Halloween Haunts: SPIDER SEASON By Evan Baughfman

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

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

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

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: An Australian Gothic Haunt… Leanbh Pearson

Halloween Haunts: An Australian Gothic Haunt… Leanbh Pearson   I'm an Australian horror author which means our celebrations for Hallow’s Eve, Samhain, Dia de los Muertos occur in Fall in northern hemisphere. But for us Aussies and Kiwis the Spooky Season is in Spring. Mind flipping? Just a little hemisphere flip to the right…(insert Rocky Horror Picture Show Joke). So, let me tell you a Halloween Haunts tale from downunder. Here’s our scene. Our Trick O' treaters deal with warm-hot temperatures, their costumes and plastic or rubber masks making them sweating and Face paint melting. No worries. We enjoy the…

Halloween Haunts: Samhain By Brooke MacKenzie

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

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

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: 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,…