Halloween - 2009

When I was a kid Halloween was one of the only times of the year that you could really be a kid. Nothing was greater than dressing up as a spooky creature, trick or treating for candy, being allowed to get away with some mischief, and above all else becoming scared. Sadly, Halloween has kind of fallen to the sidelines with other such holidays as Easter, Valentine's Day and the 4th of July.

However, I refuse to let it die without a fight.

This October was a very busy month for me. I was bombarded with zombie scavenger hunts, film festivals and script editing galore! Luckily, my down time was spent doing something productive - turning my front yard into a massive pile of scary and the macabre! There were zombies, scattered limbs, guillotines, and the guest appearances of the Grim Reaper and Satan.
Granted, I've seen houses a lot fancier than mine, but that doesn't change the fact that the response from the neighborhood was overwhelming. Let me put it to you this way, kids were falling off their bikes while checking out my house.

So I spent the month decorating and transforming the house into a B-Rated film, but completely spaced out on setting myself up with a Halloween costume. However, I had acquired a pretty awesome mask at the beginning of the month, which then became the bane of the children's existence. I garbed myself in all black, including a trench coat, and wore some demonic gloves to add some flavor to the outfit. I then sat out in my front yard as an inanimate object and waited for my opportunity to strike. Yes, there were the few skeptics who could see I was blatantly a person, but the crowd of people who became my scare victims overshadowed the former group by a landslide.

In short, scaring children dressed as Scooby-Doo, chasing male nurses halfway down the road, making teeny-boppers cry, nearly getting eaten by a pitbull and running after kids whose only choice was to flee into a moving vehicle was a great way to resurrect the Halloween spirit for myself, and hopefully for the neighborhood. Let's only hope that it carries on into next year for the haunted attraction I have planned!