Halloween

In a few weeks, I will begin my sixtieth journey around the sun. Over those years, Halloween has changed for me. The meaning. How I enjoy it. With whom I enjoy it. But one thing hasn’t changed: I enjoy Halloween. All of it. The chill creeping into the night air. The rustle of leaves as the breeze sends them dancing across the cracked pavements. The movies—especially the old Hammer horror films—playing over the television (or streaming in today’s world). Pumpkins. Costumes. Candy. The change I experienced over the years may be best termed a maturing. As a child, I looked…

To an Asian Australian, Halloween is a delightful, albeit slightly bewildering, phenomenon. It isn’t widely celebrated in Malaysia (where I spent my early childhood) and is really only just starting to take hold in Australia. I love seeing my American friends share their excitement that fall has arrived and the spooky season is on its way. However, Halloween seems more celebration than haunting, and the ghosts in the States feel somewhat unreal or distant, like they belong to someone else. Someplace else. Somewhere along the way, I’d come to believe that supernatural beings were endemic to specific locations, and you…

“Why do you write horror?” they ask (whoever they are—generally people who avoid horror at all costs, who don’t like to be scared). I’m never sure how to answer. Despite being a writer, there are some things I can’t quite articulate. Because I was obsessed with Goosebumps and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark as a kid? Because I’ve always liked being a little creeped out? Because horror stories are just the ones I happen to want to tell? Not great answers. Not wrong—but incomplete, perhaps. Skirting the easy edges of the thing of it, which is intangible, possibly…

As a child born to Cuban exiles in 1971, Halloween wasn’t a major holiday in our household for a while, since it wasn’t celebrated in Cuba. Once my parents recognized they were never going home to Havana, however, that things were never “going back to normal” as long as Fidel Castro was in power, they figured they may as well settle into their new home and become full-blown Americans with full-blown American-born kids. We spoke mostly English in the house. This was different from other Cuban American households, where parents often insisted their kids speak only Spanish as a way…

No one celebrates Halloween better than the Halloween People, and while every Halloween has been special in some way or another, the most memorable one, for me, was in 2015. If you love horror, and if you’re reading this, I assume you do, you know that there are few better places to spend the best holiday of the year than at The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, CO. An old hotel renowned for its haunting and inspiration for Stephen King’s The Shining is the perfect place to celebrate. What’s even better than the perfect place is the perfect people. A…

One of my favorite parts of the Halloween season is watching horror films. Ever since I was a kid in the 80s scouring Fangoria magazine for October releases to find the newest spooky films and video tapes, I have been a hardcore fan. And the experience was always cooler with a horror host, someone to talk about the films and even make light of them. The ritual of a night with a host is something I have enjoyed over the years. Decorating for Halloween, lighting the candle inside the Jack-o-lantern, and settling in for a guided night of horror all…

As many folks in the United States prepare for upcoming Halloween celebrations by choosing costumes—for themselves or perhaps for their children to go trick-or-treating—it’s intriguing to think about how dressing up in costume relates to writing horror. What are some of the common effects or benefits of each? The roots of Halloween lie in the early celebration of Samhain, where Celtic villagers disguised themselves in animal skins and as monsters to welcome in their new year, and chase away spirits or goblin infestations. They believed costumes could keep them from being kidnapped by fairies or spirits of their ancestors who…

A lifelong “Halloween People” myself, I connect Halloween with libraries, and do so for several reasons.  Each year I have the great pleasure of writing and directing a Halloween Haunt in my university library, working with the librarians and student performers.  We’re in the tenth year of doing this.  As the exhibit is about “Difficult Fairies,” we have created Haunting of Hannon X: Widdershins.  We have Chinese fairies, Filippino fairies, Vietnamese fairies, Mexican fairies, Irish fairies, Welsh fairies, Scottish fairies, and all of them are terrifying. The audience walks through the library in groups of ten to twelve through fifteen…

“The Children of the Night—what music they make!” Why hello there, Halloween people. Brian Asman here, author of the viral hit Man, Fuck This House and the upcoming Christmas horror comedy Return of the Living Elves. When I sat down to write something for the HWA blog, I racked my brain for spooky topics on which I’d be particularly qualified to pontificate. After all, I already wrote an article about Garfield’s Halloween Adventure, which is basically my only artistic influence. What else could I possibly talk about? Luckily, I was listening to music at the time. I know, weird, right?…

