2025 has been a year of interesting firsts for me, on a personal level. Hey, did I tell you guys that I got engaged? Or that I attended my first convention as a vendor, being on the other side of the dealer's room for once? (Not that this stopped me from buying more one-sheets and action figures that I didn't need.) Hey, I broke my arm and had to have surgery on it back in March. That was a new experience for me too. Through all this change and upheaval in my life – mostly good, I'll clarify – there was a little thought in the back of my head.
“How is this going to effect my Halloween?”
Yes, even when I've got a lot going on, the Autumn Country is never far from my mind. When the pumpkins and skeletons and ghosts and witches start to pop up in stores, in the middle of summer now, I always feel like a little kid again. If only for a second or two. Perhaps that is why Halloween has such a special place in my heart. It reconnects me with my childhood in a way that simply no other time of year does. Ya know, to be a kid is to be afraid a lot. You are new to the world. There is much you don't understand. Maybe Halloween is a way to embrace that fear. To learn not to be afraid by becoming friends with the monster under the bed, to quote an anecdote from Guillermo del Toro.
“How is this going to effect my Halloween?”
Yes, even when I've got a lot going on, the Autumn Country is never far from my mind. When the pumpkins and skeletons and ghosts and witches start to pop up in stores, in the middle of summer now, I always feel like a little kid again. If only for a second or two. Perhaps that is why Halloween has such a special place in my heart. It reconnects me with my childhood in a way that simply no other time of year does. Ya know, to be a kid is to be afraid a lot. You are new to the world. There is much you don't understand. Maybe Halloween is a way to embrace that fear. To learn not to be afraid by becoming friends with the monster under the bed, to quote an anecdote from Guillermo del Toro.
As I've recounted, oh, at least fourteen times before, the Halloween Horrorfest Blog-a-Thon has long been my favorite way to celebrate the latter months of the year. I guess it's silly. Who reads blogs in 2025? Almost nobody, if Google's analytics are correct. Like all hobbyist, I do it for the love of the game. Watching and writing about a bunch of creepy or spooky old movies and TV shows – maybe a few newer ones too – makes me happy. It makes me able to pretend that I'm a real film critic, that gold star job title I used to want to have that basically doesn't exist anymore. We're all film critics now, with our own platforms on various social media avenues. Will my back log of thousands of movie reviews ever count for anything? Probably not. I just like it.
Anyway, I digress. Back to the topic at hand: Grim grinning gourds, clattering bones, howling wolves. Since expanding my seasonal coverage to two months last year, it's opened up more time for me to do this stupid shit. Plenty of familiar faces, a number of recent releases, many more old ones, and plenty of off-beat choices will be covered in these digital pages in the days and weeks to come. If one person reads these words, it'll have all been worth it.
One of my goals with the Blog-a-Thon every year is to fill gaps in my genre movie knowledge. In 2025, I'm doing this a little more literally than usual. Since horror is a landscape littered with long-running franchises, some of us have probably seen some installments in an obscure series here or there but not all of them. Well, after consulting my very long list of shit I've seen, I discovered several off-beat long-runners that I never bothered watching more of. "Final Destination" got a new movie this year and I want to pay tribute to Tony Todd, so I'll be catching up with all of those. After sitting on the shelf for a while, that "Witchboard" remake finally cam out. I've only ever seen the original so might as watch the two sequels as well. I read Dean Koontz' "Watchers" a few years back and – at the risk of exposing myself as a horror lit fraud – I actually loved it. I watched the first adaptation a while ago but have never seen the three sequels, so that's on the agenda. Once I started looking at obscure series that I've left unrun, I started finding more and quickly my schedule for September and October started to fill out.
That would probably be enough for most but, me always overdoing it, I'm throwing in another massive project designed to expand my education. During last year's Halloween Blog-a-Thon, I decided to travel through as many foreign countries as possible via the horror movies they have produced. I ended up hitting over forty different cultures, which was cool and all... But we all know fifty is the milestone number to aspire too! Thus, I'm doing a second Horror Around the World theme this fall. The last one was great fun and I'll be returning to a number of cinematic frontiers I've previously visited while including far more I've not yet explored. Besides, I'm not super happy with the state of my own country right now so maybe I'll find another one more charming...
As stuffed as that makes my two months, I can't have a Blog-a-Thon without a bunch of TV shows too. Spooky sitcoms have become a reoccurring feature around here, so naturally I'm going to continue with the original "Addams Family." 2025 apparently marks the seventh year I've been doing what I call the Anthologies Anthology: Watching a single episode from a wide selection of old, and some newer, horror and science fiction anthology shows. Every time I do this, I discover some overlooked program that is surprisingly good and my line-up is as wide and diverse as always. I'm highly skeptical of "Alien: Earth," somehow the first attempt to serialize that particular franchise of intergalactic fear, but I suppose I would be a "bad fan" if I didn't at least give it a try.
I don't have any other Halloween festivities planned for the next nine weeks. I'm a middle-aged man now. I have responsibilities and such. Watching upwards of a hundred or more movies and TV shows in a two month period, writing reviews of all of them, is time intensive. I have often found myself wondering when I'll no longer have the time to pursue this silly hobby of mine. It's hard for me to give it up, truth be told. Even when I've thought about doing it, ringing in the harvest, marking the change of the season, establishing yearly continuity by doing the same thing every year: It is important to me. Holidays are important, in that sense. I think so anyway.
I don't have any other Halloween festivities planned for the next nine weeks. I'm a middle-aged man now. I have responsibilities and such. Watching upwards of a hundred or more movies and TV shows in a two month period, writing reviews of all of them, is time intensive. I have often found myself wondering when I'll no longer have the time to pursue this silly hobby of mine. It's hard for me to give it up, truth be told. Even when I've thought about doing it, ringing in the harvest, marking the change of the season, establishing yearly continuity by doing the same thing every year: It is important to me. Holidays are important, in that sense. I think so anyway.
Maybe Halloween is the most important. Like the leaves falling from the tree, crumbled up and dried out, to the dust we shall all return. We can run from the inevitable. Like Michael Myers, ambling along at a relaxed pace, it'll catch up with us eventually. Instead, we can embrace it a little. Mock it, in turn. Paint our faces skeletal white. Prop fangs into our mouths or masks on our face. We take a little power back from the Reaper that way but it's all in good fun, because he's got our number regardless. Perhaps, by acknowledging that end, we can escape it in a way. Nothing ever ends. The sun will burn on. The planet will spin. The seasons will come and go and come again. So let's have a party. There's a full moon in the sky. It's the hour of the wolf and I don't want to die. Yes, we die. We are the dead and I love dead. Let us be ghosts for the next two months, in defiance and in celebration and in remembrance. The keys to the cemetery gates jangle in my hands. Ring the bells, drink the wine, and hold the lanterns high. That spells Halloween, baby.
