What’s your October pleasure?

But enough about you — let’s talk about me. The Halloween costume and ornament catalogs have been coming for weeks and are lying about the house in various states of destruction, pawed at by the kids and chewed on by the rabbit. I gave them a cursory flip-through and haven’t looked back. Halloween for a great many in the 21st Century seems to be an especially charnel affair, all about severed arms and legs and jars of eyeballs and such and such. Zombies dominate the costume section but not the zombies of old, with their blank stares and solemn business attire – no, these are post-WALKING DEAD flesh-eaters, with their dangling mandibles and missing parts. Thank you but no. Blood and gore and free-floating viscera have their place and I’m grateful to live in a world where they can hang out. But that’s not Halloween to me.

I want to be haunted. I want to be beguiled and charmed. I want to be beckoned and warned and to ignore that warning and follow that sound from downstairs, that light in the attic, those whispers behind the wainscoting, the footsteps on the stairs. I want crisp Autumn nights and days in which the sky is the color of gunmetal. I want my leaves to be withered and sere, my roads unpaved and winding, my graveyards mossy and snaggled. As much as I prize, say, THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974) — and I do! — it’s just not a Halloween movie to me. I’m a year-round horror geek, so there is a season for every horror movie and the dog days of August are the optimal viewing time for that Tobe Hooper classic… but when the leaves start to turn and the days grow shorter and even warm days turn to chilly nights, I want a particular kind of seasonal viewing.

Terence Fisher’s THE BRIDES OF DRACULA (1960) has a wonderful autumnal palette… dead leaves are constantly underfoot in that movie and Van Helsing wears a scarf against the chill. (There’s also a wonderful resurrection scene in which a frightening old hag coaxes a fledgling vampire out of her grave, which at once seems to be a mockery of both childbirth and the fall harvest.) So many movies of a certain vintage get that feeling just right and I still watch them long after the full impact of their scare scenes has faded like old denim. Though not a horror film, per se, and closer kin to science fiction, Fisher’s ISLAND OF TERROR (1965) also has that frosty feeling of winter closing in, with bare treetops above and wet earth underfoot and all of the characters going about their business wearing topcoats or anoraks, and hats.

Sadly missing in contemporary horror films is the once de rigueur tavern scene, in which characters take refuge from the elements and/or monsters. Often times, our heroes will order wine or soup (or, better yet, goulash!) while the winds howl without and the flames from the fireplace cast odd, slightly menacing shadows on the walls. Even when the staff is surly and the service lacking, the tavern scene would be my favorite part of the horror movie, providing as it did a momentary caesura from the mounting dread and looming terror but also underscoring, in a sly way, the dichotomous nature of horror entertainment, the vicarious thrill we get from sampling from a place of comfort someone else’s worst case scenario. Horror has, in the past forty years or so, endeavored to put you, the viewer, in the center of it, to bring the horror home. I get that, I appreciate that on a certain level, it was a logical step for the genre… but I miss the charm, and the safety, of being on the outside looking in. And speaking of that…

… there is nothing scarier than someone looking in your damn window at night. Doesn’t matter who it is… Melissa Grapps, Count Yorga, that Glick boy… it just works a charm because you see them and they see you and they know you see them and WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO DO NEXT? That is horror, fear fans, and a wonderful metaphor for the experience of watching horror movies. More of that, please, and less of the other stuff, with the duct tape and the shackles and the rusty medical instruments and the blah dee blah. Also I want…

… more candles! Or lanterns! More flickering, let’s say! Flickering is scary because it changes the nature of what you’re looking at even as you see it for the first time. Horror movies used to involve certain tools, like game pieces, and everyone had to have them. Matches, candles, pocket knives (for prying open locked boxes or cutting around a wax seal)…

… and pinkie rings! Horror was just better when everyone wore pinkie rings. I mean, if we’re talking haunting and mystery and that Gothic vibe that is what October is and should be all about. Obviously if you crave more visceral thrills, if you enjoy tasting your own vomit at the back of the throat, then no, of course, you’re not going to see the value in pinkie rings. But if you are that sort, then you probably haven’t read this far anyway. But I digress.

More fog! That’s what this month needs! Carpets of fog, rolling in from the Devil knows where.

More work with the spade and mattock! People used to have to work for their horror, it didn’t just show up at their summer camp. Let’s see some dirt under everyone’s fingernails and not so much of their own blood. That’s October to me!

More old books full of secrets and incantations! The ones you can’t check out from the library but you have to steal! And I’ll take this opportunity to affirm that I’m not kidding about pinkie rings.