I really, really love Halloween. It’s clearly the best holiday ever, as Kriston ably explains here. But my track record of displaying my love for the occasion is mixed, and this year I’m being particularly lame. I haven’t acquired any pumpkins, I haven’t decided on a costume, and I certainly haven’t summoned any unspeakable creatures of ancient evil from beyond the bounds of sane men’s dreams. I’m dropping the ball.
I’ve made my peace with this, though. I’ve more or less resigned myself to dealing with middle age by being the creepy guy who puts way too much effort into decorating his house each year, so it’s okay if I run up a Halloween-related karmic debt right now. Besides, by the time next year’s celebration rolls around I anticipate having learned how to make animatronic monsters (leaving only genuine necromancy remaining on my lifetime h’ween syllabus).
But I don’t want to let the date slip by entirely, so for now I’ll just offer some Halloween-y media that I enjoy:
- Do They Know It’s Halloween? I still love this song a stupid amount (be forewarned: there’s sound on the page at that link). I sang its praises last year, but my enthusiasm for the concept and execution hasn’t dimmed. It stayed in my regular ipod rotation for an embarrassingly large amount of November ‘05, and it’s wormed its way back in over the past few weeks.
- Hellboy! I came across the pretty-good movie adaptation on TV last night, which naturally reminded me of the totally awesome comic (viewer applications: currently-unavailable PC viewer, untested PC viewer, okay Mac viewer, untested Mac viewer). I soliloquized on Hellboy in a pretty tiring manner a year and a half ago — if you’re curious to know the storyline, head there. If you just want to read a deeply creepy and well-realized horror pastiche, start that Bittorrent download posthaste.
- Garfield’s Halloween Adventure. Admittedly, I haven’t actually seen this since I was a little kid, and anything associated with this franchise is generally pretty terrible. But it remains one of my most vivid Halloween memories. The internet disagrees with me, but I swear that when I saw this as a kid it contained a bunch of short animated pieces in addition to the main storyline. One of these centered on an orange cat — drawn in a completely different and generally more realistic style — escaping from an animal testing lab and being hunted down by scientists and dogs. In the final scene he escapes capture by involuntarily transforming into a dog — the result of the horrible testing he had undergone.
Okay, I might not be doing a good job of making it sound creepy as it seemed. But it scared the hell out of me when I first saw it. Now, sadly, the internet seems to have collectively forgotten this unusually grim chapter in the Garfield ouevre. Or maybe the sheer terror of it all just made everyone repress the memory. Anyway, this special was way better than Charlie Brown’s annual Halloween apostasy. Great Pumpkin?! Screw that.