My Favorite Halloween Memories

Halloween has never not been my favorite time of the year. I have always loved it, going as far back as I can remember, and I think that had to be fueled by my parents getting into it, too. My mom would always get extremely into the costumes and my dad could never resist any of the stupid jokes that made the holiday—and especially the seasonal commercials—so memorable. I was a monster fan and a horror fan from the earliest age, Halloween was the one time of the year I’d see monsters and ghouls and zombies and vampires absolutely everywhere that I went. It was Heaven. As a kid, it was a chance to dress up, pretend to be a creature or a superhero, get an unlimited amount of candy. There was absolutely no competing with Halloween for best holiday as far as I was concerned, and I stand that even today.

I’ve decided to consider 31 my “Halloween year,” to take the edge off the fact that I am now truly in my thirties. It’s not working, so let’s not think about it at all by going back through some of the best of the best Halloween memories. It’s hard not to be nostalgic when it comes to Halloween because, let’s face it, the holiday is a whole lot cooler when you’re a kid. It means everything.

I can still immediately bring to mind certain decorations that I either loved or hated. Or both. We had a hanging, electronic Dracula that lit up and made noise and as much as I thought it was so cool, it really scared me. We had whole gravestone set up with hands crawling out of the dirt and the words “Izzy Still Dead” written on the tombstone. And a generic light-up Jack-O-Lantern that I thought looked so neat. Pumpkin flash lights, Jack-O-Lantern trash bags, you name it. These things stick out to me decades later. That’s the magic of Halloween.

1996

It was second grade and I was already in love with the classic monsters, Dracula in particular. It also happened to be a staple Halloween costume. In fact, it was probably the easiest costume I had ever done at the time. And yet it was one of my favorites because I just absolutely loved that character, I already owned the 1931 Dracula on VHS at that point and watched it pretty regularly and owned a junior novelization of the movie, not to mention a Universal Monsters coloring book. It just happened to be a great decade in which those classic horror icons were marketed to children. This was the height of Dunkin Donuts doing Universal Monster themed Munchkins and only a year ahead of Burger King doing full-blown Universal Monster Happy Meal toys.

My mom usually tried to plan a costume to accompany mine, so that year she decided to be a Universal Monster as well and picked The Mummy. That was largely because she couldn’t resist the pun. She made this papier-mache blank, white face mask that looked horrifying on its own, a white turtleneck and bandaged her arms and hands. Her costume was way more involved than mine. She didn’t have enough bandages to really pull it off, so she accentuated her Mummy costume with a leather jacket, which actually turned it into a pretty cool, if off-book look. I would definitely be in the bag for more bomber jacket Mummies in the world of horror.

Years later, I found that old white mask when I was around thirteen or fourteen and attempted to film my own horror movie with it. We didn’t ever finish filming it, even if we had mapped out the whole thing.

My strongest memory of that Halloween is actually of that night. I had a dream that I actually was Dracula. I don’t know if I’ve ever told anyone this. I never, ever forgot this dream where I was sitting at the window, inside the castle, looking out over the trees and gazing up at the moon, listening to the howling of wolves. Except, even in my dream, I was still wearing the same plastic fangs with my face covered in Walmart grease paint. It’s like my whole brand was decided by my subconscious that night.

1997

Third grade. It seemed only natural to follow my award-winning (in my own mind) turn as Dracula by dressing as Frankenstein’s Monster for that Halloween. After all, just like Dracula, I completely ate Frankenstein up. This was also one of the first times that my Halloween costume had not been crafted by my mom and was instead something that I just picked up at the store. Not the first, though, as my first grade Darth Vader costume had also been store bought, as had my Beast (as in Beauty and, not X-Men) costume before that. She bought the Frankenstein costume and brought it home for me to try on and it fit, but there was one much bigger problem: I hated it.

The costume couldn’t commit to either a mask or just face paint, I remember that being the thing that enraged eight-year-old me the most. It had a floppy latex forehead and wig with bolts that went above the ears when I knew that the bolts were supposed to go on the neck. I was a child, offended that they couldn’t just give me bolts to stick on my own neck so they could at least try and get the look right. It also big soft “boots” that were meant to be velcroed to my own shoes to get that classic Frankenstein platform shoe look, but just came across looking like pajama booties.

