THE HALLOWEEN O' 2019

Once again, I assembled a list of Halloween activities and then followed my list.  Here is what that looked like this year...

1. Decorate for Halloween
Here's my latest innovation...



2. Make Halloween mood table
This year's theme: Mcfarlane Monsters



3. Change phone wallpaper
This is from a 1970s blacklight poster



4. Seek out new Halloween decorations and spooky toys
This year I made a startling discovery that rocked the Twitterverse.
"Attention Spooky folks: these decorations from Dollar Tree are essentially the Silver Shamrock masks from Halloween III!"



5. Read one of my vintage horror paperbacks
I ended up listening to the first book of Blackwater by Michael McDowell.

 

6. Play a spooky video game



7. Watch pre-selected pile of Halloween entertainment
I found the bulk of these over the past year at thrift stores and flea markets. (Though a few are perennial watches.)  My greatest score was the entire In Search Of series for $7. Over the past two months I've made it through all of these. Well, not all the In Search Of episodes.)

 

8. Subscribe to Shudder and watch stuff



9. Make a fire in the backyard fire pit



10. Create a horror playlist. Listen while walking/driving around.
I really just copied a couple peoples' existing lists, and then customized them to my liking.



11. Seek out some of the seasonal stuff that like-minded people are tweeting about
This year it was the Mountain Dew mystery flavor (i.e. Candy Corn), the blow mold decorations from Michaels, and the Universal Monster Bend-ems from Walgreens.

  

12. Write a blog post

13. and 14. Go on an October day trip/Go Halloween shopping in another town
I've been able to do a lot of this, thankfully. I make it a point to travel roads I've never traveled if possible, and go through towns I've never visited. Naturally I picked up lots of goodies.












15. Spend Halloween with my family 
And this will happen Thursday.

For me, the scariest thing about Halloween is the thought of letting the season slip by without doing whatever I can to enjoy it. This year I have nothing to fear.
Happy Halloween!

HALLOWEEN 2018

Greetings internet traveler! I just want to commemorate this Halloween season with a rundown of how things have played out this year. It's been a different type of season for me because this is the first Halloween in nine years that I've had a full time, day-to-day job as opposed to a precarious freelance lifestyle. This has created the classic time vs. money conundrum. Last year I was able to review a different vintage Halloween cassette every single day in October, while this year work-related time constraints kept me from crossing off several major items from my annual list of Halloween goals. (I discovered a couple years ago that lists can help keep the Halloween magic from slipping through my fingers.)  Here's how it went...

1. Decorate house for Halloween 

    Done

 

2. Go on October trip to Toronto

3. Go to Chicago toy show

    Both were not prudent given my work situation  

4. Go to a Halloween event

    See below

5. See a horror movie in the theater
    Saw Halloween (2018)

6. Make my Halloween mood table

    No, but my house evokes a strong Halloween mood this year

7. Drive to a nearby town and go Halloween shopping

    Went to several

8. Play a Halloween themed video game
    I started playing Fortnite to bond with my son earlier this year. Then I kept playing. This October it became Halloween themed

9. Read an 80s horror paperback

   Didn't make the time 

10. Watch my pre-selected Halloween movie pile
Got through almost all of it. It included things like: WNUF Halloween Special, Trick 'r Treat, Hereditary, Channel Zero: Candlestick Cove, Ghost Stories, Ghost Story, Return of the Living Dead, Mandy, The Town that Dreaded Sundown, Phantasm III and more

11. Have friends over to watch scary things 

   Yes, two friends came over on two different nights and watched IT (2017), and Carrie respectively

  

12. Create something with a Halloween theme

    See Below

13. Make a Halloween blog post

    Work in progress

14. Celebrate Halloween with my family

    Still to come 

It was a work-related errand that kicked off my "pre-Halloween" back in September. I wandered into Lowe's on a Wednesday morning and lit up when I saw a fresh display spooks sitting on hay bales. I picked up my very first life-size plastic skeleton, the kind that GLOWS IN THE DARK. The Lowe's manager lady gave a triumphant shout across the store and declared that I had bought the first Halloween item of the year. Other customers chuckled when I laid him on the floor in front of the cash register. In the parking lot yet another lady made a joke as I was putting him into the passenger seat of the truck. With expert timing I retorted, "Now I have someone to talk to." and a group of shoppers all laughed. It felt like I was in a movie where the happy-go-lucky character has the perfect skeleton buying experience while the opening credits pop on and off the screen.

