Haunt Retrospective

Re-post of the old Retrospective Gallery post to bump it up (just added a photo from the 2025 display).

Had fun posting these to Instagram and wanted to have them all in one place on the blog.  Prior to the first display photo below from 1986, we did random things like stuffed dummies or rubber masks hanging in the tree.  1986 was an important year as it established that the lawn would always be some kind of cemetery.  And it featured a prop centerpiece (a focal point), which would become a general theme in the coming decades.  The Ghost standing in the cemetery had a flashing strobe light in its head, and even now after all these years I love the vibe in that photo.  It really captures what I love about Halloween.  The macabre absurdity of it all.  Creating some strange little world on a small lawn of a brick house in a strip of rowhomes in suburbia.  Trying to make the ordinary (and life) spooky... and making it a little mysterious too.  

The Shape

Sported my new Myers mask (Cemetery Gate Production's WARLOCK) this Halloween and I'd have to say that I've never felt more like him.  People seemed extra unnerved.  One child was shouting up from the sidewalk asking Michael Audrey Myers if he was going to kill him.  I did the Myers head tilt and his family laughed and screamed.  They eventually came up, and I could tell they were really creeped out and uncomfortable.  So after handing them candy, and as they were leaving, I stepped out onto the porch (something I rarely do).  They definitely weren't expecting that and the mom shrieked.  This caused the child, and his family, to run towards the sidewalk.  In what seemed like a moment from a Scooby-Doo cartoon, one of the handles on his trick-or-treat bag caught onto the foot of the staked corpse at the entry to the porch.  He didn't know what snagged him, but I could tell he thought it was me, as he wasn't looking back.  He screamed and left the bag dangling from the corpse's foot.  Michael Myers silently removed the bag, straightened the corpse, and looked up.  The boy was coming back.  I handed him his bag and he whispered "Thank you, Michael" and ran off.

It was one of those incredible Halloween moments that make this holiday so absolutely wonderful.

What a night.

September 1st

Spending the first of September fiddling and tinkering in the basement, getting ready for the big day.  Everything's going really well and I'm definitely ahead of schedule.

  

As a child, September was the ugly end of summer vacation.  I recall worrying about September by the end of each July.  The worrying practically ruined August.  I tried to force myself to savor the break from school, to mentally will the days to go slower.  They never did.

September also meant that Halloween was around the corner...  and Thanksgiving and Christmas soon after.  It felt like being bamboozled.  We had to do this one [horrid] thing in order to get these other [great] things.  I can recall asking my mother every morning "How many more days until school?"  She probably couldn't wait.

The prison routine was easy to pick up once we started back.  Before you knew it, the weather was crisp and cool and decorations for Fall and Halloween were getting hung.  We spoke of our costume plans and talked about scary movies.  Teachers shut off the lights and told ghost stories.  We made napkin ghosts and ate mellowcreme pumpkins.  

I can recall a particularly windy Fall day where I gazed out the window of a classroom that faced the wooded area that backed up against the narrow parking lot next to the school.  The window was on the third floor, so it offered a terrific view of the creek that ran through those woods. We spent so much of our free time down in those woods, and along that creek.  Leaves were flying from the trees with each gust of wind, and the trees were already thinning.  A small dirt path ran along the creek, and I found myself staring at it, imagining a classic Witch moving along it.  I swear that I imagined it so clearly that it was like watching it happen.  She hurried along, with her back to me, as the leaves snowed down around her.  I turned to a kid next to me and tried to explain what I was seeing in my head, but it surely came out as goofy, and ranty (I've seen that look a million times since then [proportionate to my rantings]).

I'd like to think that it was one of those formative moments... one of those sparks that I carried with me.  Something that made me want to build and photograph spooky props when I figured out how to build them.  Oddly, thinking about that today made me extremely grateful smartphones didn't exist back then.  Heck, the Internet didn't either.  I dread to think how having the ability to instantly view such a scene...a Witch walking along a leafy path... would have satiated my thoughts, and dulled my creativity.  And I can't even comprehend what A.I. would have done to my motivation.  I feel like so much of my process starts with "You know what would be neat?!" and to be able to google that neat thing, or to create it instantly with A.I., well, I'm thinking I wouldn't have been as compelled to build it.  

Thankfully, I'll never know the answer to that.  As I'm sitting here right now imagining myself talking to my old grade school and asking them for permission to take some photos from that window.  Looking down on that old dirt path, as I snap a bunch of photos of my Witch prop, with her back to me.  As leaves shower down around her on a very windy Autumn day.

Cheers to September!  

It's nice to have you back.

