Halloween! It's definitely one of my favorite holidays. I generally get the decorating itch around mid-August, and damn if it doesn't turn into full blown hives come the second week of September.
Tastes and the idea of what is scary, not to mention what is deemed presentable, sure has changed over the decades. It's understandable that while my grandparents found Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff terrifying, it was difficult to be driven to shivers by a leering Vincent Price in my parents' heyday, when there was footage from Vietnam on the nightly news and factors like Kent State and the swell of sensationalized serial killers, the rise in crime and social disillusionment eroding away at the squeaky clean and safe image of 1950s society. In a way, the world that was generally marginalized to pooh-poohe'd, trashy, hyper-sensationalized True Crime magazines at the newsstand, was now shown to be closer to the state of things than the Lawrence Welk broadcast illusion that many had tried to paper their lives in, regardless how many holes and tears it bore. At that point, The Mummy ceased to be terrifying. Hence George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. New terror for a new era, where the chills on the screen had to match and exceed the ones the curtain had been drawn back from in the real world.
Take a walk through any department store Halloween section these days, and you'll see a plethora of brutal set pieces: bloody handprint window decals, cake toppers cast in the shape of butcher knives with bloody blades, polystyrene decapitated heads. Me, I'm a traditionalist. To me, that isn't Halloween. Halloween for me is a celebration; it's a charade; and, damned if it isn't supposed to me fun. Human butchery isn't fun, it's horrible, which is why while I understand the evolution of horror as a genre from William Hope Hodgson and Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man to Poppy Z. Brite and Saw, I'm strictly in the former camp when it comes to decoration.
Most of my decorations come from Beistle, the company that made all those nostalgic paper window decorations popular when your parents and grandparents were children. Due to popular demand they've been reprinting their classic designs over the last few years, even modernizing their game by upgrading some of their cardstock decor to window clings.
If you're interested in these throwback decorations as well, check them out
here. For some great goods (including shirts, pins, etcetera) utilizing some of those amazing Beistle designs, check out Creepy Co
here. And everyone have a great Halloween!
