My Halloween: Creeping Bride

Five questions asked over a glowing Jack o’Lantern, under an Autumn moon obscured by passing clouds…in between mouthfuls of candy corn…the Creeping Bride has just begun a SHOCK! and Son of SHOCK! viewing project this October, covering the 72 Universal and Columbia movies released to television in 1957 and 1958…

Why is Halloween important to you?

I love how subversive Halloween is. Halloween is a rupture in the day-to-day miseries of quotidian existence—it’s like Mardi Gras but with less drunken idiots in the street and fewer puddles of vomit everywhere.

First of all, people dress up in crazy outfits and stroll the streets and it’s never an issue (have you ever wondered what would happen to you if you tried to wear a werewolf mask in public on the Fourth of July or Memorial Day?). Secondly, you give away fun stuff to total strangers (cheap candy, mostly, but I also sometimes give out DVD-Rs that I’ve made of public domain horror and sci fi flicks). So you’ve got this complete undermining of normal, respectable decorum and the dull mechanics of capitalist exchange.

Halloween also undermines the edifices of Christianity that tower over daily life in the U.S. It is, after all, a vestigial reminder of the distant pre-Christian and pre-industrial agricultural past: a polytheistic pagan harvest ceremony and festival of the dead. In Europe, the Church tried in vain to eliminate festivals like Samhain among the Celtic people by creating All Saints and All Souls holidays, but the stubborn persistence of Halloween suggests that this effort to Christianize the pagans has failed. In fact, I would argue that the evangelical “hell houses”—those haunted attractions put on by fundamentalist Christian groups in late October that substitute drug addicts, porn-addicted chronic masturbators, Muslim terrorists, ob-gyn doctors who perform abortions, and gay men for ghosts, vampires, and other monsters—illustrate how harvest-time pagan festivals of the dead have had a profound influence on Christianity. If you can’t beat the pagan ideas that underlie Halloween, then join ‘em, I guess.

Finally, I like that Halloween is so geared towards children. Kids have a very loose grasp on what is real—they are not bound by the confines of language, instrumental rationality, or career-mindedness, so theirs is much more like a world of imagination and instinct and emotion. Celebrating Halloween is giving them a time when they have the run of the roost of the Real World, and this makes the day all the more subversive. I know a lot of people like New Year’s Eve and Fat Tuesday as holidays, where the world is turned upside down, but for me, there’s only ever Halloween. (At least until we figure out a way to get folks to celebrate Walpurgis Night, too…)

Describe your ideal Halloween.

Let me start off by saying that Halloween should be a civic holiday where everyone gets the day off with pay. Maybe it could be two days, like Christmas Eve/Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day… let’s make it Halloween on 10/31 and the Day of the Dead on 11/1, when we’ll have parades and such. And you know how TV stations endlessly re-run Christmas kids’ shows like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer all December long”? Well, I’d like to see classic Halloween holiday shows in heavy rotation on TV, like Mad Monster Party, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, Groovie Goolies, and that CBS Famous Classic Tales animated production of The Tales of Washington Irving from the early ‘70s. (And while we’re on the subject, wouldn’t Dr. Seuss’s What Was I Scared Of? make a great half-hour animated Halloween counterpart to “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”?)

My ideal Halloween involves a movie house in my city that was built in the late 1920s and has been abandoned for about ten years. I’d love to resurrect that place for the night. I’d want to get some friends together and set up a walk-thru “haunted house” and Halloween party… open it up for people on Halloween, maybe with an old-time “spook show” magic act in the late afternoon for kids followed by an hour-long blast of classic scary cartoons (like Bugs Bunny’s Water, Water Every Hare, Felix the Cat’s Felix the Ghost Breaker, Popeye’s Fright to the Finish, Bimbo & Betty Boop’s Mysterious Mose, a Casper cartoon of some sort, etc.). After all the trick-or-treaters have come and gone and been put to bed, we can have a 10pm double-feature for the older crowd… maybe The Black Cat (1934) and The Uninvited (1944) and lots of creepy trailers, of course. But on second thought, since everyone’s got two days off for Halloween, why not make it a triple feature?

Let’s finish off the night with a Hammer picture, say The Plague of Zombies (1966) or Vampire Circus (1972).

What Halloween collectibles do you cherish, or hate, or both?

I’m not a collector, so I really can’t say that I feel anything about Halloween collectibles. I mean, I saw some pictures online the other day of a guy’s collection of vintage Halloween candles made by the Gurley company… I recognized a few of them from my own distant past, but the feelings I had were just nostalgic curiosity, I think, rather than aesthetic appreciation.

But I do like some of the 1950s and 1960s paper Halloween decoration designs, like those big thin cardboard ones that I used to see in my grandmother’s house or on my elementary school bulletin board.

When was your very first Halloween, the one where you really knew it was Halloween, and how was it?

I don’t know. I remember some of my early costumes and I remember some of the things that happened when I was a kid out trick-or-treating, but I can’t really remember my very first. But I do recall a house near my grandmother’s where the couple who lived there really went all in for Halloween. They lived in a house that had a big connecting living room and dining room that they made into a kind of spook house: the front door was propped open and kids had to walk through the two front rooms to a place in the back for candy. The couple wore costumes and decorated the place with crazy lights and candles and blasted Disney’s Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House LP all night long.

As a little kid, I found the whole experience to be quite disturbing, but I remember one year, in September, walking past the house (I seem to remember it painted red like the town in that High Plains Drifter movie) and thinking “Halloween will be here soon and I’ll have to go into that scary house again” and being a little nervous about it. I was probably five years old. That might be the first time that I ever anticipated Halloween.

What’s the one Halloween question you want to be asked and what’s your answer?

Q: What music are you preparing to use on Halloween night this year to freak out the trick-or-treaters who come to your door?

A: Film scores, I think: Tangerine Dream’s soundtrack for Sorcerer; the Westminster Philharmonic’s recording of Waxman’s The Bride of Frankenstein; the Eraserhead soundtrack; and the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra’s recreation of Salter’s The Ghost of Frankenstein and Skinner’s Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror. Put the speakers in the window, turn up the volume, and set the CD player on “shuffle”!