Halloween Haunts: “Was I Supposed to be Scared?” By J.B. Corso

Halloween Haunts: “Was I Supposed to be Scared?” By J.B. Corso     This is the worst question a horror reader can ask themselves. If you or your reader asked this, at least one of two things is likely true. The narrative failed to connect because: it lacked the necessary emotional charge to be scary, and/ or the storyline, horror, and/ or theme was too familiar So, what might’ve gone wrong? Here are 6 challenges a horror story faces and what can be done to correct them. Let’s go! Over-saturated Market (Problem #2) Humans have evolved over the millennia to…

Halloween Haunts: Horror Influences By Dean Cade

Halloween Haunts: Horror Influences By Dean Cade I never planned on becoming a writer. The seeds were planted since I was a horror fan from a young age. My earliest memory of being scared in a theater was seeing the horror film, Prophecy, in the early summer of 1979. There was a scene towards the end that changed my life. The survivors were hiding in some kind of underground chamber, whispering and debating about the mutant bear somewhere up above. I wanted them to stay where it was safe and not open the trapdoor, but characters never listen and do dumb…

Halloween Haunts: The Frog and The Scorpion Go to Universal Studios By Michael Subjack

Halloween Haunts: The Frog and The Scorpion Go to Universal Studios By Michael Subjack   “I know you’re going to tell people about that shit.” We were barely out of the parking lot when Brian delivered this statement with a weary certainty. “I would never do that to you, buddy,” I assured him. “This stays between us.” It was a genuine promise. Too bad it only lasted a night.   We had just spent the evening at Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights, a tradition that began when I moved to the West Coast in 2010. The 2013 line-up wasn’t among the…

Halloween Haunts: My Season as a Scareactor By Rob Tiemstra

Halloween Haunts: My Season as a Scareactor By Rob Tiemstra   It’s September of 2018. At Universal Studios Hollywood, rehearsal is underway for this year’s Halloween Horror Nights. My friend Noelle walks out onto the deserted upper lot and pantomimes howling at the moon. The rest of her cast converges behind her as the soundtrack kicks into high gear and they charge forward. Even without anyone in costume or makeup, the staging is a thrill to witness. This act will become the Opening Scare-emony of HHN 2018. The inhabitants of the Upper Lot Scare Zone — themed after Michael Dougherty’s…

Halloween Haunts: When the Line Between the Living and the Dead is at its Thinnest By Amanda Worthington

Halloween Haunts: When the Line Between the Living and the Dead is at its Thinnest By Amanda Worthington   My mom had had a good day the day before and we were all unusually optimistic. The strains of my conversation alone with her drifted back to me – “If it ever comes to life-saving measures versus comfort measures, I want comfort-measures.” Those words were heavy, but I drudged them up from the deep as the heart monitor let out its disparaging whine. The next moments are a blur, even now. Cancer is a bitch. And it made her a corpse…

Halloween Haunts: Truth or Scare by AJ Danna

Halloween Haunts: Truth or Scare by AJ Danna “Every year, on one special night, people all over the world find fun… in fear. For most of us, Halloween is the night for fright, complete with costumes, trick-or-treating, and more candy than you can ever eat. But, did you ever wonder where all of these different traditions come from?” These are just a few of the tantalizing words that drew my elementary-aged self closer to my family’s 13-inch TV, clinging to the host’s mysterious tone. Though I was an avid viewer who tuned in weekly to learn about new curious subjects,…

Halloween Haunts: Halloween Treats, No Tricks By Patrick Tumblety

Halloween Haunts: Halloween Treats, No Tricks By Patrick Tumblety   Dear Ghouls and Goblins, With dripping fangs and too much hair (not supernatural related), I come to you with terrible tidings of awful displeasure… HAPPY HALLOWEEN! Two Halloween-themed releases and a creeptastic anthology have made this spooky season especially special! I have provided details on these new releases below, but I wanted to share with you three pieces that were not included in my all-ages illustrated book, The October Children. I did not include them in the final book because they will either be included in a future collection or…

