Halloween Haunts 2013: ‘Tis the Season by Ed Erdelac

The Halloween season is upon us, when the trees shed their leaves like scraps of yellow-orange construction paper that shuffle beneath your feet, every pumpkin spreads a butter-yellow grin, and every porch light becomes an invitation to fill your bucket with candy.

I must admit, at the risk of sending the gentle reader clicking off to some other corner of the web, Christmas is my favorite holiday, but Halloween is a close second.

But I got to thinking, one of the things I always looked forward to on Christmas as a kid were the proliferation of holiday-themed animated specials and movies that flooded the airwaves. I’m talking about the Christmas classics. There’s the big three — It’s A Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol, and A Charlie Brown Christmas, there’s The Grinch Stole Christmas, and then all those awesome Rankin and Bass stop motion one offs like Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town, Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, etc.

I can count at least seven Christmas holiday standbys I looked forward to every December.

So how many does Halloween have?

Well, that’s what I decided to write about on the annual Halloween blog post. I know I should probably be talking about the significance of Halloween or at the very least, writing, but eh, let’s have a little fun.

Here are my picks for what ought to be Halloween Holiday Stand Bys, paired with their Christmas equivalents.

Not necessarily the scariest or best-made movies or TV specials, but the kind that just put a grin on your face, and put you in the mood to inflate your Kooky Spooks and go out to fill your bag. The kind that in my, mind, exemplify Halloween.

Halloween III: Season Of The Witch is my all-time top movie to be viewed during the Halloween season. It’s the Halloween equivalent of It’s A Wonderful Life. Hang on, now, you Michael Meyers fans, get your fingers off the mice. Lemme explain.

My criteria for a good seasonal special is that A, it should ideally take place during the holiday, B, it should somehow convey the spirit of Halloween.

Halloween 3: Season Of The Witch, does both to a tee.

OK, point one (or A). Halloween 3…you know what, I’m gonna call it Season Of The Witch from here on out, because I really believe this flick would be more fondly remembered were it entirely removed from the shadow of the Halloween series. OK? OK.

Point A. Season Of The Witch takes place a couple days before Halloween. We know this because we’ve got that catchy Silver Shamrock jingle that lets us know just how much time we’ve got. You know it. You’re singing it now in your head. If you’ve never seen this movie, check out the jingle. Now it’s in your head. ‘Probably will be until after the actual Halloween is over.  Now, this jingle builds the excitement of the oncoming holiday. I would argue it instills in you a shadow of the excitement you had as a kid waiting to don your costume and go out. So the climax takes place on Halloween night. No problem. Check.

Point B. How does Season Of The Witch convey the spirit of Halloween? Woo, it does it in spades. Now, I’m not talking about the mystical aspect, that the veil between the worlds is thin or anything like that, I’m talking about the spirit of the Halloween I grew up with. Good old American sweet tooth, cheap latex, and plastic pumpkin Halloween. The Halloween of pumpkin smashing and eggs going splat on the windows. Bag snatching, prank-filled Halloween. You know, the one that’s on the surface very lighthearted and silly, but underneath, there’s a very slight undercurrent of nastiness.

THAT’S Season Of The Witch. The entire movie is a prank on the trick or treatin’ children of the USA. A cheesy novelty toy maker unloads a wildly successful line of commercialized, generic Halloween masks on the unsuspecting country with the help of an infectious jingle and a nebulous ‘big giveaway,’ and every kid is rabid to have a Silver Shamrock mask and park themselves in front of the boob tube after ‘John Carpenter’s immortal classic the original Halloween ‘airs on some TV station Halloween night. This reminded me of the 3D glasses Son of Svengoolie pushed on us all in Chicago when I was a kid, so we could get home and watch Creature Of The Black Lagoon reaching out to us from our sets. This PERFECTLY encapsulates my south suburban Halloween experience as a kid.

Except I didn’t make it to the big giveaway. I bugged the hell out of my parents for the glasses and the commemorative Slurpee cup, but I didn’t wanna quit trick or treating in time to make the show. If I were a kid in Season Of The Witch, my Halloween hard-cored-ness would’ve saved my little butt.

Yep (and SPOILER HERE), because once the kids are in front of the TV and that final bouncy jingle sounds with the flashing pumpkin graphic, a signal gets piped into a chip containing a fragment of Stonehenge (!) in the back of the mask and sets off a mystical reaction that causes vermin to pour out of the wearer’s eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Puckish Dan O’Herlihy’s prank is nothing less than the mass murder of thousands of kids on Halloween night, supposedly to appease the thousand year old sacrifice required of a hidden cult to which he belongs. (END SPOILER)

And who’s the champion John Carpenter puts forth to save us? Not Snake Plissken. Not even Jack Burton. It’s Tom Atkin’s lecherous, alcoholic, deadbeat dad, Dr. Daniel Challis. Because who else would be the savior of Halloween?

