It was a big deal for me when my mom let me rent “Halloween,” the supposedly most successful shoe-string budget horror film in history. Horror icons like Jason Vorhees, Freddy Kreuger, and Michael Myers are in many elementary school kids’ vocabulary, though few have probably seen any of the movies featuring these characters. Alexei had told me all about the later sequels in the “Halloween” series around a year after his ankle-shattering, arm-breaking fall from a dead tree limb. The Halloween of his accident he dressed as a burn victim and we carted him around David Moats’ neighborhood in a wheelchair. At that time, the mask my mom picked out at the local costume shop to complete his outfit was a mummy mask that was vaguely reminiscent of Michael Myers mask, which, if you know the trivia was itself actually a William Shatner Star Trek mask spray-painted white (recall I mentioned a shoe-string budget).
The following year I was having another annual Halloween party, something I loved to put on. Typically I invited a group of friends, decorated the house and designed a mini haunted house sort of scenario. And there were always treat bags at my parties, an extra feature that kept my friends coming. I would lead them around the various rooms of my creepy old house, and try to scare them with tacky props, etc. At the conclusion of the first annual Halloween party I brought them into the room that used to be the ‘study’ and opened a closet door to have a corpse mask stuffed with newspaper to come barreling down. It scared Andy Altonhoff enough for me to know that I needed to make another one the next year.
The next year went haywire for a variety of reasons. For one, Bobby Shoup did some jump maneuver that sent his weight into the TV stand, causing it to break. Julian was there and thought it was hilarious. Dave also ruined the blind-folded put-your-hands-in-the-bowl-and-feel-the-eyeballs-that-are-actually-grapes by saying, “I can’t eat these, I don’t eat grapes.” At any rate, that was the year I used Alexei’s mummy mask as the head of a stuffed dummy in the living room. Late one night he came back from hanging out with Jeff Judycki. The two of them had watched a “Halloween” marathon on cable television and he told me the next day how the mask scared him in the dark.
I don’t remember what year it was, but I first watched “Halloween” upstairs in my bedroom and Alexei was assigned by my mom to watch it with me, lest I get frightened, but he didn’t want to so he holed himself away in his room. By then he was a teenager, so… you know…
On the Halloween seasons of 7th and 8th grade, Seth and I put on a haunted forest walk in his yard, which for one year included Dave’s yard as well. Dave was there for the first year, but the second year he ditched out at the last minute, leaving Seth and me scrambling to rearrange the whole schematic of the haunted forest walk. We made money from it too. Charged 50 or 75 cents the first year and a dollar the next. The first year by consensus of local neighbors and classmates at school was better than the second, but Seth and I did the best we could given Dave’s absenteeism. Neighborhood families and classmates flooded to our haunted forest both years, as we had developed a good ad campaign even at that age. I bought the “Halloween” soundtrack to play on a boom box for when we were on. Those same songs played over and over again night after night (maybe two weekends each year that we were open for business), and continued to play in my mind when I walked back home across the prairie at 10:30 pm; I remember it exactly like that: a few dollars richer, exhausted, wind cooling the sweat from my mask-matted hair, and the “Halloween” soundtrack residues in the back of my thoughts. Those were some of the best Halloween seasons of my life.
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