Halloween Haunts: Halloween Traditions Come Full Circle by Amber Jourdan

Halloween Haunts: Halloween Traditions Come Full Circle                                           by Amber Jourdan   Traditions of Halloween Growing up tradition has always been a strong and present concept in our home.  It was very important to my mother that she instill tradition into our life experience.  Of course, the holidays were ripe territory for tradition.  Every holiday governed over it's own set of traditions, administering them fairly stringently, not missing a beat until my latter teen years.  As the youngest I saw all of our traditions wane against the rising tide of years.  Fitting as most holidays mark the passage of time…

Halloween Haunts: Tricks Before Treats: Our Halloween Tradition By Robert E. Stahl

Halloween Haunts: Tricks Before Treats: Our Halloween Tradition By Robert E. Stahl   Every October I start dreaming of my favorite annual tradition—scaring the heck out of trick-or-treaters on Halloween night. It’s my favorite thing in the world. Well, except for peanut butter. My husband and I have been doing it for years. We’ve perfected the set up by now. A few weeks before Halloween, we get the yard looking all spooky. Ghosts flapping everywhere. Cobwebs in the bushes. Inflatable spooks lurking near the sidewalk. Then on Halloween night, we go hard. Spooky music. Strobe lights. Fog machines. The works.…

Halloween Haunts: Hounded by the Dead By Heddy Johannesen

Halloween Haunts: Hounded by the Dead By Heddy Johannesen   The supernatural is the last unexplored frontier, as mysterious as the Marianas Trench. The realm of the dead is challenging to explore. One would have to die and then come back to life to be able to report on it. I had a unique experience in my life. The supernatural haunted me, whether I liked it or not. When I was a child in grade school, some mean kids convinced me that Bloody Mary haunted the third stall in the girls’ bathroom. Something was off about that whole red brick…

Halloween Haunts: Against the Fog: Halloween by the Sea By Juno Guadalupe

Halloween Haunts: Against the Fog: Halloween by the Sea By Juno Guadalupe Every October, I make a pilgrimage to Salem. It has become a tradition, not just for the theatrics of Halloween but for the way the town itself seems to breathe history. In Salem, the sea is never far away. You feel it in a creeping chill, in the salt carried on the wind, in the damp cobblestones... At night, the harbor fog drifts in like a costume, covering the streets in something otherworldly. Standing by the coast, you understand why so many horror stories linger in places like…

Halloween Haunts: In Search of Ghosts and Happy Haunts by Cecilia Kennedy

Halloween Haunts: In Search of Ghosts and Happy Haunts by Cecilia Kennedy   I once entered a haunted saloon in town, sometime around Halloween. But nothing really happened. I drank a beer. It was good—cold, refreshing—everything I’d hoped a beer would be, but I was expecting something otherworldly, based on the lore and legends on the restaurant’s website. The Oxford Saloon, established in 1900 in Snohomish, Washington, is famously haunted—all documented online. And I believe it all: ghostly sightings of women who worked in the bordello on the second floor, a policeman who died when a fight broke out at…

Halloween Haunts: Aren’t You Too Old for This? Really…? By James Ryan

Halloween Haunts: Aren’t You Too Old for This? Really…? By James Ryan I remember how hitting puberty meant being told that I was now too old for Halloween. Back in those barbaric days, Halloween was confined to kids. The holiday never went as all-out as it does now, with celebrations back then geared for the 11-and-under set. An outfit from Ben Cooper Costumes, usually one of those horrible (and flammable, we’d discover later) one piece affairs with a plastic mask that would suffocate the wearer if the flimsy thin elastic band actually held the thing in place, a bag from…

Halloween Haunts: Headless Halloween By Steve A. Wiggins

When the first breath of autumn touches the air, thoughts turn to colorful leaves, cinnamon-scented goodies, and pumpkins.  Halloween can’t be far away.  And each Halloween the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow rides.  Most of us don’t stop to think how closely related Halloween and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” actually are.  They grew up together. Many of us in the Boomer generation likely learned about Washington Irving’s classic through Disney’s The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, or perhaps through the shortened version shown on television, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  We grew up with that scary song, “Headless…
Halloween Haunts: SETTING THE STAGE & THE BROWN COUNTY JACK-O-LANTERN

