Captain Kirk showing his good side...

1.    Halloween is the Celtic New Year. It was originally a pagan holiday to honor the dead (note: “pagan” means “heathen!” – See #19). It took place, as it does now, on October 31st, and was called All Hallow’s Eve (the next day, November 1st, was called All Saint’s Day). It dates back more than 2000 years.

2.    Due to the movie’s tiny budget, for the Michael Meyers mask in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) the prop department had to use the cheapest thing they could find, which turned out to be a spray-painted William Shatner mask.

3.    Made on a budget of $320,000 in about three weeks, Halloween became the highest grossing independent film ever made at the time of its release (it grossed more than $65,000,000).

4.    The Mexican version of Halloween Day is called Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), and takes place on the 1st and 2nd of November. They use the occasion to to gather together with family and friends and pray for loved ones who have died. They believe that during the Dia de los Muertos, it is easier for the souls of the dead to visit the living.

5.    The “Jack-O-Lantern,” according to Celtic folklore, got it’s name from a guy named Stingy Jack, a miserable old drunk who liked to play tricks on everyone from his own mother to the Devil himself (see the full story at the end of this post).

6.    You must hold your breath while walking past a cemetery or you might breathe in the spirit of someone who has recently died. And if I’ve learned anything from years of watching scary movies, there is no way that can be a good thing.

7.    Jack-O-Lanterns originated in Ireland, where people would put candles into hollowed out turnips and beets to keep away evil spirits and ghosts on the Samhain holiday. Why did they use turnips and beets and not pumpkins like normal people? See the story about Stingy Jack below.

John Carpenter - "Nobody breaks up with ME and gets away with it without being terrorized in a series of wildly successful horror movies!"

8.    To the original European immigrants who first brought it to North America, Halloween was a celebration of the end of the summer harvest, and they would observe the holiday by gathering around a bonfire to tell ghost stories, sing, dance, and tell fortunes.

9.    Laurie Strode, the beleaguered heroine of the Halloween movies, was named after John Carpenter’s first girlfriend.

10.    Halloween is the second most commercially successful holiday (Halloween candy sales average more than $2,000,000,000 [$2 billion] annually). Christmas, of course, is number 1.

11.     Tootsie rolls were the first wrapped penny candy in America. They were introduced in 1896 by an Austrian candy maker named Leo Hirschfield, who opened a tiny candy shop in New York City. He named the candy after his 5-year-old daughter’s nickname, “Tootsie.”

If #13 wasn't true, this whole series would never have happened!

12.    The ancient Celts believed that spirits and ghosts roamed the countryside on Halloween night, so they began wearing costumes and masks to avoid being recognized as human!

13.    Horror movies, love them or hate them, show us the most unusual and creative human deaths that any of us will ever see (and I’m willing to bet that includes real life CSI’s).

14.    Pumpkins also appear in nature in white, blue, and green.

15.    It is believed that the Irish started the tradition of trick-or-treating. In preparation for All Hallow’s Eve, Irish townspeople would visit people throughout their neighborhoods asking for contributions of food for a town feast.

Trick-or-treating has benefited everyone from lost 9th century souls to this kid's dentist!

16.    Another theory is that trick-or-treating originated with a 9th century European custom called “souling.” Christians would go from village to village on November 2nd (All Souls Day) and beg for “soul cakes,” which were square pieces of bread with currants. The more they received, the more prayers they would promise to say for the souls of the donors’ lost loved ones. At that time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for some time after death, and prayer, even from strangers, could quicken a soul’s passage to heaven.

17.    The music in Halloween was credited in the movie to the “Bowling Green Symphony Orchestra,” but was actually put together by John Carpenter and a few of his music buddies. It is one of the most famous and enduring horror movie scores of all time.

18.    About 21% of pet owners dress up their pets for Halloween. No word on what their marriages are like…

Say your prayers, Peter Pan, I'll kill you with cuteness!

19.    There is some debate, with opinions generally divided, as to whether or not Halloween is a Satanic holiday. What do you think?

