October Favorites: 31 Days of Horror

 We had the spookiest October ever! All my favorite things about my second-favorite holiday were back this year: kids DIYing Halloween costumes--

--our Monstrous Family Movie Night, with our traditional monstrous menu accompanying Nightmare Before Christmas--

--and even trick-or-treating with friends--

--resulting in the traditional non-problem of Too Much Candy:

I decided that I was only consuming horror-based media this October, which I low-key thought would be a mistake for my mental health, tbh, but in actually, it. Was. AWESOME!!! Horror is already one of my absolute favorite genres, so it was very fun to take a deep dive into it for a full month.

I'd really wanted to listen to The Haunting of Hill House with the kids, but I'm always five minutes behind the pack and so library copies were unobtainable. I realized during my catalogue search that I'd never read this Shirley Jackson classic--

--and so I remedied that for myself, instead. It's very Grey Gardens Gothic, isn't it? 

This book was a good take on the zombie subgenre:

It's heavily informed by our better understanding of the actual clusterfuck chaos that a pandemic will cause, and takes place in a world in which you can't actually, in perfect conscience, hack away willy-nilly at your zombie attackers... on account of they aren't actually dead.

I've been looking forward to reading the sequel to Scary Stories for Young Foxes, and it just happened to come in from my library holds queue in time for Scary Stories Month!

I was VERY late to the game figuring out what the recurring pandemic is supposed to be, and now I like the books even better for the way that the author combines the supernatural with the real, and gives the foxes the same type of mythmaking tradition that people have.

Kill Creek, about four horror novelists in a haunted house, didn't move me, but I SUPER loved this book:

This Amazon review does a much better job than I could in encapsulating my absolute delight with it:

Seriously, the concept of taking a "non-scary" imaginary creature and making it SUPER scary?

Delightful!

I thought the author's name sounded familiar, and when I looked her up I saw that she also wrote another of my favorites, Parasite, and its sequels... and she's written a ton more, all of which are now in my library holds queue. 

It's been kind of hard to stop only consuming horror media now that it's November, actually. Last night, for completely non-Halloween reasons, I was searching Spotify for Vampire Weekend when I came across a user-created vampire-themed playlist.

I HAD to check it out, right?!?

Twenty minutes in, though, as I was happily vibing along to it and reading the HONY book that had been waiting for me on my library shelves all month, Syd suddenly looked up and was all, "You're listening to another Halloween playlist, aren't you? It's NOVEMBER!!!"

She then reminded me that it was 365 days until Halloween, the brat.

DIY Cardboard Minecraft Heads Make an Easy(ish) Halloween Costume

 

You remember how much the kids used to love Minecraft, right?

Well, turns out they still do. Honestly, I think most of their play these days involves hanging out with their buddies on their servers, rather than mining and crafting, but I guess there's nothing like a global pandemic to highlight the benefits of a social, virtual, sandbox game.

Minecraft is also a pretty good source of Halloween costumes! The heads are simple constructions with easy-to-add details, and those heads are so notable that you can pull together whatever clothes you've got on hand for the rest of the costume and it still looks fine.

For these two Minecraft costumes, I drove over to the county recycling center and liberated an absolutely massive cardboard box from its path to the cardboard dumpster. It was large enough that each kid could cut her Minecraft head from one of the box's original vertices, giving her three good edges and one good corner as a head start.

I measured each kid's shoulder width, and that was the length of each side of her cube. The kids cut each face to be that measurement squared, then assembled them into a cube using copious amounts of duct tape (good thing they did this project BEFORE Syd and I made her a duct tape dress form, because now we no longer have copious amounts of duct tape!). 

The kids primed their cubes, then each used a ruler and pencil to mark out each face of their cube into an 8x8 array.

Then they painted!

When the painted heads had dried, each kid measured the circumference of her head, the cut a hole in the bottom of the box to fit. Pop the box on, and you're a Minecraft character!

Left to its own devices, the cardboard box shifts around alarmingly on one's head, so each kid engineered her own solution to make the head wearable. Syd made herself a head brace out of cardboard, bamboo skewers, and hot glue. 

Will just stuffed a blanket into the top of the box. Honestly, Will's one-second method worked better than Syd's painstakingly-crafted method, as Syd's brace gave way halfway through our weekend trick-or-treating event and she spent the rest of the time just holding the box under her arm like a Minecraft Headless Horseman.

Will also made her eye holes bigger, so it's also possible that she simply didn't care when the head shifted around:

The real winner of our trick-or-treating event, however, was Luna! I followed behind the kids with Luna, not trick-or-treating (but still wearing my DIY Hogwarts robe, of course!). Several times, someone handing out candy approached me and asked if they could give Luna a treat. And she wasn't even in costume!

Luna scored a few dog biscuits and an entire bag of dog treats, but the real prize was this genuine pig ear:

Luna was delighted with it, but because I had to keep the kids in sight, I refused to let her lie down with it immediately and start leisurely munching like she wanted to.

As a compromise, she simply carried it around in her mouth for the whole time we trick-or-treated, looking absolutely adorable and charming everyone who saw her.

The Apple Orchard and the Pumpkin Patch

 

Unless Will goes to our local university, this will probably be her last autumn visit to our favorite apple orchard and pumpkin patch for a while.

Time to make every moment count and then cry about it!

We did all our favorite things, including wandering around instead of picking apples--

--sitting around instead of picking apples--

--picking apples but putting them directly into our mouths instead of the bag--

--and then accidentally picking more apples than will fit in the bag and so panic eating some:

Oh, and MY personal favorite: lying on a giant blanket underneath the apple trees, working puzzles, eating and drinking delicious things, and listening to spooky podcasts:

We took our family portraits and then wandered around until a mean bee stung Luna's paw, then Matt carried her back to the car and we drove over to the orchard's pumpkin patch:

Oddly enough, Luna seemed to feel a lot better once there were elephant ears and apple fritters around, so I might be doubting that bee story of hers a little bit...

