell of popcorn, sugar, pepper and onions caused my mouth to water and I quickened my pace.  Within minutes the lights of the miniature carnival could be seen against the treetops urging us onward until the fair itself was in sight.  Upon arrival we found a microcosm of a fair, but it was still a thrill for an October Saturday night when you were too young to drive.

I remember the rides being smaller than the usual, but we rode them anyway.  The food was as good as could be, though.  Popcorn and cotton candy eaten out of doors while walking around the small attraction somehow tasted better than it would have at home.  Standing at that fair ground I was reminded of my earliest memories of the Alabama State Fair.  In those bygone days the carnival sideshow existed and was a major attraction.  The horrible PC age would come to destroy that particular piece of Americana while I was still a youth and too young to realize what was being taken from me.  I had seen the sideshows when I visited my first State Fair at the tender age of 6.  My stepfather and mother took me to the fair and as was typical of my stepfather, no experience was to be missed.  A lesson I would not come to appreciate until I was a grown man was instilled into my subconscious at that young age: life is the sum of one’s experiences, one should never pass up an opportunity to experience new and wonderful things.  Only a child, I knew nothing about the nature of carnival.  I knew nothing of the deep-seated need that normal humanity has to see the bizarre and unnatural only to justify its own mediocre existence.  I was a babe in the woods on that night, seeing for the first time the giant Mexican rodent, the world’s smallest woman, the lizard boy, and countless other sights that have gone from the sanitized, prozac riddled landscape of an America I never made.  I would visit fairs many times as I grew, sometimes with Aldo in tow.  We had a hobby of visiting spookhouses on Halloween that we extended to the fairground spookhouses when possible.  Always Aldo’s idea, I should add.  No state or local fair I would visit after my first would ever again have the sideshows full of grotesque and wonderful freaks.  Naturally this small fair visiting my town for a week had no such sideshows, but it evoked the memories all the same.  I felt happy there, and that was a feeling I rarely felt in my life. 

We were barely adolescents and still some years from our requisite teen angst, but I can say that I was already in the throws of that hormonal malady even then.  Perhaps all people feel at some time that they need to find their niche.  I had moved to this town at the end of my third grade year and immediately found a world alien to me.  I was the outsider and it did not suit me.  Yet I had no desire to be like my fellows, only accepted by them.  I found neither.  It was strange at the time, but it looks different to me now.  Memory is a dynamic thing; it changes over time.  Our adult understanding, colored by our life’s experiences, realizes our memories in ways that we could not understand when the events occurred.  Looking back I remember that at that fair, on a chilly October night full of the scent of a world dying for the winter, the sounds of the fair and the wind in the trees, I felt as though I had a place in the world.  People I knew from school, people I knew to hold an intense dislike for me, walked past me and had no harsh words.  It seemed as though the fair allowed us all to forget our roles, to lose our sense of pecking orders and pack mentalities and just be individuals interacting.  The carnival, the spirit of abandon and sin, the traveling show that has no home and no place inside society, the tiny city of freaks and tramps that sets up on the outskirts of civilization felt like my place.  I know it is not real.  I know that the carnival is a show from the moment you pay your admission and enter the grounds.  Every person in the carnival is there to cater to your whims and petty desires, taking your money and leaving you feeling as though you wanted them to do so.  The multicolored spun sugar that is overpriced and yet seems a bargain to the reveler, the popped corn and hot dogs that could be purchased from the grocer for a fraction of the cost, all of the elements of the fair seem magical and worth the expense; and we paid the price time and again until we were exhausted and penniless.  Then we took a last walk around the grounds, soaking up the sights, the smells, the noise, and the garish glow of the lights decorating rides, games, and snack carts.  When we had nothing left to do or spend we headed for home. 

