Halloween

I love Halloween.  I love candy and pumpkins, and a small part of me lives to see Charlie Brown attempt to kick the football every year. 

When I was a kid, I loved planning out my Halloween costume.  I started in August with the arrival of the Party City Halloween catalogue and probably changed my mind half a dozen times before I picked my final costume. I would still dress up now, if given the opportunity, but adult costumes are expensive, and I don’t really have anywhere to wear them. 

So basically, Halloween is a big deal to me. It’s apparently a big deal in college, too. There are parties and haunted houses and people really go all out. Well, cool people do. And since I try to be cool sometimes, I decided to go along with it this year and go to the Halloween Double Feature tonight. They were showing Psycho and Insidious and I gave myself permission to go, even though I knew it probably wouldn’t turn out well.  It’s the one time of year that I feel like it’s acceptable to submit to my desire to be scared out of my wits, even knowing what’s going to happen, because it’s the same thing that happens every time.  I go in, stoked to see a scary movie, thinking “this time I’ll be brave and I won’t jump or scream or hide behind my scarf for an hour and a half”.  But I end up doing all of those things, because if I’m being realistic, I have the fear tolerance of a three year old.

Nonetheless, I was super excited to go, mostly  because of Psycho. It’s one of those iconic movies that I think everyone should see at least once, if for no other reason than to say “I saw it”.  The plan was simple… Watch Psycho and then quietly sneak out before Insidious came on.

If you know me, you know that my plans don’t always turn out the way I’d like.  I sat down with a friend, excited to watch a classic Alfred Hitchcock flick and get in the mood for Halloween.    

But then this happened: 

I briefly considered leaving and coming back later for Psycho, but I had dragged said friend out in the miserable, cold rain to see these movies, so I decided to suck it up and stay. This is the part where I would like to say that I was very brave, and didn’t do any of the things that were on the list that I just mentioned. Instead, I spent the better part of the movie hiding behind my gloves (which make better blinders than one would realize), jumping at every sound, and trying desperately to choke back noises that sounded like some bizarre cross between a squeaky toy and a sort of pathetic whimper.  

After about three times of asking “is it over yet?” the movie finally ended. My friend asked me how much of it I thought I had actually seen, and when I thought about it, I gave 15 minutes as my estimate. That’s a generous figure.

Halloween is on Monday. After that, I can turn my thoughts toward Thanksgiving and Christmas. But until then…