I have written before about how much I love Halloween. It’s the one holiday where it doesn’t matter where you’re from, where you live, where you go to church, or what other holidays you happen to observe. All it takes is an adventurous spirit and a love for candy.
But as much as I love Halloween, it dawned on me that it is the children, costumes, and candy I enjoy. It is not the spooky side of Halloween at all. When it comes to Trick-or-Treat, I’ll take the treat and pass on the trick every time.
My dad spent my entire childhood honing my fight-or-flight reflex. That’s the built-in self-defense reaction we are all born with, so when faced with a sudden traumatic experience, our brains panic and quickly decide if we should fight back or run. At least, most people have that. My dad scared the “fight” reflex out of me years ago and left me with only the “run like heck” response. To this day, you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone more easily startled than I.
Dad would hide and scare me and my sisters every chance he got, and he had a plethora of scary sounds to choose from. He could do monsters of all kinds. He made an evil scientist laugh. But it was his black panther scream that always sent me screaming.
A friend in Montgomery, who does special effects for horror movies, used to decorate his house every year. One year, he enclosed his covered front porch with black curtains and invited people to go inside and have a look. I had to get up the courage just to do that. Inside, there was dim lighting, a fog machine creating a layer of fog, and a huge monster he had created. It was a replica of the creature from the 1982 movie The Thing, starring Kurt Russell.
I was impressed with his handiwork. I was also impressed that I was handling it so well. Looking back on it now, I should have known there would be more to it. He had a high school girl helping him that year. She wore a black cloak and was backed into the black curtain. As people stood knee-deep in the fog staring at this grotesque creation, she’d step out and grab them. When she did that to me, the entire neighborhood came running, thinking, judging by my screaming, that someone must have been torturing a six-year-old girl.
So, yeah, I love the candy. I love to see the kids in their costumes. I even still love to dress up for Halloween. But when it comes to the scary parts, I’m definitely just a big Hallo-weenie.
Neal Wooten is a columnist in the Mountain Valley News and North Jackson Press newspapers. He can be reached at [email protected].