The walk home was so different from the journey to the fair.  It was sad.  There were no more expectations and nothing to look forward to at home.  We walked slower on the return trip, reminiscing all the while about events that had only just taken place.  Back at Aldo’s house there was little to do of interest.  Aldo was always calm and somewhat stoic.  I was hyperactive.  How many times I had tried to drag him into some amusement I couldn’t say.  He was never one for games and although he had always had plenty of toys, most of his interests were solitary, being model cars and solo video games.  There was a little known Vincent Price horror spoof on the television and I convinced him to watch that.  Although I cannot remember the name of the film or even the basic plot, I remember that it was another thing that my world has lost: the seasonal programming.  In those days you could always find a scary movie on the television on Friday and Saturday nights, more so during the Halloween season.  The Creels didn’t decorate much for Halloween until Aldo became inspired during his high school years.  This year marked the last time we would Trick or Treat, and we were probably too old for it even then.  But I didn’t know that at that time.  What I knew was that it was autumn and I had been to a place where I felt I belonged.  What I knew was that the movie on television made me happy and that I liked this season very much.  Christmas had been lost to me when I’d learned there was no Santa Claus (and obviously the Easter Bunny didn’t stand a chance after that), but Halloween was still mine.  Now more than ever Halloween was mine.  I think the seeds were sown that night that created a life long Vincent Price fan.  I think that was the night my rose tinted glasses cracked and I saw the world beyond my petty, childish world of games and simplistic desires.  Without knowing it, I had opened myself up to the world and the world had come in to fill me.  I understood on some unconscious level that the world was one of masks and the carnival was the only true face it had.  Hiding behind the greasepaint of clowns and the misshapen limbs of the “freaks” was the real world, an ugly world continually going about the business of living and dieing.  One day I too would die, but for now I would live.  The smell of death surrounded me that night and in it was the smell of life.  Beside the oak tree whose leaves were changing through a calliope of colors stood a pine tree, giving up some of its needles to the ground so that others could live through the winter.  The cycle of death and rebirth played out before me every year and I had never noticed it.  I was a child lost in the world and I accepted it, but I never knew it then.  Eventually we would sleep.  In the morning sun the world looked wrong to me.  My happiness of the night before was but a fading memory and a feeling of loss and pain. 

I would visit fairs and carnivals again many times in my life, but something changed.  Perhaps it was the realization of the lost carnival spirit of old, or perhaps it was my changing interests as I grew to manhood, or perhaps it was something else, but I would never again walk through the fairgrounds and feel my sense of place in the world.  I would feel that sense of belonging again though.  In tourist towns across the country, in amusement parks and atop mountains I would feel that thrill of that first moment when I had a sense of self.  I would find it standing on storm swept beaches and while watching sharks swim in the aquarium.  The false face of the tourist industry, always serving the interests of the customer would be my comfort.  A world made just for me was to be found in every amusement park and every tourist trap I would visit.  That false-faced world felt more honest than the mundane world of my existence.  It’s the kinetic nature of it all.  I think that is why the fair was never the same for me again.  Life is transitory; one day it will pass away.  My happiness seemed to lie in motion.  The traveling show, the tides coming and going, the constant swimming of the sharks, it all pointed to a sense of impermanence.  Or maybe I felt as though I was the freak, forever outside of society.  We all strive to find our place and I think all those years gone I found mine…and it was no place. 

I’ve felt it again and again since that night so many years gone by.  Something will trigger the memory, especially as autumn comes to take the life of summer.  A simple smell or the feeling of the breeze upon my face as the sun’s light fades into night will cause my chest to tighten slightly.  I might feel my eyes water and a wistful smile rush toward my lips and then the memory returns and with it the full force of my feelings on that night.  At that time I feel sad and alone in this great, Atlean world and I want to go back, to return to that time and again be that boy who wasn’t quite as jaded or angry as the man he has become.  I want to find my place again, but I know I cannot.  I will not find my place again until I am put into the ground, completing my portion of the cycle of life and death.  The autumn comes and I know that some day I too will be only a short sunrise from winter and like the leaf that was once green and full of life I will turn dark of hue and fall, never again to rise and my living time on this Earth will pass.  Then, when that time comes and there are no more answers for the questions I will not ask, I will find my place in the earth.  Until then I’ll just keep moving.