We’re back!

October started like it had somewhere to be this year, huh?

All of Fall did, really. It seemed to come in at a rush, as if the changing of the seasons slipped a ring at curtain call and brought the whole thing crashing down to center stage. It’s cold now! It’s rainy and soggy and I can’t seem to get this chill out of my apartment, or the cat out of his little blanket-nest on the couch! I swear it was sunny and warm, like, a week ago. It’s as if the seasons are making up for all that time we spent in quarantine, and now they’ve got something to prove just like the rest of us. Hallowe’en is back!

The LONG Hallowe’en is back! We made it through another year!

Someday I’ll get good at writing these – these first, introductory posts, I mean. What can I say about Hallowe’en I haven’t already said before? How am I going to put it better than last year’s anniversary post that commemorated a decade of obsessing over spooky media, spoopy media and everything in between? What’s even left for this creepy little column?

I’m sure there’s still some leftovers to pick through. Let me think for a sec.

Well, first of all I still haven’t written about The Nightmare Before Christmas or the legendary Hausu, despite finding time to date monsters, mould plastic fingertips and suffer a panic attack on a Disney ride. I’ve plumbed the corporate hellscape, Ontario and highschool but still haven’t brought Barbarian, Manhunt or PTSD: Radio into the fold just yet. Night in the Woods is still lost out there, so is Returnal, so are Signalis and Inscryption. In fact I’d estimate there’s over a hundred entries waiting in the wings for their shot at the pumpkin crown. I do my best, but not every year can be Quarante’en Hallowe’en 2020: the year this column measured a novel-length 40,000 words and semi-accidentally became my indie game-dev debut.

Mercifully, every year is also not ten-year anniversary 2022: the year life and a seven-day work week left me the space to throw together about 3 of the 31 articles planned. Not ideal, but then who’s counting?

(Me. I’m counting. At least it isn’t a Youtube playlist anymore!)

At least the finale was good. But that’s all behind us now: it’s a bold new decade for Hallowe’en writeups, reviews, reflections and resurrections. What I’m saying is this:

Welcome to The Long Hallowe’en XI: Online Edition.

Did I mention it’s been eleven years? Sometimes I forget people drop in and out of this thing. I don’t blame them: let’s go from the top.

What is the Long Hallowe’en? Like the Batman comic?

Yes! Also no.

Since its inception in 2012, The Long Hallowe’en has been a lot of different things: It’s been an ill-fated Youtube playlist, several better-fated Spotify playlists, a series of in-house film screenings, a series of blackout-level Hallowe’en parties (I’m told), a tarot card spread, a photography series, an interactive text-adventure and, yes, a legendary Batman run by Jeph Loeb and the late, great Tim Sale. Jeph, for the record, has a standing invitation to come fight me for the name of the holiday he misspells on the cover of his own comic book.

Your move, Jeph. Guess those four Eisners can’t buy an apostrophe. Please don’t hate me. 

We’ve come a very long way to where my Long Hallowe’en is now: a month-long curated celebration of the spooky season spirit in all its many diverse forms. The Long Hallowe’en is a series of music playlists, yes, but also a curiosity shop stuffed with exceptional games, films, books and mysterious junk all in the name of better observing pumpkin month. It’s an October Advent Calendar counting down to the best day of the year: the day everyone, everywhere, is given a one-night license to step out of their skin and imagine themselves as something else for a while. It’s the day transformations take place; some a temporary bit of superficial fun, many others in secret, and on a much deeper level. 

It’s a simple but inescapable truth: tons of people put on costumes for Hallowe’en. A certain subset of people – many of them gender-nonconforming and trans – take Hallowe’en as an opportunity to take their costumes off for a change, and show the world who they really are. 

It’s the festival of the harvest and a season for change, after all. 

For the last several years, The Long Hallowe’en has taken the form of a series of articles championing various pieces of media that I feel best embody the Hallowe’en spirit. Classic Horror films (obvious) to outsider art pieces and thinly-disguised therapy sessions (less obvious!) have all made features before. Sometimes it’s an opportunity to experiment with my own work, or even dissect the deep lore of horror icon Garfield, the cat who loves pizza. There are only three rules for what gets featured on the Long Hallowe’en, and they’re kind of all the same:

  1. Nothing gets reused (with the exception of a certain Ministry song). Whether it’s a tune, movie or anything else. This makes playlists fun and hard after 10 years!
  2. No featuring the same artist twice in a row, for music or anything else. 
  3. No featuring the same medium twice in a row. If yesterday was an album, today’s a movie.  

This year, to keep things interesting and celebrate a new decade of Long Hallowe’ens, I thought I’d add a new pendulum-shaped rule: Trick and Treat.  

  1. Every day’s post must alternate tonally between Trick (for those bits of media that are nasty, frightening surprises) and Treat (for those cozy Autumn warmers that brighten our soggy October nights). Some will cheat and be both!

The idea is to keep things rocking back and forth between fun and genuinely frightening, and keep candles burning for the twin creepy-cute, scary-safe energies that make Hallowe’en so special. Let me give examples: a Treat would be something like Candy Corn, because it’s sweet and nostalgic and will give you a cavity immediately. A Trick would be something like… well, like Candy Corn because it has the consistency of a packing peanut and also tastes like a packing peanut. It’s like a candy from the 1800’s they forgot to finish or throw away. And now we’re stuck with it.

Maybe that was a bad example. Have I written on Candy Corn yet?

The primary goal, as always, is to get to 31 pieces over the next 31 days. Have we ever actually pulled it off? Yes, once, deep in the pandemic! The fact that this introductory article is going up on the fifth is a clue about where we’re at this year, and the work to be done. Will we have fun and revel for straight month in the sublime energy of pumpkin spice, horror games and the scary movie season?

Absolutely. We are all going to get tummy aches right away.

So let’s get started!

Before I take off, a peek in this year’s Trick or Treat sack. It’s all full-size bars this year, no fruit leathers, no weird house on the corner that gives out ziploc bags of loose nuts for some reason. No Rockets. I’ve had two years to prepare, so put your mask on. We got articles coming on:

  • A haunted card game flush with hungry spirits!
  • A rusting vessel on murky waters!
  • A dead city choked with rain!
  • A NOT-dead city choked with zombies!
  • The bizarre forty-year hallucinations of puppet master Phil Tippett!
  • The burrowing horror of anxiety!
  • Perhaps the most addictive videogame of all time!
  • The psychic onslaught of the most distressing visual novel ever written! In song!
  • Candy Corn!
  • Cats having a weird time!

Happy Hallowe’en! It’s gonna be great!

Tide yourself over til the next entry with last year’s grand finale and the fifteenth entry in our mixtape series, Lavender Coffin! It’s 31 days worth of haunting, haunted American Blues, Murder Ballads and Salvation!