20.    In North America, it’s bad luck if a black cat crosses your path but good luck if a white cat crosses your path. In Britain and Ireland, it’s the opposite.

21.    Black and orange are the colors of Halloween because orange represents the Fall colors and black represents darkness and death.

22.    Superstition says that if a bat flies around a house three times, it is considered a death omen. So if you live in bat country, keep a BB gun handy.

23.    It’s bad luck to allow a fire to burn out on Halloween.

24.    The significance of black cats is that they are believed to be the protectors of a witch’s powers. If a black cat walks toward you, it brings good fortune. But if it walks away, it takes the good luck with it.  Again, keep that BB gun handy.

Looks American enough to me!

25.   Every year almost without exception, the most popular Halloween costume for women is something that starts with the word “sexy.” Although for 2009, the most popular/controversial costume seems to be the illegal alien!

26.    Also almost without exception, men who dress up for Halloween in a costume that begins with the word “sexy” do not look at all sexy.

27.    Halloween did not become an American holiday until the 19th century because the restrictions of lingering Puritan tradition prevented even the observance of Christmas before the 1800s.

28.    Check this out – It was the transatlantic migration of millions of Irish immigrants following the great Irish Potato Famine (1845-1849) that finally brought Halloween to America. So basically, we have an overseas potato shortage to thank for our second most commercially successful holiday!

29.    Halloween was mostly a social holiday from the 1800s until around 1910, when the introduction of postcards first commercialized it. Masks and costumes were not being mass-produced until the 1930s, and trick-or-treating didn’t become a permanent holiday fixture until about 20 years after that.

30.    Salem, Massachusetts claims to be the “Halloween Capital of the World,” while at the same time trying to disassociate itself with its history of persecuting witches. The irony kills me! Anoka, Minnesota also claims the world title, but sadly has no history of witch trials to make it stand out. For some reason, national attention continues to evade its beloved annual Halloween parade.

31.    Your humble writer would really, really, really like to know where he can get a bottle of Stingy Jack’s authentic pumpkin wine. So, if you know, feel free to help me out!!

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And now…

One dark Halloween night, a deceitful and bitter old drunk named Stingy Jack managed to trick the Devil into climbing up an apple tree. Once he was in the tree, Jack quickly put crosses all around the tree, trapping the Devil. He then told the Devil that he would not let him down until he promised not to take his soul when he died. The Devil gave the promise and Jack finally let him down.

Years later, when Jack finally died, he met Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates of Heaven and was told that he had lived a worthless and miserable life on earth as a drunken trickster, and so would not be allowed into heaven. He was sent to Hell to talk to the Devil, and once there, Jack reminded the Devil of his promise not to take his soul. The Devil kept his promise and didn’t allow Jack to enter Hell.

Now, Jack was scared and had nowhere to go. All he could do was wander forever in the total darkness between Heaven and Hell. He went back to the Devil and asked him how he could survive when there was no light, and the Devil, in an unusual gesture of kindness, responded by tossing him an ember from the flames of Hell to help him light his way.

Jack placed the ember in a hollowed out turnip, one of his favorite foods which he always carried with him, and from that day on, Stingy Jack roamed the earth without a resting place, lighting the way as he went with his lantern…

“The darkest souls are not those which choose to exist within the hell of the abyss, but those which choose to break free from the abyss and move silently among us.”

Dr. Sam Loomis

It has become the popular thing to do these days to stop appending numbers to the titles of high-numbered sequels – maybe it’s just become too much work to do all that research and figure out what number we’re on, anyway – and Rob Zombie has, then, done the cool thing and simply renamed his Halloween remake after John Carpenter’s original film. It’s a fitting title, though, since the movie’s essentially a re-telling of the same story. But rather than just re-shoot the same story, Zombie goes deeper into the psyche of Michael Myers. The movie has a biographical feel of one of horror’s greatest slashers with a distinctive Rob Zombie style, and as it turns out that’s not a bad combination .