My mom was not impressed because we were cutting it pretty close to Halloween for me to not be happy with my costume. She ran out to get me something else and came back with a generic store bought Spider-Man costume that I absolutely loved. Being Spider-Man was my dream, after all. He had always been my favorite superhero and even that Halloween, I had adventures in that costume well into, oh, say, the sixth grade.

1998

1998 was one hell of a costume. I really wish I could find a picture of it. I know they exist, but I have no idea where that album is. In fourth grade, my mom decided to go all out on making me a costume and my God did she ever. She decided that that year, I’d spend Halloween as something even my ambitious fourth grade mind thought impossible: the Alien. As in, the Xenomorph from the movie alien. She made a whole armature out of chicken wire, spray painted it black. It didn’t look quite based on the movie because she based she used one of my action figures as the working model, and that action figure was the Gorilla Alien, as the gimmick of the action figure series was mostly what would happen if the Aliens were crossed with different species of animal. The head, torso and tail were papier-mache and the teeth and claws were cardboard.

My mom decided to reuse the leather jacket from the Mummy costume and grabbed one of my toy guns to turn herself, naturally, into Ripley. The costume was a huge showstopper at school, even if the parade was very hard to navigate. I didn’t even realize other schools didn’t do this until I was much older, but back then we’d have a Halloween parade and every kid would line up in their costume, accompanied by the band playing a very generic spooky song (and yet impossible to find on its own, not that I’ve tried) and we’d march from the school to the legion hall and back again. Naturally, it was very hard to see in that costume. I could only look through the inner mouth, which was made out of a toilet paper roll and spray painted silver. I actually thought that was very clever.

The costume was an even bigger hit that night, when we went to Bar Harbor, to the local costume contest. I remember being bummed for a few seconds because a toddler in an adorable lady bug costume came in third, but I misheard and thought she had come in first place. Instead, the first place winner was me, or as they said, “First place goes to, uh, the black alien creature!” I won a fifty dollar gift card to Cadillac Mountain Sports, which I was never going to use. My mom realized that and gave me fifty dollars cash instead. That turned it into a much bigger win. That costume hung around in the basement for years, a point of pride for both myself and my mom, until it was eventually destroyed when the basement flooded.

1999

I have a lot of memories associated with Halloween 1999. The first of them was that I remember going to Portland for the Haunted Hayride. The Haunted Hayride in Gorham was the biggest Halloween event in Maine and I had wanted to go for years. Close family friend and perennial childhood babysitter Wanda agreed to take me and make a whole trip of it. It was unbelievable. At the Portland Mall, before we even hit the heart of Halloween central, there was a Halloween store and it was the first Halloween store I had ever seen. It may have even been a Spirit Halloween. All I remember is that there was a Michael Myers mask. It was a really generic one, but it looked impeccable to me and I wanted it badly. That sparked a years-long obsession with wanting to be Michael Myers for Halloween.

My biggest mission that trip, however, was that I wanted a Chucky doll. My God, I wanted a Chucky doll more than anything in the world. I had seen them at Spencer’s Gift, I had even seen them at the local fair, and knew that my mom would never let me get one. But Wanda would. And that’s exactly what happened, although Wanda was less than impressed. I was amazed at the sight of a Chucky doll, but she thought it was going to walk and talk like the movie, or at least say a few phrases. Admittedly, the doll wasn’t exact. It had a cheap plastic face and the rest was stuffing, it even had mittens for hands. But I cherished it.

When it came to the actual haunted hayride, that was when Wanda lost her shit. I had begged to make this trip a reality. When it actually came time to go, I did what I always did and started to chicken out. I got terrified and as soon as we got up to the gate, I insisted that I didn’t want to go in. We had driven three hours to get there. She made me go in and it worked out great, because that haunted hayride was a blast. There was a huge inflatable Godzilla, I got grabbed by Michael Myers, chainsawed by Leatherface (the saws had no actual chains, and it kind of tickled) and that was also when I first learned that making fun of things as a defense mechanism came pretty naturally to me. Nonetheless, Wanda gave me shit about initially chickening out for years, almost as much as she gave me for getting furious at her when I was little for her not remembering all the dinosaur names.

