“Cheap Plastic Costumes and My Imagination” By Damian Serbu

As a professionally trained historian come horror writer, I recently reflected on my childhood and what created the writer inside of me. I concluded that some of the imagination that inspired that writer stemmed from my Halloween experiences as a child. So many horror fans loved Halloween growing up, and I was no exception. I thrilled at finding my costume, putting it on that night, and transforming myself into another being, thrusting myself into another reality, with the trick-or-treating as almost an afterthought. Except, instead of having the time and means to create a fantastical costume and generate a look…

“The Late, Great Halloween Costume Massacre” By Maria Alexander

September 1976 Los Angeles, CA   “Sit down, girls. We’ve got something serious to talk about.” My younger sister and I sit cross-legged on the scratchy brown carpet of our tiny apartment as Mom and Dad sit on the couch. Barely four years old, my sister Danielle yanks on the hair of her doll as she alternately slams it against the floor to what is surely the dismay of our new downstairs neighbors. I sit upright and listen. My mom’s normally moon-like face darkens as she speaks. My father slumps backward, reading his newspaper. I’m just grateful he isn’t screaming,…

“New Orleans Halloween Traditions” By Alexandrea Weis

The blending of cultures in New Orleans has left a myriad of different traditions ingrained in the eccentric psyche of the city. Perhaps the most profound occur around Halloween where the Catholic, Voodoo, Irish, and French influences converge. Celebrations for the dead begin days before the fall of Halloween. We have events such as the Day of the Dead Parade, numerous cemetery festivals, haunted houses, costume balls, and ghost tours to mark the creepiest day of the year. However, it’s the quieter and older traditions that are not as well known to outsiders. The most sacred day in the city…

“The Spirit of Samhain” By David Sharp

Passing through the cemetery gates, I felt a strange calm juxtaposing to the hyperactivity of the city streets. The graveyard surpassed my expectations. It was huge — a vast expanse dating back hundreds of years. Autumn made itself known through a change in the air, a crispness, a different light from the overcast sky. This is the season of the witch, leading up to All Hallow’s Eve — once known as Samhain from the forgotten rites. All of my life I have been drawn to this time of year. The path underfoot was wide and lined with tombs. Leaves were…

“Falling In Love: The Second Most Terrifying Thing to Happen On Halloween” By Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall

Twenty years ago on Oct. 31, we decided to get married and start writing horror together — it was a monstrous decision. We officially became engaged on a blustery Halloween night 20 years ago. Clark was dressed as the devil on vacation. Maps in hand, horns out, leisure shirt on. Kathleen was a zombie fairy. Glitter, tutu, bloodied face. It seemed fitting for two people raised on a steady diet of H.P. Lovecraft and Gothic romances set on windswept moors, two people with minds quick to turn to dark and morbid thoughts, to pledge undying love on a night when…

“Truth, Fiction, or Both? Confessions of a Horror Writer” By Howard Odentz

Writers write what we know. Even if we’re writing about ghosts, or monsters, or the disturbing woman with a peeping Tom fetish who lives two blocks away and only walks in the middle of the night wearing elbow lights, our best stories always carry a grain of truth. I’m no different. I often use my past experiences in my stories. Sometimes I even use yours if what you’ve told me in passing is interesting, bizarre, or even humorous enough to weave into one of my tales. My newest novel, WHAT WE KILL, premiering on the very appropriate Friday the 13th…

“All Messed Up” By David Ghilardi

A hippy was standing out by the back gate. He seemed drunk, looking thru trash. I ignored him. "They're coming to get you, Barbara." "Stop teasing, Johnny." I glanced at our black and white television. The nerds were still in the cemetery. Even though stern adult voices warned that 'images were intense' and admonished 'younger viewers should leave the room', not much was happening. The music was creepy, sure. But I'd seen worse from Vietnam War newscasts. That Walter Cronkite guy's voice gave me the willies. Swiveling in my jammies towards the yard, the vagrant there had not moved. Looked…

“How to Overcome the Horror of Writing” By John Allen

When I received the HWA mailer asking members to contribute for Halloween I knew immediately what I wanted to write about. I wanted to share something that would help other new horror authors trying to get their stories polished and published. Horror I feel scares some readers away and often gets confused with other genres. When I told a colleague I had written a horror novel, she wrinkled her nose up and said ‘I hate horror! I hate being scared.’ Obviously not my target audience. I’ve then read books that market themselves as ‘dark fantasy’ or ‘dystopian fantasy’ when they…

“The Angry Woman” By Marlena Frank

Back before Katrina dumped the Gulf on top of New Orleans, my sister and I decided to celebrate Halloween on Bourbon Street. We met up with four of our online friends who we had never met or spoken to outside of chat windows. This was at a time of pagers and pay phones, so it was a little nerve-wracking. Fortunately they were all awesome people, and we talked just as easily in person as we did online. We picked up our bags at the Louis Armstrong International Airport and drove down to see the hotel owner. You see, we were…

“Who Says They Can Ban Halloween? By David B. Riley

They say you never really believe in ghosts until you’ve encountered one. Two Halloweens ago I was working in Vail, Colorado at a hotel. I worked graveyard shift. October tended to be a dead month.  There was very little going on and all thoughts were on the approaching ski season. They kept the place open, but most of the daytime staff were doing cleaning and maintenance type duties to get everything ready for winter. So, I worked on night reports and posted what few special charges there were and set about generally being bored. I was particularly in a sour…