A week later the skeleton was accompanied by a plastic light-up Jack-o-lantern. I found it at the Tulsa flea market and it has all sorts of sentimental value for me. First, my uncle stored his Matchbox cars and plastic toys in a treat bucket of this very same design. So I would dump out this pumpkin head during nearly every childhood visit to my grandmother's house. It also still has its $1.47 Woolco price tag stuck to it...


  

And best of all, the man who sold it to me said it was a classroom decoration for years. It has a masking taped label on the bottom that says "[Something] Boys & Girls, Salina, KS" I think Woolos (Wootos?) may be a teacher's name, and it's dated Oct. 26, 1975.
  
I was about to pay for it when I saw this on the floor under the table...




It's the Kay Lande and Wade Denning Halloween classroom record! It includes the song "Halloween" that we sang in grade school Music class, and was the official theme song for the holiday in my mind. The digital version of this has been my go-to every year since I discovered it on the legendary Scar Stuff blog. It's a great, not-too-scary album that I could play for my son when he was very little.

It's quite possible that this record was stored alongside the jack-o-lantern, only to emerge once a year into a room of lucky children. Those pumpkin eyes probably saw costumed kids dancing to the record on chilly Kansas mornings year after year. Sigh.


September also found me on the ebay, searching for collectible reminders of forgotten Halloween memories. This cloaked skeleton figure popped up...

 

It's not a toy, or a decoration per se, but more of a craft item for the doll collecting set. I closed the tab and moved on. Yet, obviously I own it now, so what happened? Well, it popped up in another one of my search results and I started thinking about it. It's from 1987, and it reminds me of the sort of thing that might have caught my attention when I was a kid on shopping days when my mom would drag me from store to store. Her stores catered to moms of course, so sometimes anything distantly toy-like was all there was to focus on during the endless visits. Halloween expanded the possibilities. It could be something like a stuffed black cat, or a felt monster, or a witch cake decoration. But I liked this concept of Halloween fun for moms and grandmas.

It still has a tag on it that mentions the Virginian sisters who made it. That caused me to imagine their whole brainstorming session behind the skeleton man. Two sisters sitting in Virginia in 1987 (or '86 if they had a lot of lead time) discussing their upcoming collectible Halloween dolls. This delights me. Then I wondered what I was doing on that day. I also wonder who bought it, and why it reeks of cigarette smoke and perfume.

I was also struck by his little flannel shirt sleeves. This clearly isn't a grim reaper, but an adult wearing a handmade costume of his own design. The bones look hastily painted on the smock, and I can't tell who's craftsmanship that reflects, the doll maker or the doll's. This flannel-and-jeans wearing guy was probably working the 1987 jaycee's haunted house. This portrayal of a homemade haunter also stuck with me. All of these thoughts motivated me to bid, and when I finally did, I grew terrified that I'd lose the auction. (Turns out I had no competition.)

A couple weeks later I got a call from good ol' Mike Becker of Funko fame. He said he was planning a Halloween fundraiser called Monster Mask-O-Raid, and he was seeking vintage Halloween photos, as well as artwork for the show. Thanks to my new job I have access to screen printing equipment, which is an art form that has eluded me all my life. In a moment of revelation, I decided to combine my desire to screen print with this art opportunity, and the spark of inspiration was none other than the flannel shirt-wearing grim reaper.

I spent a couple weeks brainstorming, sketching, and finalizing my design which turned into a series of die cut-style Halloween decorations featuring the skeleton man and his decorated neighborhood.
The night before my shipping deadline I bribed a college student with a pizza dinner in exchange for supervising me as I attempted to ink my first designs. (I had already called in other favors earlier in the week to get assistance with printing the transparent film and burning the screens.) The first batch was a success! My goal was to make a series of 25 sets of three.

After my pizza-fed student teacher left I started having trouble with the black ink. My sets dwindled as the ink bled and dried in all the wrong places. Feeling defeated, I decided to stop before I ruined all my orange prints. Then it dawned on me that if I could salvage just one of each design I could submit a single complete set of three. That's what I did, and here's how they turned out...

