Halloween Month Begins!

It's October!  As anybody who read my blog last year during this time knows (or anybody who casually strolls over there now to take a quick look...it's okay, I'll wait...) I'm a huge fan of Halloween.  I carve up pumpkins, I decorate, and I get deep into the idea of scary movies, TV shows, video games, books, and everything else.

Which is surprising, because when I was young I hated scary movies.  I've talked about the first thing that I remember scaring me on TV (which my father insists wasn't the first thing that ever really scared me, but it's what I remember).  What I haven't talked about is the fact that I grew to hate scary things so much that once, at a party at my own house, a group of my friends decided to watch Ernest Scared Stupid.  I knew that Ernest movies were dumb.  I watched his TV show when I was young, and looking back now, I have no idea why anybody thought he was funny.

But instead of watching a movie that might have been "dumb scary" and "probably not funny," I instead excused myself to another room and...you know, I don't even remember what I did in there.  Played a board game by myself?  Read a book?  Playing my Game Boy?  I remember sitting on the floor doing something, but I can't for the life of me remember what.  But when the movie was over, I came back out and rejoined my friends.

I'm still embarrassed by that, but I justify it by saying that I can proudly say I've never seen all of Ernest Scared Stupid.


So getting into Halloween Month this year is going to be a bit different than last year.  Last year I tried to stay to some pretty true classic "tropes" of Halloween.  We've had vampires invade Riverdale,  zombies in high schools, and haunted amusement park rides.  Movies, games, and so many other things were discussed, but I never really got into fear itself.

Sadly, not the TV series.  My attempt to buy a used copy on DVD got me three scratched discs.  Someday.

This month, I'm going to try to look a bit deeper into the psychological side of what makes things scary, and why certain things affected me in my life the way they did.  There will be some basics, such as "what do classic horror monsters represent," and there will be some personal insights into what I'm afraid of.  There will also be some really thin attempts to justify including something in Halloween Month based off a casual mention of fear, and there will be some truly weird things that I'll probably completely mishandle, but have a significance in today's culture.

For instance, today's post wasn't going to be this mini-essay, it was going to be me jumping right in with a video game about high school students forced to kill each other to survive, but in light of today's news, it seemed to be in rather poor taste.  It could be extremely relevant, but I'm not 100% confident in my ability to handle the matter without using some language that detracts from the respect I feel for the issue itself.

But anyway, you can expect a look at movies, cartoons, video games, and even a few comic books.  We'll get goofy, we'll get silly, and, of course, we'll get scary.

Join us (me?) as tomorrow we dive right in and explore what I'd probably describe as my greatest fear of all.