“The Time Halloween Almost Didn’t Come” By Charie D. La Marr

As news of Hurricane Sandy grew in the days leading up to Halloween, 2012, those of us who love Halloween were torn. More and more, it seemed like New York was going to take a major hit. It couldn’t have been coming at a worse time of the month—it would be a full moon and major surges in the tides would only make things worse As we began our preparations, down came the Halloween decorations. One by one, houses took down the tombstones on their lawns, the ghosts and witches flying in the trees and the bright orange and purple…

“Horror for Tweens” By Kristina Stancil

Traditional or normal are words that I would not use in descriptions of my family.  Examples of when we are not normal include a certain family member who will watch Christmas movies eleven months out of the year but refuses to watch between Thanksgiving and New Years and the fact that the only thing that was ever censored from my viewing growing up was sexually explicit content.  So yes, 90% of Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and all of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Children of the Corn was all watched by little me before I was in second grade. So,…

“How to Make Witch Books” By Annie Neugebauer

  Halloween is the best season for crafts! It’s also the best season for horror. AND the best season for books. So what better than making your own spooky book craft? I found the perfect combination in these DIY Halloween ‘witch books’! They can be as intricate or simple as you’d like them to be, really. I even ended up painting some page edges and drilling into some of my books. They don’t have to be witch-themed, either; that’s just what I was feeling this year. You could make them demon books, monster books, whatever strikes your fancy. I took…

“One Cool Way to Get Yourself Out There” By Tom Leveen

“The day Joe Pipkin was born all the Orange Crush and Nehi soda bottles in the world fizzed over…”~ Ray Bradbury, The Halloween Tree This is one of those sentences I wish I’d written. It says it all, so effortlessly and completely. We know in an instant the kind of boy Bradbury is talking about. For as purple as Bradbury got once in awhile, his poetic take on language was not easily matched by any other author, then or now. While Bradbury was known to the outside world principally as a science fiction writer—most folks probably know his name from reading Fahrenheit 451 in high school—those…

“Kids Can be Monsters” By Dave Jeffery

Kids can be monsters. It’s an adage we hear all too often, the cry of desperate, sleep-deprived parents run ragged by their ‘little darlings’.  As observers, we tend to sit in two camps: those who have been there, nodding our heads, sympathising through a haze of figurative nostalgia, or those who wonder why the hell any self-respecting couple would put themselves through what appears to be some kind of perpetual state of sadomasochism. Of course, all of this is relative, and the focus always softened by the unconditional love of a parent. On Halloween, however, I find this abstract concept…

“This Small Window of Acceptance” By Joseph VanBuren

The Halloween season is the time of the year when the rest of the world accepts us. I mean that in two different ways. Growing up, my mom was not only a super hero single mother raising three boys, she was also Wiccan. My brothers and I were raised with the sense that Halloween was “our” New Year’s. Yes, we went trick-or-treating like all the normal kids, but we also celebrated the dead. I have fond memories of setting a place for the spirits at Samhain dinner. While my brothers and I were running around the house on a sugar…

“A Little Halloween Chat” By Lisa Morton and Ellen Datlow

HWA’s next anthology, the Halloween-themed Haunted Nights, debuts on October 3rd. Including sixteen brand new stories about every horror writer’s favorite holiday, the anthology – published by Anchor Books and Blumhouse Books – recently received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Below, editors Ellen Datlow and Lisa Morton talk about their editing processes, the thrill of finding a great story, and how they’re celebrating Halloween this year. Lisa: When I first approached you about co-editing a Halloween-themed anthology, did you ever think, "Wow, is there really anything left to say about that holiday?" Because I know that thought has crossed…

BAD GIRLS, BAD GIRLS, WHAT YOU GONNA DO?

An Intimate interview with Marge Simon, Mary Turzillo and Weasel Press about their new book Satan's Sweethearts. by David E. Cowen. Author of The Madness of Empty Spaces (Weasel Press 2014) and The Seven Yards of Sorrow (Weasel Press September 2016); Editor HWA Horror Poetry Showcase Volumes III (2016) and IV (2017) Hurricane Harvey is now here in Houston a memory though the gifts it brought still blossom with the mold growing on so many walls. Now poor Florida, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands are in the process of having to pick up and dry off. If you ever…

“The Hearse” By Robert Stava

Halloween, of course, evokes all sorts of childhood memories, including – in my case – my very first haunted house at the age of six, which was in an abandoned Victorian mansion in Rochester in the late 1960s. That one scared the living hell out of me, and invoked a lifelong passion for being spooked at haunted houses that wasn’t matched again until I was an adult and started attending “Horseman’s Hollow’ down the road here in Sleepy Hollow, New York. But one of the most iconic events in my memories of October hails back to my junior HS year…

“Welcome to Halloween Haunts 2017” By Michele Brittany

The leaves are beginning to turn golden oranges, yellows, and reds, and there is a subtle change to cooler weather as I write, sitting here in Southern California. Appearing in my neighborhood and local stores are banners announcing the arrival of autumn and Halloween decorations. Soon bowls of sweets will sit near front doors and at the end of the month, little ghosts, goblins, superheroes, and such will appear on doorsteps singing out “Trick or Treat!” For aficionados of the horror genre, October is a fantastic month in which to catch broadcasts of classic and contemporary horror films, while for…