The mask on the kid is based on a real mask that I saw on one of my old blog posts about a Traveler's Novelty Catalog. (Bottom left)

Just like this Halloween season itself, I didn't live up to my own grand plan, but I'm still very happy with the outcome.

One thing that did turn out right was number four on my list...

4. Go to a Halloween event

There's a cave in Missouri that's been showing spooky movies inside it around Halloween. (In previous years they've put on a spook house in the cave, which also sounds neat.) Their sign is good too...

  

The exterior is pretty well decorated which gave us a jolt of Halloween magic...

 

I took my son to see Beetlejuice, which was his first time to see it. When it was over he looked around and said, "Oh, yeah, I forgot we were in a cave." It was a uniquely surreal experience. Water from the ceiling dripped on me several times. Maybe next year I'll see a horror show there. They screen The Descent (2005) on Halloween night.

Yesterday was another Halloween-ish time spent at a corn maze and pumpkin patch...




Those were my most notable events this month. The weather was super hot in early October, then it turned crazy cold and rainy a couple weeks ago. There were quite a few nice and gloomy days. These offered plenty of smile-inducing moments like picking up my pizza order at the gas station and seeing this guy hanging in the window. (Yes, I eat gas station pizza. Casey's tastes like a childhood pizza party.)






I also got my most popular ever Twitter post with this video and the caption:
"The Halloween decoration I hung outside my own window has legitimately terrified me three times now."
which is very true...

There was also a lot of shopping. Flea markets...




And Target, where you can find an official Mego Frankenstein action figure in the year 2018!..




Last year the big challenge was finding the plastic Skeleton Army that was being sold in some Dollar General stores. My twitter feed was full of boastful people lording them over me. I went to a half dozen locations before I was finally able to track them down in the next town over.  This year they followed with a Mummy Army and I was poised for another hunt, but apparently the success of the skeletons convinced them to put the mummies in nearly every location.

But most of my shopping was online. Like this amazing skeleton from Boss Fight Studio that I found thanks to a tip from a twitter pal, The Pathologist...

 

 

And this British import of the mini Stretch X-Ray! Thanks to a tip from another Twitter pal.

 

And yet another Twitter pal, Andy Nyman, sent me this superb dime store "Lochness Monster," also from the UK!

There's also these (which came from a store, now that I think about it.)

I couldn't resist the amazingly ridiculous, ridiculously amazing Savage World horror figures from Funko...

And light-up Halloween III pins from Camera Viscera...

 

But my favorite of all Halloween products this year is this perfect Beistle skeleton blanket from Creepy Company.

Welp, it's late and I should post this so I can get back to work. I'll leave you with some pics of graveyards and moons from this season.  Happy Halloween!

 

HALLOWEEN TAPE REVIEW #31: The Hallmark Halloween Tapes

Hallmark put out four different Halloween cassettes between 1986 and '89 during the peak of the Halloween cassette trend. The tapes were part of their annual Halloween promotions. For example, if you spent five dollars, you could get a tape for $1.95 (Which really wasn't less than most Halloween cassettes at the time.) The first three releases share a great deal of content (see specifics below) while the '89 release was an all new recording. I have many questions about these tapes, and perhaps the answers rest deep in the Hallmark archives, but for now I'll happily rely on pure speculation.

Title: The Haunting Sounds of Halloween
Manufacturer: Hallmark
Year: 1986
Also popular from Hallmark that year: Black cat and witch Merry Miniatures

Total Runtime: around 60 Min
Repeats on both sides: Yes
Stories: No
Music: Cinematic music, some synth, and some pipe organ music
Narration: No 
Distinct Audio: "Aren't you a little big to be trick or treating?" and other lines of dialogue 
Review: Hallmark has always presented a grandma-friendly version of Halloween that complimented the discount store blood and disfigured monster masks. It often found its way onto teachers' desks and store clerk smocks, and I always welcomed the sight of it. Naturally, their Halloween cassettes follow the same whimsical aesthetic.

Rather than a harrowing soundscape, the Hallmark effects come at you methodically, and with a bit too much dead air in between each noise for my taste. The mood stays tongue-in-cheek as a handful of actors speak comical lines. Most are written to work with a trick or treat porch scenario like: "My, what an ugly costume." and, "Didn't the other kids tell you not to come here?" The effects in between are death-free; instead they focus on things like door hinges and cats.