The movie starts off with Myers as a kid, but Zombie shows us how dysfunctional his family is. An stripping mother, her abusive boyfriend, and a slutty older sister with a dirtbag boyfriend. He shows signs of being a normal, if slightly long-haired, kid who just wants to go trick-or-treating and be a regular 10-year-old. But soon begins the chain of events that led to the closing off and then total collapse of his inner self, and his start down the road to becoming the stalking, stabbing Michael Myers that we’ve all come to know and morbidly love. In fact, it is one of the movie’s great strengths that it is able to show so clearly and so linearly Michael’s transition from an almost normal 10-year-old to a brutal masked killer that hasn’t uttered a word in 15 years.

Michael's mother Deborah (Sheri Moon Zombie) visits her son at the Smith's Grove Institution For Psychotic Children.

Donald Pleasance’s beloved character Dr. Sam Loomis is now played by none other than Malcolm McDowell, who has a massive list of acting credits but might be most widely known from his role in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. We meet Loomis before he is assigned to the case of Michael Myers and this time we see the process of Loomis getting to know Michael and struggling to understand what’s going on in his head as he swings wildly back and forth between a childlike happiness with no memory of his recent murders to violent outbursts of frustration and rage. His normal moments grow rarer and rarer until ultimately he withdraws completely into himself and stops communicating at all.

Zombie makes a small but important addition to the story in an event that takes place involving a nurse at his hospital and his mother’s reaction, just before we cut to 15 Years Later. At this point the movie returns to the familiar plot of the original film with Michael stalking his way back to Haddonfield to find his sister Laurie while Loomis tries to both find him and convince the police of the reality of what they’re dealing with.

There are a lot of stand-out performances in the movie, like McDowell as Dr. Loomis, Sheri Moon Zombie as Michael’s mother, Deborah, William Forsythe as her abusive boyfriend, and the character of Sheriff Brackett, played by Brad Dourif, one of the giants of horror lore to take a part in the movie. He’s probably best remembered as Chucky from the Child’s Play films (btw, a “re-boot” of the original film is slated for a 2010 release), but has an impressive filmography, including the Lord of the Rings films and the best scene in the 1998 film Urban Legend. And then there’s this kid Daeg Faech, who plays the young Michael. This kid wrote and directed his first film at age 8, and can do French and German accents as well as speak English, French, Japanese, American Sign Language and some Danish. You probably remember him now as the bratty French kid in Hancock that gets thrown up into the sky, but I recommend keeping an eye on this kid, he could be big. Tyler Mane also does an outstanding performance as the older Michael, effectively capturing the unique movement and solidity of Nick Castle’s performance in the original film.

But Laurie Strode, unfortunately, is played by the instantly forgettable Scout Taylor-Compton, your typical cookie-cutter teenie-bopper actor, the likes of which you can find by the truckful in bad teen comedies and horror movies. Her character is an irritating high school cliché without a shred of the charm and charisma of Jamie Lee Curtis’s performance in the original film, and is probably the single most important factor in a lot of the popular disappointment with the movie. And it doesn’t help that her friends – one of whom, Annie Brackett, is played by Danielle Harris, who was Jamie Lloyd in Halloween 4 and 5 – are equally devoid of interest.

But it should be noted that even though Zombie has given us a remake of the original film and remakes are freighted with the stigma of being the result of a lack of originality, he has definitely added something to the series as a whole, which is increasingly rare with each successive sequel in any franchise. He has gone deeper into the persona of Michael Myers without damaging any of the mystery surrounding him which, sadly is more than can be said of his 2009 effort, Halloween II. And he also adds several threads to the story which serve to clarify it and deepen it rather than come off as inexcusable and pointless creative liberties.

This recent tendency to add on unnumbered sequels to already prodigious franchises comes with an uneasy feeling of endlessness, but Rob Zombie’s Halloween is an example of one of the better additions to the world of high-numbered sequels. I think the producers understand that, given the relative cheapness with which a Halloween film can be made, they’re always going to make money as long as there are enough horror fans in the world for whom the legend of Michael Myers will never die, no matter how bad the movies get. But with even the horror talents of Zombie having by now resulted in the relatively disappointing Halloween II, who knows how long that will be?

The Bean Meter

3.5 Beans out of 5.