The challenge flitted across my Facebook feed this morning, and it reminded me that it’s time to start planning Halloween assignments for my three classes. Since the students are just as valuable as the textbooks, I must ponder how to get them to teach me something and give them an exercise that I’ll enjoy doing as well. It is that time of year, after all, when the sounds of haunting takeover the airwaves and wideband. So, the challenge puts spur to my planning. What’s the challenge; let’s compile a playlist of scary songs! I fully expect to get a mix…

I was too young to remember. But as the story’s been retold in family lore, it goes something like this: My family used to go out for fast-food most Sundays after church; in hindsight, it was clearly a way for my parents to bribe my brother and me to get us into Sunday School each week. I was about four years-old, took a big bit off a fried chicken drumstick, then fixed my gaze on the piece in my hand. I squinted my eyes at it, looked up at my parents, and said, “Hey…doesn’t this hurt the chicken?” My father…

When I was a kid in the 1980s, long before the advent of R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps, my friends and family told scary stories with a funny twist. Some were rather dirty like, “The Ghost in the Walls,” while others were clean and spooky like, “The Man with the Golden Arm” and “The Ghost with the Ruby, Ruby Lips.” The story I’d like to share with you today, has become a Halloween tradition in my family. I’ve even told it to my son’s class during Halloween parties at his school. It’s called, “The Ghost with One Bloody Finger.”   THE…

From my very first Halloween, I learned how important sewing is to that special night. My mother wore an elaborate clown costume, complete with a separate neck ruffle with ringing bells. Her mother had crafted this costume for her when Mom was in the eighth grade, for a stage performance at school. Mom also owned a child-sized devil costume of fluffy red that Grandma sewed for my Uncle Dan in 1948, when he was five, and Mom, age three, portrayed a Little Dutch Girl; Mom wore the devil costume the next year, and Uncle Dan became (through Grandma's wizardry) the…

To say that I never saw myself writing horror is an understatement. My earliest memory of horror was at my best friend’s birthday when we were children. I don’t remember exactly how old we were, but I doubt we could have been much older than ten. A gaggle of girls huddled in her basement for a sleepover (which was already something that made me uneasy, being the introverted homebody that I was) to watch a special movie picked out by the birthday girl. The film? Halloween. You can imagine how well that went over with me, watching Michael Myers running…

Like many people born in October — all of us beauty-loving Libras, all of those mysterious, sexy Scorpios — I grew up thinking that Halloween was my special holiday. Like I had some sort of corner on the market. Some of my earliest memories involve inhaling the smell of greasepaint and latex masks in drugstores, crunching through the corpses of once-green leaves piled on lawns in knee-deep mounds, the dull sweetness of soft wax lips clutched tightly between my own baby teeth. My childhood birthday parties further blurred the line between birthday and Halloween, especially as I got older, serving…

I’ve written a lot of Halloween fiction, and I do mean A LOT. As in, I’ve already had one entire collection of just Halloween short stories and novellas – The Samhanach and Other Halloween Treats – published (by JournalStone) in 2017, and I’ve written a bunch of new Halloween fiction since. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that I’m both a horror fiction writer and an expert on Halloween history (with three non-fiction books on that subject to my credit). When I’m asked to contribute a new Halloween story to something, I always stop first to think about some…

I always wanted to be a writer, but deep inside for most of my life, I was constantly in a struggle with my own demons. Demons of being “less than”. Once when I was in sixth grade, our English teacher wanted us to write a story. In a ruled notebook, I chose one in which a knight fought a dragon, a basic medieval type story. After she reviewed all our stories, she handed the notebooks back, one by one. When it was my turn, she had a smile on her face. The page with the ending had words marked in…

I came home for the first time to celebrate Samhain, one week after someone died there, on that land.   If I were ever to write a tabletop role-playing game based on Halloween, I think I’d forego the use of dice or cards or resource management, all those usual ways by which TTRPGs introduce chance into their narratives.  Instead, I think I would instruct the players to cover up all their clock faces, remove all their watches, turn off phones and computers, and when they wanted their character to do something, they would peek at the time, the ones digit…

There is nothing that says ‘horror’ more than the Halloween holidays. Ask any fan of all things macabre for their favourite time of year and their obvious response is October, the Season of the Witch. Take this annual blog series, for example. Halloween Haunts exists as a celebration, a cornerstone of the horror writing community, a time of year when all of our passions are distilled into a month of festivities. For horror fans, especially writers, Halloween lauds the awe and wonder of the fantastic and the innate terror of something unknown and otherworldly, and in doing so has us…