Halloween Haunts: SETTING THE STAGE & THE BROWN COUNTY JACK-O-LANTERN

Halloween Haunts: Setting the Stage & the Brown County Jack-o-Lantern by K.A. Schultz   It is not terribly late, but the sun is about to set, its last lighted dregs trickling out from beneath the gathering wall of clouds. The rays tint the air a pinkish gray, imbuing the autumnal dusk, the wet leaves, and the shiny sidewalks with a quick-fading warmth. From my second-floor apartment, I see costumed children making their way down the block; the youngest ones have already finished with their rounds. I see patches of candle glow on porches and in windows below, lopsided grins and sinister…
Halloween Haunts: THE PERSONAL NATURE OF HORROR

Halloween Haunts: THE PERSONAL NATURE OF HORROR

Halloween Haunts: The Personal Nature of Horror Eugen Bacon   As writers of horror, there are many motivations that spur us to write this kind of fiction. Some, perhaps like Eric LaRocca, there’s a certain glee in unsettling the reader. But in an interview on their book This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances, he shares that horror is, to him, a form of healing. There’s blood and brutality, the Lovecraftian in cosmic horror. In the horrific is a certain truth: ‘awful things happen to everyone’. This is one reason I write horror—it reflects reality. You have only to…
Halloween Haunts: HAVE A BLUETOOTH HALLOWEEN

Halloween Haunts: HAVE A BLUETOOTH HALLOWEEN

Halloween Haunts: Have a Bluetooth Halloween By Lisa Morton   Bluetooth. Who could’ve predicted ten years ago that Bluetooth technology would be one of the major future advances in the art of the Halloween haunt? But it’s happened, and it’s fantastic. Bluetooth, that nearly-magical energy that allows us to connect our phones to other devices, first entered the Halloween haunt arena a few years ago by allowing haunters to use Bluetooth speakers throughout their mazes. The speakers, which are surprisingly powerful but may be no bigger than a hockey puck or a box of crackers, are controlled by phone apps,…

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: DO GO IN THE BASEMENT

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: DO GO IN THE BASEMENT BY TIM WAGGONER   When I was child in the mid-1960s to the mid-1970’s, I attended a Quaker church in my small southwestern Ohio town. My parents, as far as I know, never attended a church (at least not as adults). My maternal grandmother and great-grandmother did, however, and for reasons I’m not entirely clear on, my parents let them take me. I mostly went to Sunday school, though. My family thought it was too difficult for kids to sit through a full church service, and they didn’t make me try. I did…

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: UNDERWORLD CONNECTIONS

HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: UNDERWORLD CONNECTIONS By Lee Murray   Another spooky season is upon us and, once again, I’m scratching my head, trying to come up with something to contribute to our HWA Halloween Haunts blog. Because, as I’ve said many times before, Halloween isn’t really a thing down here in Aotearoa New Zealand. There are lots of reasons: the mostly secular nature of the nation, the bouncy southern hemisphere spring-lamb timing, and the fact that uncanny supernatural things are a part of our everyday, so perhaps we don’t see the need for a unique celebration of the macabre. Very few…

Halloween Haunts: THE LEGEND OF STINGY JACK

Halloween Haunts: THE LEGEND OF STINGY JACK by Debra Every   Herein lies a tale fit nary for babe nor child. Only the brave shall know the legend of Stingy Jack. In a town long gone, nestled ‘tween the McGillycuddy Reeks of Killarney, lived John Finnegan O’Connell, a blacksmith by trade; a wastrel by pleasure. Born under a black moon, he grew from churlish child to mean-spirited man. A trickster. A drunkard. A miser of coin and conscience. He stole bread from the sick, clothes from the poor, coin from the clergy. And ne’er did he help his brethren in…