As for my actual Halloween costume that year, I remember that pretty vividly as well. After the haunted hayride, I begged my mom to let me be Michael Myers until she gave in. We went to Spencer’s at the mall in Bangor. Sure enough, they had the full Michael costume in my size, coveralls, mask, knife, you name it. But they also had a Spawn costume and man, did I love Spawn as a kid. Once I saw that costume, it was all I could think about, even if all they had left was an adult size. I was a very small kid. They had a Michael Myers costume in my size and that was the only thing I wanted in the days building up to Halloween. Instead, I passed it over for a Spawn costume meant for a grown man.

Obviously, I looked ridiculous and secretly wished I didn’t pass up Michael Myers. I did honestly love my Spawn costume, even though older kids made fun of me for it. I was also jealous of a classmate’s Chucky costume that year. That Halloween night, we did the local haunted hayride and even though I knew who was in that Chucky costume, they still managed to scare me.

2000

Oh boy, 2000 was the reigning champ of my childhood Halloween costumes. That one was a legitimate dream come true. I don’t think I have to explain to anyone what a huge fan of Puppet Master I am. It had become my biggest childhood obsession from the first moment I’d laid eyes on the toys, and the deal was truly sealed as soon as I first watched the movie. I rented the movies all the time. That Halloween, at the start of sixth grade, I had once again planned to be Michael Myers. It hadn’t gone my way the previous year, but that year I had a mission and I would not be dissuaded. Until once again, we went to Spencer’s and once again, I saw a mask I couldn’t possibly say “no” to. This one, however, was much more reasonable. I saw a Puppet Master Blade mask, really high quality, and I couldn’t believe I was seeing it. That was a time when Puppet Master merchandise was still very hard to come by, which was part of the reason why I had fallen so deeply into it, that rarity of it. Anytime I saw anything Puppet Master related in a store, I picked it up immediately. So obviously, I bought that mask and that dictated my costume for that year.

I was very short, but so was my grandmother, who had an old coat that would work for Blade’s trench coat. The only trouble was that it was tan, so we had to dye it to try and turn it black. It never got all the way to Black, but it did reach a very dark gray, and I thought that was definitely good enough. Once I added a plastic knife and hook, the costume was complete. That year was also my first Halloween in middle school, which meant that in addition to wearing the costume trick-or-treating, I also wore it to one of my very first dances. I usually had a terrible time at dances, especially as middle school continued, but on that night, I was Blade and I had Blade’s confidence (I presume confidence comes easy to a puppet) so things went mildly more smoothly.

2001

Around Halloween 2001, I became a little more obsessed with being cool, mostly because I was aware that I was a huge nerd and many if not most people in my class thought that I was very weird. I had a massive crush on a girl who was far more popular than I was and so I knew that being a great big nerd would certainly hurt my chances. I turned to rom-coms for inspiration but they were, well, the kind of rom-coms I would turn to. Especially personal favorites My Best Friend is a Vampire and My Boyfriend’s Back. It was the latter that I especially fell into that October, catching it again on TV after having not seen it for a few years. I really felt like Johnny Dingle, the lovesick hero of that movie who pined for a girl who didn’t give him the time of day because he was a zombie. Meanwhile, this girl just didn’t give me the time of day because I was a big, shy, short dork.

Still, that year I slapped on some grease paint and decided to go as Johnny Dingle, making me probably the first and only kid to ever do a My Boyfriend’s Back Halloween costume. It was also the first year I was allowed to go trick-or-treating with friends instead of being accompanied by a parent. Every single house we went to, everyone got my friends’ costumes right away, and while I didn’t expect anyone to guess the movie I was doing, nobody—literally not one single person—even correctly guessed that I was a zombie.

2002

2002, eighth grade, was the year it finally came together. That year, I was dead set on being Michael Myers, went to Spencer’s intent on buying that mask and finally, actually did it. And just in time as it was the last year I ever went trick-or-treating with my friends. The mask was way too big for my head and the overalls belonged to my grandfather but happened to fit me pretty well, even if they were a little baggy. But I didn’t care. I was in Heaven, finally standing there in the costume I had wanted for years, achieving a childhood dream of being Michael Myers on Halloween and stalking around my town for candy.