The pumpkin patch leads on to the next magical family memory that a Will at a far-away college will miss:

For the past seventeen years I've lied to myself that next year I'll really splash out and splurge on one of those fancy professional-looking pumpkin-carving kits, and every year I just dig our exact same most basic kit possible out from the back of the junk drawer. It really holds up!

I swore that I was not going to go to the trouble of roasting pumpkin seeds this year because nobody eats them but me, the kids swore that they'd eat them this year if I made them, and so I went to the trouble of separating seeds from guts, soaking them in salt water, and roasting them with spices:

So far, nobody has eaten them but me.

But the Jack-o-lanterns are epic this year!

We're looking forward to the reinstatement of of some of our out-in-public Halloween traditions this year, including declaration that yes, my 17-year-old IS going to be one of those trick-or-treating teenagers that the memes talk about:

It feels like it might just be one last season of normality before our world gets shifted on its axis again next fall, and I'm so grateful to have it.

Halloween Horror Favorites: The Spookiest Books, Movies, and Podcasts for October

King-Kong at the local drive-in movie theater!

Welcome to my favorite month and my favorite fiction genre! October is basically my month-long celebration of horror, and now that I have teenagers, it's even more fun.

Because you know what it turns out teenagers are nearly all super into?

HORROR! They don't agree completely with my favorites (if there's a lull of all of five minutes between the splashes of gore, they start complaining that they're bored), but my teenagers are 100% still my favorite horror buddies.

A few days ago, the kids and I were listening to my current favorite horror podcast, Ruined:

In Ruined, one of the podcasters loves horror and watches every horror movie, and the other podcaster hates horror and never watches it. Every week, the podcaster who loves horror tells the podcaster who hates it the full, step-by-step plot of a different horror movie, pausing every now and then to make her try to guess who dies, what the twist is, etc.

I LOVE IT.

Anyway, we had just started their episode on The Sixth Sense, when suddenly I was all, "Wait! Do y'all know the plot of The Sixth Sense?"

Friends, they did not.

"Do you know what the twist is?"

Friends, they did NOT!

Obviously, I turned off the Ruined episode that second, requested The Sixth Sense from the library the next second, and two nights later we watched it.

They both guessed the twist during Cole's dead people monologue, my clever kids.

Here are some of the other horror movies the kids and I have enjoyed watching together:

I've actually got the super old-school Dracula film checked out from the library to show them, too, but we've got one hour and eighteen minutes left in the Dracula audiobook first!

We're all quite loving Dracula, but in a very talk-back-to-the-TV sort of way, if that makes sense. We'll all be absolutely engrossed for several minutes, then miss the next ten minutes while we all gripe about how obnoxious Van Helsing's incessant speeches about friendship are, then listen for another twenty minutes, then miss half a chapter bitching to each other about how Mina Harker is getting the freaking SHAFT in this book! I mean, she's the one who practically broke the story, considering Jonathan Harker had a mental breakdown due to trauma and thought all the shit that had happened to him back at Castle Dracula was brain fever. Mina's the only connection between Van Helsing and Jonathan, AND she typed out Jonathan's diaries for evidence and got Van Helsing over to visit for the first time (there's a hilarious scene in which she's writing to ask him to come, and she spends about four paragraphs just detailing exactly which trains he should take depending on what time he wants to arrive. GIRL LIKES TRAINS!). And yet, as soon as anything exciting happens, the dude gang of vampire hunters is all, "You guys, let's start leaving Mina out of all this, on account of she's a girl. And let's all just leave her alone in this literal insane asylum while we dudes go out as a group all night, every night, and when we finally get back, let's not tell her where we've been or what we've been doing together. Cool, right?"

And then the book just retells everyone's diary entries for a while, in which every guy in the group is in turn, like, "Went out with my boys to hunt vampires last night. Didn't see Dracula at ALL, dang it. In other news, isn't it so weird that Mina is so tired and pale today? Come to think of it, she wakes up even more tireder and paler every day. Maybe me and my bros will leave her alone in the insane asylum even earlier tonight so she can get more sleep."

I swear, if Mina does not, somewhere in the last hour and eighteen minutes of the book, have some sort of triumph, the kids are going to burn down the house.

NOVEMBER 2021 UPDATE: Sigh... Mina Harker was wasted on Bram Stoker.

Unfortunately, I accidentally let the kids know that Dracula is educational, and so when we're chilling out and working puzzles in the evening they refuse to listen to it. Instead, we've been cycling through our favorite horror podcasts:

Will and I have long held Night Vale as our favorite podcast, but I'm especially thrilled about The Black Tapes, which I listened to years ago and loved. It's so fun to get to experience it again with the kids, mainly because now I have someone to talk to and obsess with!

I mostly read my horror novels by myself, but the kids have a couple of favorites that they share with me. Will introduced me to Scary Stories for Young Foxes a few years ago--

--and I swear to god it scared the SNOT out of me. The sequel is also good, but more sad-scary than scary-scary:

Turns out that people are still the biggest monsters.

Syd's favorite book (and movie!) is Coraline:

It joins Coco and Nightmare before Christmas as the holiday classics that we have to re-watch every October.

Here are MY favorite horror novels:

Oh, and you can't forget this graphic novel--

--which isn't scary but DOES take place in a pumpkin patch. And it's adorable!

Here are the other non-scary Halloween family favorites:

Now, off to watch Hocus Pocus while figuring out a craft activity that my children did NOT ask me to plan for the Halloween get-together that they're hosting for their friends...