Halloween is Here, Sort of

BLOG FROM BEYOND

I woke up today here in the tiny Balkan country of Montenegro in pitch black. To set the stage, it was storming here last night when I went to bed. When I woke up early, it was dark. The power was out. And I was in the mood to write.

When I looked at my iPhone, I was dumbstruck to discover that today is Friday the 13th, which officially kicks off the Halloween season for me and the binge-watching of many a horror film, good or bad. Sometimes a bad horror flick can be great fun if it sucks in a truly monumental way (all hail Ed Wood). Hmm, I wonder if they have popcorn here in Montenegro.

Actually, my horror movie marathon began Labor Day weekend. I watched Lee Daniels’ ghetto possession horror drama The Deliverance on Netflix. I also finally watched The Black Phone, which I had skipped over during many a streaming search. I'll write about both of those films in another post—I promise. But right now, I want to talk about Halloween.

All Hallows’ Eve is my favorite holiday in the world. Some may look at me strangely when I say that, but it’s true. Originally known as the ancient festival of Samhain, it was a tradition practiced by the Celts. To them, it was a night when the boundaries between the land of the living and the land of the dead became blurred, and ghosts roamed the earth.

To me, Halloween is about believing in the unbelievable, the fantastic, the scary. It’s like being a kid all over again. In my youth, I lived in a world of comic books, sci-fi anthologies, true crime books, and, of course, horror flicks. Growing up in a slum area in Brooklyn, I found there weren't many ways to stay out of trouble (and danger). The local theater, unable to acquire first-run movies, would have triple features of older films. One hot summer day, to escape our sweltering apartment, my mother took us kids to the cool, dark of the movies, in what I would later learn was a grindhouse theater.

A triple feature was playing.

One movie was The Blob with a young Steve McQueen. The second feature was The Green Slime. The last feature was Night of the Living Dead, in all its black-and-white gory glory. That movie marked me deeply. At the time, I wasn’t fully aware of the statement director George A. Romero was making in 1968 when he cast an African American man as the main protagonist. But it was wonderful for a deprived Black kid to see that. Years later, I realized the bold statement the movie was making with the choice of hero and what happened to him at the hands of redneck hicks who mistook him for one of the living dead after he had survived a horrific night of horrors. That irony is no longer lost on me.

The movie gave me nightmares for weeks.

It launched a subgenre of zombie apocalypse films and series that continues today with The Walking Dead and World War Z, to name a couple.

The movie also changed my life.

#horror #halloween