Mark Snow

We lost composer Mark Snow on July 4th.  He was 78 years old.  When I was young, I can perfectly recall the disgust and uneasiness that my dad would project whenever a favorite Hollywood figure or big band composer would pass away.  He would yell into the other room where my mother was and say something like "Betty!  James Cagney died! I remember when he was a young man!  Everybody's dying!"

I never gave it much thought back then, as those people seemed to be some kind of relic or fossil.  My dad would add later "Never get old, boys!"  (Though he'd also often say "Never get married!...and if you DO get married, never have kids!")  

I feel like everyone who reads this blog probably has a deep love for The X-Files.  And if you feel that love, you probably know the show's composer by name.  His music was as much a part of that show as the two main characters.  I wonder if the show would have been as popular had he not scored every episode.  Would the aliens have been as horrifying?  Would those wonderful moments between Scully and Mulder have been as touching?  

Absolutely not.

Here's to a man who made an enormous impact on this guy.  

It's rough getting old and seeing your favorites pass on.

Everybody's dying.

Click below for the absolute perfect example of Mr. Snow's talents...

Reaper

An old (true) story that inspired a prop...

Giving out candy on Halloween night for as long as I've been doing it has made me something of an observer.  I get to study how adults and children act when approaching my Haunt. If they're the type to pause and appreciate everything, or the sort that rushes up and away without hesitation and without looking back. There are the people that kneel down and study props, tapping lightly at the mache.  And the ones that get brushed with threads hanging down from the porch or trellis like thin spider webs and scream and run off before getting candy.  There are parents that get frustrated with their children who clearly are too terrified to walk onto the porch for candy.  And parents who love to sit back and watch their children slowly approaching the Haunt, with huge proud smiles.

Back when I gave out candy at my parents' house in the old neighborhood, I saw children grow up - going from trick-or-treater to parent.  That was the most peculiar feeling.  I'd see a young man carrying his own child, and I remembered when he was too scared to come up for candy. Crazy.

Then there was something else - Death.  There was a cloaked figure that walked slowly around the neighborhood.  A black hooded cloak, the deluxe variety, and a rubber skull mask.  I'm assuming it was an adult male based on the height and build.  I'm not exaggerating or embellishing in any way - I saw him every single year and had seen him for as far back as I could remember.  I don't know if it was the same guy or maybe a few guys over the years.  But there was always just the one lonely figure, keeping to himself and not stopping at houses for candy.  He was in character too, with a strange slow walk, like a one-man funeral procession.

It's a neat concept, an adult who never gave up on Halloween.  Keeps a cloak and a mask in a drawer or closet all year long. On Halloween night, he leaves work early, has dinner, puts a bowl of candy out on the porch with a "Help Yourself" sign, and then dons a rich dark cloak and an old, tattered latex mask, the kind that smells like new sneakers.  I bet he was smiling under there the whole time.

Or maybe it really was Death.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hoping everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving.  We're currently drinking coffee and flipping between the Macy's and the Philadelphia Dunkin' Thanksgiving Parades.  That Dunkin' Donuts one initially started out in Philadelphia as the Gimbles Thanksgiving Day Parade, back in 1920.  It ran until 1986, and it always seemed to be on in my parents' and grandparents' houses, despite being wildly inferior in quality and talent.  By the 80's, it felt more like visiting a sad carnival in an old empty town.  Like a scene in a favorite Bradbury story:

Now a sword-swallower choked on a sword, sprayed kerosene in a gout of flame, and wandered out to applause from five small girls.

Three clowns knocked each other across the ring and bounded off to aching silence.

I think it was a Philly thing.  It was occurring in our own city, and we would like it if it killed us.  My sister even starred in it one year.  That's how it was treated in our house, like she was performing a musical number.  Meanwhile she worked for a now-defunct toy company called Kiddie City.  She was one of the five folks holding a support tether to an extremely small, round Kiddie City balloon in the parade.  And we missed her in the broadcast.  

Eventually, I stopped watching either parade.  It just seemed a little soulless and phony.  A few years ago, I turned the Macy's parade back on.  Had a fire going, had some music playing in the background, and kept the volume on the tv nice and low.  Felt a little like being at my grandmother's house on Thanksgiving morning.  And it actually wasn't all that soulless.  Nor phony.  It turns out it's that wonderful thing called Tradition.  And at this age, I welcome the actors I've never seen... and the songs I've never heard.

This year it's raining at both locations, and the crowds are excited and happy nonetheless.  

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!  Thanks SO much for reading this blog.  I truly appreciate it.

Here are some vintage and delightfully creepy photos from the Gimbles parade.

Image sources here and here.