4

Trunk-or-Treating

Squidoo.com

Halloween is unsafe -- ask anyone who bubble wraps their children before they get to school. Psychos could be at home right now just packing fudge full of cyanide. They're going to pack that fudge until the 31st and then give it to your kids, and your kids will eat it and then die. It happens every year.

Except, of course, it doesn't. And hasn't. No one has ever been poisoned by a crazy Halloween poisoner in the history of ever. But don't let that stop you from ruining the enjoyable trick-or-treating tradition for your kid by instead having them fish candy out of people's trunks like so many splendid hobos with sticky fingers desperate to get wasted on antifreeze.

Trunk-or-treating is what happens when laziness and paranoia collide in a parking lot. You gather some friends from the neighborhood or the church or your local swingers club and you all park your cars somewhere and the kids go around trick-or-treating from car to car instead of at houses. Give it a few more years and we'll just mail each other boxes of candy for each other's kids, and a few years after that we'll just set up sucrose IVs and dim the lights, call it a night.

3

Halloween Bans

WFMY 2 via Godless Wonder

For those who can't replace Halloween with the power of Christ or a trunk full of candy corn, there's just an outright ban on the holiday. Schools are the worst for this, as most of the towns from the movie Footloose that hate all things fun have been wiped from the Earth by Kevin Bacon fans.

It shouldn't be surprising that some schools are willing to ban Halloween activities: Give a school board a long enough timeline and it will find a way to ban everything, including holidays, sports, books, evolution, common sense and maybe even students. If you didn't know better, it would be entirely reasonable to assume that every modern school board was run by a coalition consisting of Mr. Burns, Rumpelstiltskin, Glenn Beck, Cruella De Vil and Joseph Kony. Hey, 'member him? The Internet doesn't.

What reason do schools have for not allowing Halloween activities? The spirit of equity. You see, due to cultural, financial and social differences, it's not fair to celebrate something like Halloween. Take a moment to appreciate the lofty, Jenga-like stack of bullshit that represents; it's impressive. Cultural differences? Because of the diversity of cultures these days, it's not fair to celebrate Halloween. By that logic, it is also not fair to celebrate literally anything. Ever. Especially when you toss in financial concerns. It's best to never acknowledge that a world exists outside the school because it will inevitably relate to something that one of those students doesn't experience at home, and we know it's not OK for kids to ever experience anything that's new. Doesn't that contradict the very idea of learning? Shut up, naysayer, and eat these paint chips until you forget your woes!

2

Rob Zombie's Halloween

Robzombie.com

OK, so this isn't explicitly about the holiday Halloween, but it's the same word, and I'm writing this, so I win. Rob Zombie's Halloween remake is an abomination. It just is.

The original John Carpenter Halloween is a decent movie. If I never see it again, I won't lose sleep or spend nights weeping softly, but I liked it well enough. It obviously struck a chord with horror fans and has endured for decades. Then Rob Zombie stepped in and said, "Look at me, I was in a horrorish metal band and my last name is Zombie and I made this other awful horror movie that literally had a character named Dr. Satan in it, let me remake this," and nobody said no, even though they knew he was going to cast his wife in it, and even though we'd all seen her in House of 1000 Corpses and there was no humanly possible way that her acting had improved enough to allow her to be put on film again. Physics is still trying to work out the equations to calculate how much she sucks, but the variable of how her maniacal, brain-shattering laughter throws how much she sucks into wacky, atom-destroying levels is a real kicker, mathematically speaking.

So Sheri Moon aside, the only reason Carpenter's Halloween was a standout -- and you can argue that I'm wrong, but I need you to be comfortable knowing that, to everyone with sense, I am not wrong, and you may have fallen asleep inside a plastic bag at some point to get you to the point where you disagree with me -- the only reason Halloween worked so well was because of the Michael Myers character. Nothing else in the movie, aside from a catchy score, was really a standout. Was Donald Pleasance good? Sure, but not remarkably so. Did people like Jamie Lee Curtis? I guess so, but you didn't see her boobs until Trading Places, years later. But Myers was meant to be evil personified. He wasn't a killer who had been wronged, he wasn't seeking vengeance or profit, he wasn't trying to prove a Saw-like point or haunting the place where he'd been abandoned by negligent teens. He was literally just a big, psychotic prick who defied sense. It was brilliant. It was.

1

Raisins, Apples and Toothbrushes

What are you, fuckin' new here? No one has ever in the history of all time wanted a box of raisins, and that isn't even limited to Halloween -- it's ever. Do you like raisins? Ironically, even if you answer yes, it's not true. You really don't. Raisins are the food version of sex with someone you're sort of attracted to but not crazy about, and also they have herpes. It's just not a thing with which you want to be involved.

In the exact same despicable bag as raisins are apples and toothbrushes, but at least those have real-world uses beyond Halloween. But on Halloween, an apple is about as generous a treat as spreading your scrotum skin (or labia, for you ladies) out flat on the edge of a table and having a good whack at it with a rubber mallet.

If you're not sure if kids want fruit on Halloween, feel free to find a kid right now and offer him a choice between a chocolate bar and a pear. The kid who picks the pear probably also has a small shrine of animal heads in his closet and holds hugs way longer than is appropriate.

Your toothbrush is just as thoughtless, and the reason should be obvious -- that kid already has a toothbrush. And if he doesn't, then that's really fucked up, and I don't think he's going to use the one you just gave him. But either way, you don't need strangers giving you oral hygiene tools. How does that kid know that you didn't have that brush up your ass all day before you gave it to him? How do you know that I won't do that to your toothbrush if you invite me over? You need one toothbrush at a time, and they last like six months or so, don't they? At least? Fun-sized Kit Kats last three seconds and then you need another one because that shit isn't fun. Give kids candy, don't be a twat.

You can follow Ian on Twitter @IanFortey and find out what he's doing, maybe invite him over for a sandwich. Hide your toothbrush.

What the Hell Did I Just Read: A Novel of Cosmic Horror, the third book in David Wong's John Dies at the End series, is available now!