Another year, another Halloween over…
Or is it?
This was a largely unfulfilling Halloween for me. I suspect it was for many other people, too. It isn’t just that we couldn’t celebrate it the way we normally do… Halloween, truthfully, can be just a night of you watching Halloween stuff alone, whether it’s specials or scary movies… Eating some candy. Stuff like that. I tried. I watched Treehouse of Terror episodes, some various other Halloween cartoons and specials here and there, and spun my copy of the classic Disneyland LP Chilling Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House. I re-wrote a long-dormant Halloween-themed episode of a planned animated TV show I’ve been working on for ages. I even went on a walk around my neighborhood, with crisp fall air and everything… But anxiety pounded me. Non-stop. It has been pounding me like no other. An election that would decide the fate of the country and several peoples’ lives… being right around the corner did not help one bit… Add in sinus problems and more anxiety about not doing enough to make this Halloween worth it and every other struggle I’m having being stuck at home…
So now Halloween is over, that whole “season” is over… Fall is still here until December 21st, of course, but… I think about friends and other folks who are into Halloween-ish and spooky stuff all year around, like I am…
Why stop after October 31st? Or November 1st, if you specifically celebrate Samhain, for that matter?
There are horror movies that come out in November, December, January, and so on. Some recent examples… Freaky opened today, Friday the 13th, Leigh Whannel’s excellent and nail-biting The Invisible Man was a late February release earlier this year, Mike Flanigan’s masterful Stephen King adaptation Doctor Sleep opened in November of last year, Julius Avery’s splatterhouse WWII actioner Overlord came out in November 2018, Jordan Peele’s excellent Get Out was a February release in 2017, other horror films opened during the early summer. Animated feature horror – a frustratingly rare breed in American animation – sometimes misses the summer and fall, Henry Selick’s Coraline is a great example of that, for it was a February release back in 2009. Some of the classic horror cartoons I turn to have come out a little after Halloween. One example is the UPA’s adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, it was first theatrically released in mid-December of 1953. The Mickey Mouse cartoon Lonesome Ghosts, regularly included in Disney Halloween compilations – such as the 1990 Cartoon Classics volume Halloween Haunts and the House of Villains feature-length special of the House of Mouse TV show, was also a December release in its respective year of release. Hell, even the quintessential modern “Halloween classic” Over the Garden Wall first aired on Cartoon Network three days after Halloween.
Who says it all stops after October 31st?
Around this time, the days get shorter. The skies go completely dark at around 4:30-5:00 pm, and the weather remains the way it is with some fluctuations here and there. These past few days, it’s been in the low 70s.
The Christmas season is often emphasized with bright reds and greens, jingle-jangle music and carols, pine trees, friendly images of a bearded man with a troop of magical reindeer, and lots of white… Snow, of course.
But to me, Christmas can definitely take on a darker and spookier aesthetic. A nonetheless compelling and freakish one, at that. Charles Dickens’ iconic classic, A Christmas Carol, is a great example of such elements. The story is about ghosts, for starters. Many adaptations of the story have leaned into the darker aspects, too, and take on that ominous, spooky mood. How about the idea of a random bearded man who “sees you when you’re sleeping” and “knows when you’re awake”? Even in a fantastical context, Santa keeping a list of every child in the world and knowing what they are up to is certainly unsettling in many ways. Who does this guy think he is? Big Brother? Santa coming down the chimney derives from folkloric stories of beings coming down chimneys, whether they were benevolent supernatural beings or horrid gremlins. Or hey, how about Krampus? That European monster who punishes the naughty children? Oh, and let’s not forget that both Halloween and Christmas have strong pagan roots and in their modern form are largely Christianized, Westernized holidays.
Basically, I’m trying to suggest that Christmas season CAN be Halloween 2.0. Like people, like nature itself, there’s adaptation. Gone is the harvest season, in comes the ice cold nights and snow… So, that doesn’t mean discount the spooky stuff! Maybe that’s what I need to do for myself. It’s weird coming from me, as someone who specifically enjoys the Halloween season because it – for me, a New Englander – is the perfect meshing of that kind of weather with spooky stuff and freaks. Plus, the fall leaves and textures complement the pumpkins and cider so well, you know? October is like the perfect month… Yet I and many others around the world really couldn’t have that this year due to the pandemic and every bit of stress this election has spawned. Maybe the rest of November will pick up, and less strenuous days will be ahead, who knows…
After Christmas? Well… Horror movies, like I said, come out during these months. Any horror movie that’s upcoming anytime soon will likely debut on VOD or streaming, but that doesn’t stop one from spinning a horror flick they already own during these months. The spooky and freaky stuff can be applied to the cold January, February, and March days. Spookiness is all around the cold season, it’s just a much different kind, it’s one that matches the utter drabness of winter quite nicely… That is, if you’re in the mood to enjoy that kind of weather and look. Or if you have the things that get you through it all. And hey, according to Gravity Falls, summer season can be spooky as well. If you’ve seen the episode ‘Summerween’, you’d know what I mean. Imagine if more Halloween lovers made that a summer routine. I would!
Yet for me, as someone who can have trouble with this sort of thing, it just isn’t the same. Again, the perfect combination of the October weather with the abundance of scares and frights and freaks and various autumnal festivities… I’ve got to wait once more to try and enjoy it again. Or maybe I need to stop determining that autumn was “always” my time of year when I have very well made precious memories in the other seasons. Heck, I keep going back to autumn 2004 and for some reason, in my mind that was a definitive autumn that made my love for it grow larger. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ll still cherish the September-mid December stretch, but what if it’s just attachment on my part? I want to make every autumn count, but I want to make every year count, too. In 2004, was I gearing up for autumn? Or was I gearing up for just my birthday? And somehow a lot went right despite a lot of things that could’ve – in a much different scenario – sent me into a horrible depression? Maybe I do autumn better when not consciously trying to make it great with constant planning?
How do I look at autumn, anyways? I don’t remember if I ever got into this on here… I guess that’s just how frazzled I am from this pandemic, this past election, the constant unrest and bad vibes everywhere, and my own personal issues, my ongoing battles with anxiety, etc. While some view autumn as a melancholic, depressing death season, I see it differently… I see it as a season of change and progress, marked by the trees shedding their leaves, as in shedding old selves and growing new beautiful selves, only to shed those again, and then repeat. In the mix, you get festivities of freaks and frights, another holiday that has a big meal involved, and plenty of other great things. Winter is the final death blow, shall we say, to those old selves. The tree itself remains the same, as do you. I am still me, I am still the same spirit from 2010, 2000, 1995, and before. The leaves are the old “flaws” I shed in my quest for being the best I can be. I love tradition, and I love future prospects. I am not a luddite, but I am also not one to completely forget old things, either. I like to be somewhere in the middle, that’s always been my sort of thing when it comes to this kind of thinking. Yet sometimes, that progress can be hard, as evidenced by these trying times. Maybe many other people couldn’t celebrate accordingly, either, and that it wasn’t just me letting the worst of my brain – from anxiety to executive dysfunction – get the better of me.
I have no idea what the world is going to be like in fall 2021, but I can only hope that I’ll have it in me to try to have a better September/October and a better, more fulfilling Halloween regardless of my mental battle scars brought on by this hell-year… But at the same time, I should retain that spirit throughout the year without feeling like I’m doing it all wrong… After all, isn’t Halloween the time of the year when the so-called “normies” let out their inner freak? I’m always showing my inner freak…