So to reiterate, if you’ve been avoiding Season Of The Witch for any reason, go out and buy it. It should be just as respected and beloved during the Halloween season as It’s A Wonderful Life is during Christmas.

OK what’s the Halloween equivalent of A Christmas Carol, that old standard whereby a miser learns the deep meaning of Christmas under the tutelage of three time traveling spirits?

For my money, it’s The Halloween Tree, the animated adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s novel about a bunch of costumed kids following Death (in the form of a wizened apparition called Moundshroud, voiced by Leonard Nimoy) through time and space on Halloween night, learning the ancient origins of the traditions they unwittingly celebrate, and chasing the elusive earthbound shade of their wily friend Pipkin, dying from an appendicitis as they try to save him.

Moundshroud takes them to ancient Egypt to learn about the veneration of dead ancestors, has them dance around witch fires in the pagan countryside of the Dark Ages, ride gargoyle waterspouts and floating tiles on Notre Dame Cathedral, and crack sugary Calaveras between their teeth at Mexico’s Day Of The Dead.

It’s beautifully written (it’s Bradbury!), nicely acted by a group of young voice performers and Nimoy, and conveys the cultural origins of various Halloween traditions, teaching the kids the true meaning of the holiday the same way Scrooge comes away with a new understanding of Christmas and life itself by the end. For Scrooge, it was about learning a way to celebrate and understand life. For the kids, it’s about not fearing death.

Now rounding out the big three is an easy one. Obviously the Halloween equivalent of A Charlie Brown Christmas is It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

While perhaps a tad lighter than its moving Christmas cousin, Great Pumpkin is a lot of fun.

The hapless Charlie screws up his simple sheet ghost costume and winds up getting a rock from every house the gang hits, but the heart of this outing are really Linus and Sally, spending the night in a pumpkin patch hoping to see the rise of The Great Pumpkin, a whimsical being Linus believes only visits ‘the most sincere pumpkin patch’ around.  It’s a fun slice of childhood faith and hope, at its heart a bit of a fake out, as it should be.

Trodding a bit more down the animated path, The Garfield Halloween Special has always been a favorite of myself and now my kids. Again, it centers on trick or treating, takes place on Halloween night, and involves Garfield and Odie stumbling across a crew of ghost pirates. Garfield learns about sharing the wealth. I suppose it could be considered the Halloween version of The Grinch Stole Christmas. Even has a couple of songs. Not Boris Karloff, but Lou Rawls.

Another absolute must for Halloween is the Sleepy Hollow segment of Disney’s oddly matched Ichabod and Mr. Toad, if only for the cool Bing Crosby (as Brom Bones) number in which Ichabod is warned, at a Halloween ball, about the legend of the Headless Horseman (When the spooks have-a mid-night/jam-bo-ree/they kick it off/with fien-dish glee…).  Of course, Ichabod’s confrontation with the Horseman is classic, another indelible memory from my childhood. That shattered pumpkin, laying at the edge of the bridge….and that final cackling laugh. It’s a short one, though. I’ll call it the Halloween cousin of Frosty The Snowman.

Although Rankin and Bass did put out a Halloween special, Mad Monster Party, I wish it was better than it is. I would suggest that A Nightmare Before Christmas (although technically it’s more of a Christmas movie with a lot of Halloween trappings), and Corpse Bride, with its blurring of the real and spirit worlds, actually do the Rankin and Bass holiday feeling a bit better than the real thing. I’d equate those movies to Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town and Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer respectively.

What? Rudolph is a love story too….

So those are my must-see Halloween movies, the ones I watch to put me in the mood for the season. Of course, throughout the month of October I go on a horror kick and watch a lot of different things, and I have to make special mention of Trick ‘R Treat which is definitely a consummate Halloween movie. The only reason I don’t give it its own entry is it’s an anthology, and I can’t think of a Christmas equivalent to that.

So in that regard, Halloween has the Christmas season beat, anyway.

What are your favorite Halloween movies and past times?

Lemme know!

EDWARD M. ERDELAC is the author of the acclaimed Judeocentric/Lovecraftian weird western series Merkabah Rider from Damnation Books, Terovolas from Journalstone, Buff Tea from Texas Review Press, and most recently, Coyote’s Trail, now available from Comet Press. His stories have appeared in Sword and Mythos, After Death, Kaiju Rising, Atomic Age Cthulhu, Monster Earth, Danse Macabre, and on Star Wars.com. News, excerpts, and other stuff can be found at his Delirium Tremens blog, http://emerdelac.wordpress.com.