Halloween Haunts: Three Generations of Halloween and Horror Love By Arin Ruhl   A love of horror is my inheritance on my mother’s side, and Halloween is a family extravaganza. We own more Halloween than Christmas decorations, and perhaps the first time I learned what a vampire was came from an old Dracula movie poster that has hung proudly in our dining room every October for as long as I can remember. Since I was eight years old, we’ve hosted an annual costume party for friends and relatives we don’t often see otherwise. As a kid, I got to chase…

Halloween Haunts: How Scary Movies Went Mainstream, and How They Got Sutured to Halloween By Stacie Herrington Halloween and horror movies go together like peanut butter and chocolate. But it wasn’t always that way. Reese’s commercial (1986) Once upon a time, before you were born, horror movies were weird little experiments involving things like cardboard bats and borrowed pipe organs and nonsparkling vampires. They were smoky European imports, trick films, or midnight stage-show extensions of gothic novels—creepy, sure, but about as mainstream as a séance in your great-great aunt’s parlor. Still, for a certain facet of the filmgoing public, they…

Halloween Haunts: When Dreams Turn Prophetic: What My Nightmares Taught Me By KC Grifant   Throughout my life, my dreams have been vivid, inspiring and, even fairly recently, borderline prophetic. Dreams becomes more culturally significant during the Halloween season. Samhain suggests that dreams occurring around Oct 31 are intensified and hold more meaning, as the “veil” between the real world and spirit world is thinned. Those who celebrate Dia de los Muertos hope to commune with passed loved ones during dreams. And the history of Halloween often references visions influenced by spirits. In other words, now is an ideal time…

Halloween Haunts: DON’T SELL SHORT HORROR STORIES SHORT by Paul Lonardo   For me, short stories are a lot like appetizers. They are bite-size, delicious and fulfilling. You can even make a meal out of them. Have you ever gone out to eat with a group of people where each diner would order a different appetizer, and everyone at the table would sample from all the plates to experience an array of savory flavors and tastes? This is exactly what it’s like when I find myself reading either a good collection of tales written by a single author or an…

Halloween Haunts: SPIDER SEASON By Evan Baughfman   Recently, I picked Arachnophobia for our Family Movie Night, and my kids (over)reacted as if I’d told them we’d be bobbing for egg sacs inside a squirming tub of tarantulas. They begged for Ghostface, Annabelle, and KPop demons. Anyone or anything but SPIDERS! Arachnids have been creeping through my brain since end-of-summer. (To be honest, they’re always there, just out of view. Spiders like to crawl into my horror fiction, whether it be a twisted fairy tale or a dark Christmas entry.) It’s that time of year when orb-weaver species are on…

Halloween Haunts: Married to Horror: Perspectives of a Collaborating Couple By Stephen H. Provost   Writers often approach horror from one of two perspectives: Either they’re writers who discover horror, or they’re horror lovers who find an outlet in writing. My wife, Sharon Marie Provost, was a horror fan from childhood. She’s a voracious reader who grew up on Stephen King, and she wrote a vampire-themed short story when she was in grade school. If you ask her whether she’s seen a specific horror film, chances are the answer will be “yes.” I, on the other hand, was a journalist…

Halloween Haunts: In Adolescent Clouds of Gloom By Sumiko Saulson 16-year-old Sumiko Saulson standing on the lanai of their apartment at Atkinson Plaza in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1984. Photo taken by their father, Robert Saulson. I landed at the Ambassador Hotel, in the historical Transgender District (where the Compton Cafeteria Riots took place in August 1966). The Ambassador was in the Tenderloin, San Francisco’s red light district, a rough-and-tumble 50-square-block ghetto rising up from the front doorsteps of City Hall, filled with single room occupancy (SRO) hotels like my new home, where the City’s poorest could rent a room in…

Halloween Haunts: This Haunted House Will Save You By Henry Corrigan   Everything we do, tends to have a purpose behind it. We humans might be weird, but we don’t really do random. That’s because randomness is risky. It invites chaos and if there’s one thing that both scares and offends us, it’s that something could be done to us, and we’re left with no recourse. We’re just done. So, to deal with this inescapable fact, we do what we do best. We play pretend. We create stories, structures and scenarios where we can come to grips with it safely.…

Halloween Haunts: Samhain By Brooke MacKenzie   During my senior year of high school, I had become a devout practitioner of Wicca, and I made sure everyone around me knew it.  I would offer “Blessed Be” as a standard farewell, and even the occasional, “Goddess Bless” when someone sneezed.  I performed love spells for romantically challenged friends, crafted prosperity dolls as Christmas presents, and self-righteously preached about the destructiveness of patriarchal religion.  I dyed my hair blue and then green and then purple, spilled wax all over the carpet during full moon rituals and bogarted my mom’s stock pot to…

Halloween Haunts: An HWA Halloween By Robert Cabeen Instead of promoting my own dark doings, I’m going to provide photographic evidence that HWA members deserve Kevin Wetmore’s moniker, “Halloween People.” Our annual Halloween galas provided HWA members, from across the country, the chance to give their shadows the night off and go wild. Warning: to those of you who have been caught in the act here—this will now go down on your permanent HWA record. Our last Halloween party was in the before times, but we plan to carry on the tradition in the future—maybe next year. Will you dare…

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 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…