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!