SOME MORE HALLOWEEN (EXPANDED)

This is another gruesome post. No, I'm not feeling morbid or depressed...I'm just reacting to the current view of Halloween, which for better or worse has been influenced by Stephen King and Clive Barker.

Just to cushion the blow, I'll start out with a cheery little video (above) that I lifted from a fun Halloween site called seasonofshadows.com. Watch how people react to simple scares. Some people (like me) jump out of their skins, most cringe then hurry on, some just have to go back and examine the scarer, I guess to give themselves time to calm down.

At a little more than a minute in, the soundtrack switches to music by Fruchik, the under-rated genius of the circus music genre. The music is either rousing or heartbreaking, depending on how you play it.

Can you imagine a whole suburb of face-shaped houses? I imagine the people who chose to live this way wouldn't mind if free-roving sheep were allowed to graze on the lawns.

Here's the gruesome part I told you about. A grinning pumpkin (above) acts like an aircraft carrier, launching tiny witches into an ether-filled dining room. It's a horrific, Tim Burtonesque idea, made funny by happy colors.

Looking at vintage Halloween cards I was surprised at how many had horrific themes. Here (above) the horror element comes in, not in the ghost's head that appears in the mirror, but in the hazy apparition of the witch who appears to be orchestrating the whole thing. Actually the ghost in the mirror probably isn't a ghost. Read Jenny's comment on the comment page.

I don't think anybody was trying to terrify little kids. When you deal humorously with a holiday that's meant to be scary you're going to have a hard time striking the right balance.

Of course some kids illustrators go out of their way to be creepy. Look at the work of Chris Van Allsburg and some of the later stuff by Maurice Sendak.

Even my own cartoon, "Tales of Worm Paranoia" was creepy, though in my case it was unintentional. I didn't know I had that side to my personality. If I'd had the chance to do more cartoons with the same character I would have made them more light-hearted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN35przh8pw

Talking about pictures that are intentionally horrific, what do you think of this (above)? It's a nightmare scenario of a partly human train struggling pointlessly through a slimy subterranean tunnel... something out of Hieronymus Bosch.

Another picture (above) by the same artist. Here old Italian architecture depicting the rational and the beautiful is skewered to make it depict primal fears and the breakdown of reason. It's scary to think how every positive image has a potential negative side. It reminds me of Bronowsky's summation of his "Ascent of Man" series where he warns of the consequences of hubris, the danger if we ever forget that we have a tendency to self-destruction as well as good.

Me, I still think of Halloween the way I did when I was a kid...pumpkins, ghosts and witches.

Haw! Do you see the giant cigarette boxes in the background? Believe it or not, kids used to trick or treat dressed as cigarettes. That's because TV was full of ads showing dancing girls in cigarette boxes.

You don't believe that was ever on TV? Here's (above) the proof.

If you plan to go into the haunted house/dark ride business, then you better join The Haunted House Association. Boy, every trade has an association nowadays.

Here's (above) the site of Hauntworld Magazine, which I think is put out by the Haunted House Association. When I was a kid I would have loved to have had a subscription to this.

If you live in LA you can go to the Haunted Los Angeles web site and find out where the area's haunted houses are. Real alleged haunted houses, that is, not dark rides. You can also find the sites where famous horror films were shot, and where movie stars, like Alfafa from The Little Rascals, met horrible ends.