HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: A Tribute To Shocktober
by Michael Subjack
“Shocktober…on New York’s Movie Station!”
Nothing signaled the arrival of the Halloween season for me more than those immortal words. These days, Spirit Halloween stores act as the unofficial start of the season when they open on August 1st. In the early nineties, however, it was Shocktober on WPIX, when the sky above Western New York was gray and ominous, and the colorful leaves had fallen, peppering the sidewalk like oversized confetti. The Shocktober commercial lives rent-free in my head. I watch it whenever I need a quick nostalgia fix, particularly during this time of year.
WPIX (now known as PIX 11) is a television station based in New York City. I can’t speak to its current content, but when I was a kid, it was an essential component in my cinematic education, especially when it came to horror. WPIX is how I first saw The Lost Boys, John Carpenter’s They Live, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, Creepshow, and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, to name a few. The station edited them for television with commercials interrupting at the most inopportune moments, but I lived for Shocktober. When I researched it for this essay, I learned it only ran from 1991 to 1995, but in my memory, it spanned my entire childhood. My love of Elvira began here, as Elvira: Mistress of the Dark was another film in regular rotation. I didn’t get all the jokes at the time (particularly when someone asked how her head was, and she responded with “I haven’t had any complaints yet!”), but I loved it just the same and continue to watch every year without fail.
Movies on WPIX always began at 8 pm on the dot – you could set your watch to that start time. I always made sure to finish my homework and change into my sleepwear, so I didn’t miss a minute. The lineup never changed, and not all the movies made sense. I love Blade Runner, but save for some intense moments with Rutger Hauer, it’s hardly a horror film. Everything else landed, though, even if they only had certain films from the Friday the 13th and Elm Street franchises. Few things made me squirm more than Phillip’s death in Dream Warriors. Freddy turning him into a puppet and using his bloody tendons as strings is truly the stuff nightmares are made of. And even if Freddy gruesomely dispatched most of them, I still wanted to be a Dream Warrior, though I never fully locked down what my power would be. I imagined myself doing flips, but I’m not sure how effective that would have been against Mr. Krueger. My horror fantasies didn’t stop there, as I also saw myself slaying vampires with Sam and The Frog Brothers in The Lost Boys. And anytime I put sunglasses on, I saw the chrome-skulled aliens from They Live (the Venn Diagram of aliens and adults I found mean or scary was a flat circle).
Even some of the lesser films were a treat. Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend was originally intended to be more subdued and psychological. After it tested poorly, Warner Bros. demanded reshoots with more gore, turning the movie into something of a mess. I didn’t know about these changes at the time, and I can’t attest to the film’s quality before they made them, but they were definitely impactful. Years before it became a popular GIF, Anne Ramsey (Mama Fratelli!) getting her head exploded with a basketball made my jaw drop on the first viewing, even if I recognize how silly it is now. And while the ending is completely nonsensical, seeing an evil robot rip through a latex model of Kristy Swanson to snap her boyfriend’s neck also greatly disturbed me. Something else I learned well after Shocktober ended was that Creepshow had another segment I didn’t know about. As the movies were allotted a two-hour timeslot, they had to cut the segment with a wonderfully sadistic E.G. Marshall as a wealthy shut-in with an intense fear of bugs, who, in true EC Comics fashion, gets a gruesome comeuppance. Curiously, I didn’t feel cheated when I eventually saw the move in its entirety. It was as if WPIX had given me a very generous appetizer, making the full course even more satisfying.
These days, streaming has altered the landscape significantly, and I also own most of these films on physical media. Still, there was something special about plopping down in front of a CRT TV and waiting for that glorious early 90s animated graphic that announced the start of that night’s film. I wouldn’t trade today’s conveniences for anything, but those memories remain some of my childhood favorites. If you have a free thirty seconds, go to YouTube and search for the WPIX Shocktober commercial. You won’t be sorry, and you’ll probably get a hankering to watch more than a few of those films, proving that even decades after its end, Shocktober is the gift that keeps on giving.
During these increasingly difficult times, I think that’s something we can all cherish.
Bio: Michael Subjack was born in a small town in Western New York and has since relocated to Pasadena, California. He’s published two short story collections, and his work has appeared in the anthologies 101 Proof Horror, It Calls from the Forest, Heavy Metal Nightmares, and Costs of Living. He’s also had one of his stories read on an episode of the horror podcast Chilling Tales for Dark Nights. Most recently, Roan & Weatherford selected his story, Melon Head, for their anthology, Horrific: Tales of the Dying & the Dead.
Amazon: amazon.com/stores/author/B01GJ2QSGW
Substack: msubjack.substack.com