It was also the only year that we really got to hang out and catch some of the horror movies being marathoned on TV, at least for a little while. I remember that as we were all getting into our costumes, Pumpkinhead was ending on Sci-Fi and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors was just starting. I remember that vividly, because Pete was not remotely scared of the finale of Pumpkinhead and thought that he was finally desensitized to horror and could withstand anything. Then Nightmare 3 started and scared the crap out of him almost immediately.

Because of this vivid memory, I try to watch both Pumpkinhead and Dream Warriors on Halloween night every year.

2007

Freshman year of college. Halloween meant something very different in those days, but I loved it all the same. I tried to spread Halloween joy to all my friends throughout the entire month of October. Introducing them to my favorite horror movies, buying decorations for my dorm room, you name it. I even had a great costume that year. I was Alex from A Clockwork Orange and I crushed it, I really did. But I was coming into college after many romantic misfires toward the end of my senior year of high school. Hoping for a fresh start, I had fallen for a girl the first week of college—one I actually had a lot in common with—who almost immediately started dating someone else. October was a great time to pretend I was fine, but by the time Halloween night rolled around, it all caught up to me. I wound up being pretty miserable day-of and instead of celebrating at all, wound up in a friend’s dorm room watching Spider-Man 3, a movie none of us particularly loved at the time.

2008

2008 was the total inverse of the previous year. That year had also spent focused on a particular girl up to that point and being too nervous to make any kind of move whatsoever. But the weekend of the Halloween Party, a friend of a friend—who I knew a little bit and had sparked a bit of chemistry with—came up from her school to visit and while things got off to a very awkward start, we became an item over the course of that weekend. The Halloween Party was a blast, we had cute costumes, we watched Mystery Science Theatre 3000 and made out, as I guess dorky college kids are wont to do. For actual Halloween that year, year of The Dark Knight, I decided to be Two-Face. Originally it was going to be a huge Batman group costume with all my friends, but that didn’t pan out. Still, my Two-Face won an award at the costume contest. I spray painted half my hair gray, did some gruesome makeup and called upon my mother’s sewing prowess to sew two different suits together for the full look.

2009

In 2009, I not only had a steady girlfriend, but she is now my wife. That year we definitely hadn’t figured out couple’s costumes yet, though. She was Little Red Riding Hood and I was Pinhead from Hellraiser. My costume took tons of work to put together, but it was well worth it in the end. Even if it was made for the purpose of a Halloween dance and I could barely see or move while wearing it. It didn’t matter. The costume and just in general celebrating the holiday mattered more to me than anything else. Once again I called on my mom’s costume making talent and she came through in a way that almost outdid the legendary 4th grade Alien costume.

I got my hands on a Pinhead mask and cut the mouth off so I could speak, painting my own mouth white to match. I also managed to find a plastic puzzle box replica to complete the look. The whole Cenobite robe was made, by hand, out of duct tape. It definitely looks like a homemade Halloween costume, sure, but it looks like a good one. That year I wound up taking the top prize at the costume contest.

2015

I have to throw a recent one in here to cap it off, because it was just too perfect. In 2015, the local horror convention Spooky Empire, finally put on a show during Halloween itself and man, being there and celebrating the genre in such a monumental way on the day itself was just beyond words. It was unbelievable. I got to meet and chat with the cast of Fright Night, which is not only one of my favorite horror movies but one of my favorite movies in any genre. But the real highlight? I not only met legendary actor Tony Todd, but he was also giving out free candy, so I got to do a little bit of trick or treating and most importantly got candy from the Candyman.

Obviously these aren’t my only Halloween memories, but they’re some of the most prominent. In fact, one of the biggest benefits of living in the Orlando area is that—in non-quarantined times—there’s so much going on during the Halloween season. Conventions, Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights, classic movies screening in theaters in 35mm, most if it is genuinely a dream come true. But the memories of those old times, both the good and the bad, still ring stronger than ever.