About last night…

So last night was Halloween. As you can tell from previous blogs, this is my favorite night of the year, and my favorite thing to do is scare the ever loving crud out of trick-or-treaters of all ages. We start it with ambiance…the yard was supremely creepy this year!

We had dozens of Jack-o-Lanterns, we filled the yard with brush from my neighbor’s tree trimming, I spread spider webs over all the branches…

There was even a flaming gas can that lit up our KEEP OUT sign. This is a great trick that I think I stole from the movie “Son of Rambow” which is a delightful little film if you’ve never seen it. About some very young British kids making a fantasy film in elementary school. This flaming gas can is normally the head for my scarecrow, but I didn’t have time to make a scarecrow this year.

Around 7:30pm I started to get worried. We’d had only one party of very young trick-or-treaters and it had already been dark for 30 minutes. In a normal year, the little ones come around sunset, and within an hour of darkness, everyone has finished trick-or-treating entirely. Was it going to be a bust year?

Since they moved Daylight Savings time to November, it was still not getting dark early, and since it was a school night, I was really worried that we weren’t going to have any trick or treaters. But, around 7:45, they started coming. Thank goodness!

To pull my gag, I wrap myself in old blankets and put on a creepy burlap sack mask that I made a few years ago after watching the film “El Orfanato,” a Spanish horror film produced by Guillermo del Toro (who did Pan’s Labyrinth, etc.) which is one of the scariest films I’ve EVER seen. A little deformed boy in an orphanage is forced to wear this little burlap sack over his head so the other children aren’t frightened by his deformities, and to make the mask a bit more whimsical for him, a kind woman sews little buttons on for the eyes and gives him blushing cheeks. But, for the viewer, it only makes the mask more terrifying. So I did my best to copy it:

You can see that I’ve cut one hold so I can see out through one eye, and that’s the thing that creeps kids (and parents!) out the most. Seeing that eye. But I don’t blink or move it, so they can’t tell whether it’s real or not.

All together we got about 10 groups of trick-or-treaters. We get fewer each year. I’m not sure what to attribute that to. I generally don’t scare the littlest ones, I just sit there and let them try to figure out whether I’m real. I had one little girl who was almost hypnotized, she wouldn’t grab any candy OR turn around and leave, she just stood there staring at me.

The older kids get a big scream when they reach for candy, of course. The best moment was when a group of pre-teens were too scared to walk up the sidewalk, so they forced their aunt to go for them. She kept saying, “It’s fake guys, I know it’s fake, that’s why I’m coming up here to get you your candy!”

About that moment I screamed and lunged for her, and she was so surprised that she just passed out backwards onto my sidewalk and didn’t move. For an instant I thought I had given her a heart attack and killed her, but then she started laughing and her family was rushing up to her and laughing, too. “I’m about to kill that guy!” she said, and then said, “Look at me, a grown woman, getting scared like that!’

Ultimately she was a great sport, and told me she was excited to see the footage uploaded to YouTube, and you can find the link at the bottom of this blog entry. Sweetheart, if you ever read this, you are welcome to bring your family over to my house for dinner one night!

It was a great night, a fun time had by all. Big thanks to J-P, Jacques, Karen, Sharon, Chris, and Christian for helping pull it off!

Even Oliver got in the spirit with his pumpkin costume:

He only wore it for a short time before getting totally ashamed and humiliated, so much so that he didn’t want to be outside with the rest of us and just wanted to mope on the bed: