Halloween Horrors

Later today, children will descend upon neighborhoods the world over in search of reasons for their parents to quietly ask them to brush their teeth a minute longer. The children will politely ignore the request.

It is also, god bless, happening on a Friday.

Or maybe not?

Well, the Friday part is happening. But whether or not you're in an area where you need to prepare—or care—about endless parades of trick-or-treaters is entirely to chance. The demographics of the neighborhood, the weather outside. Or...whether you want to answer the door at all.

Rob: So I’ve been thinking about what is the spookiest way you can decorate a house while still making kids approach in the hope of candy. 

This is more of a theoretical discussion for me: I’m at the end of a long drive and I don’t anticipate many trick-or-treaters and we’ll have to make very clear that The Zacny Compound is open for business if anyone is going to bother walking up the drive. Pumpkins, spotlighting on a comically large bowl of candy, maybe a big sign that says, “FREE CANDY FOR KIDS”. Though maybe that loops back around to being off-putting.

But there’s this sweet-spot where a house looks mostly uninviting but also like it might still be open for candy business. It’s the house you have to steel yourself to approach if you’re a kid walking up the driveway or footpath, where at age 9 or 10 you suspect you might get murdered but you also stand an even chance of nabbing some candy bars.

Fake cobwebs and headstones all over the lawn? OK, that’s cute, we’re in the spirit of things. Ditto that huge skeleton. Those are fun seasonal decorations that serve to advertise a house is joining in the celebration.

But nothing sticks in my head like this one house a few blocks over from my place. It stood at the end of a street on a very small ridge so you’d look up about ten feet from the street. It was a brick ranch with a breezeway-style porch between the garage and the main house. The porch was recessed underneath the eaves, and evergreens further obscured the front steps onto the porch.

The street was U-shaped. Not a cul-de-sac but two different streets terminating at the same place. So this house basically had its back to the neighborhood and only faced like one other home. And I remember one Halloween I’m walking along the street, almost home, and I look up at this place and see it has its porch-light on. But it was this single, dim, watery fluorescent bulb that mostly illuminated the front steps but plunged the porch even further into shadow. Every other light in the house is off and I’m about to just pass by when my eyes adjust a little bit and I see this outline of a person sitting on the porch.

I felt this jolt of fear but then I think, okay, there’s no decorations. No lights. They’re not taking part in trick-or-treating, and I’m kind of relieved because I don’t want to go up to that house. Except right as I’m about to walk past, I see the figure move. Its head turns toward me like an owl. A perfect, smooth, unnatural swivel. They are looking at me, I realize.

Well, now I can’t just walk past it. I am not a chicken. I’ve just turned 10 or so, I’m practically a teenager. This person will know I’m scared if I don’t go up there. I turn back toward their driveway and start up toward them, the only sound the scuff of my shoes on concrete.

“Trick or treat?” and it comes out as a quiet question. No response. I take a few more steps to the foot of their steps. “Trick or treat!” Louder now, producing a cloud of vapor between me and the figure. They don’t look quite right, but also… is that a silver bowl next to them? I catch a dim glint.

I climb the steps and brush past the evergreens and now stand at the edge of porch. “Trickertreat.” I can’t see with this fucking porchlight in the corner of my vision. I take a step forward.

Turns out it’s just a stuffed scarecrow slumped in a lawn chair next to a bowl full of candy on the ground. But Patrick, I’m telling you, it was the scariest thing I had ever seen. Not the scarecrow, really. Just the entire approach. The ambiguity. The fact it felt like I was walking into a trap, approaching a space that was fundamentally hostile.

I breathe a little sigh of relief and bend over to grab candy. Fun size wrappers, invisible in the dim light, come to hand. I put them in my sack and then out of the corner of my eye I see a bit of movement.

A small puff of steam jets from the scarecrow’s head. I freeze. A century passes. There’s another puff of steam. My eyes are adjusting now. Its chest is moving. I am backing away. I feel my feet reach the top of the steps. “Thank you!” I blurt and now I’m booking it down the driveway, down to the street, and I’m racing for home. I am dressed like the theatrical version of Sherlock Holmes with the cloak and the deerstalker hat and I keep expecting to feel something grab the edge of that coat and haul me back to my death. I stop about a block and a half away. I look behind me. Nothing. I have never been so afraid. I have never felt more alive and I know I need to calm down or my parents are never going to let me go trick-or-treating without supervision again and even though I’m half-convinced I almost died just now, I want to do this again.

Patrick: There is a whole genre of TikTok videos where you watch kids bravely stepping on a “press here” button at a Spirit Halloween, waiting for some tall monstrosity to leap into the air and scare them.

There is such a difference between the Halloween lawn decorations of years past and today. I think we’re all familiar with motion sensors, but those were a damn novelty back then. And most of them were indoors. Now, if you approach a house with a dozen Halloween-related lawn items, you damn well expect to be attacked by a jump scare en route to the candy. There’s a house down a street that spooked my five-year-old a few years back that she straight up refuses to visit again. Her sister just grabs the candy.

One of my all-time favorite memories is this one neighbor who otherwise was never seen outside. I didn’t know that lady’s story then, I don’t know it now. What I do know is that she fuckin’ loved Halloween, and would so decorate the inside of her house that she’d welcome people to walk through it. It wasn’t a haunted house, there were no jump scares. It was just tons and tons of cool lights and decorations for you to awe at while you were contemplating which piece of sugar to jam into your face in the next minute.

One day, she was too old and stopped doing it. It was such a bummer. I hope she knew how much kids appreciated what she put together, even though we were too young to convey that appreciation back then.