The Haunting Sounds of Halloween is the rarest of the four Hallmark releases. It was seemingly replaced the same year it came out with The Sounds of Halloween (see below). The assortment of sound effects are almost identical and presented in the same order. The difference is that Haunting Sounds repeatedly plays John Williams' theme to the 1979 version of "Dracula." There's also a synth track that I can't identify (and neither can the Shazam app) which doesn't necessarily sound scary. It reminds me of the beginning of an '80s movie. My sense of wild speculation tells me that the tape was pulled and replaced due to a lack of legal clearance on the music. (The credits only list Paul Whitehead after Music Production.) Was it supposed to be placeholder music, or was this intentional thievery, or just a misunderstanding? The answer to all of those questions is "yes."

Legal or not, The Haunting Sounds of Halloween is well produced and creates an amusing, spooky atmosphere without traumatizing youngsters.
Rating: 4 of 5

 

Title: The Sounds of Halloween
Manufacturer: Hallmark
Year: 1986
Total Runtime: 37 Min 
Repeats on both sides: No
Stories: No
Music: "Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor," and a bunch of Halloween friendly pop covers. 
Narration: No 
Distinct Audio: See previous review
Review: As mentioned above, the sound effects side of this recording is virtually the same as The Haunting Sounds of Halloween, but without the music (except for good ol' "Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor.") There are also added flourishes to existing sounds (like reverb) and a few added extras, like a monster roar after some dialogue, as well as some general shuffling around. Unfortunately, the edits take a significant bite out of the runtime.

In what may be an effort to make up for this loss, side two is now full of  Halloween party staples: "Ghostbusters," "Monster Mash," "Thriller," "Purple People Eater" and another dose of  Bach. This was probably convenient in the mixtape era, but the downside is that the cover songs are a hollow shell of the original recordings. But that can be entertaining in its own way. The Vincent Price stand-in is delightfully droll, and completely loses track of the rhythm. They made the wise decision not to use a Michael Jackson impersonator, and opted for a female vocalist instead.  Paul Whitehead is once again the music producer so it's nice to know he didn't lose his job after the first album.

Sounds of Halloween suffered a loss after the previous release, but there's some new fun to be had. It's kind of a yin yang situation.
Rating: 3 of 5

Here's the closet that I can find to streaming audio...




 

Title: Howl-o-ween Sounds
Manufacturer: Hallmark
Year: 1987
Also popular from Hallmark that year: Lapel Pins
 
Total Runtime: 45 Min
Repeats on both sides: Yes 
Stories: No 
Music: "Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor"
Narration: No 
Distinct Audio: See previous releases 
Review: Howl-o-ween Sounds is easily the worst of the bunch because it includes the neutered effects of The Haunting Sounds of Halloween repeated on both sides. So there's no music at all except of course "Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor " which is a basic human right at this point.

They released it a second time with a different cover, possibly to fill their Halloween tape void in 1988.

 

Howl-o-ween Sounds wouldn't be so bad if we didn't know what we were missing—but we do.

Rating: 2 of 5




Title: Spooky Sounds
Manufacturer: Hallmark
Year: 1989
Also popular from Hallmark that year: Woodland Merry Miniatures

Total Runtime: 60 Min 
Repeats on both sides: No 
Stories: No 
Music: Incidental music and a collection of spooky pop tracks 
Narration: No 
Distinct Audio: New wacky dialogue 
Review: Three years after their foray into Halloween audio Hallmark must have realized that they had gotten all the mileage they could from The Sounds of Halloween. In 1989 they put together an all new album that follows their well established format of non-threatening sounds paired with kooky dialogue. Some of it is featured in this entertaining video...



They also went back to the half effects/half music model and filled side two with a set of newly recorded cover tunes that include: "The Munsters," "Monster Mash," "The Addams Family," "Ghostbusters," "Twilight Zone," "Dark Shadows," and an original called "Haunting Melody."

With a fresh new tape under their belt they also released a fresh new promotion...




Spooky Sounds is a strong effort that proves that experience, and an ability to learn from one's mistakes can lead to new heights.
Rating: 4 of 5


HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYONE!