A Short Halloween Story

When I was a child, my father always expressed the worry that I was too timid and too physically weak to be able to handle the slings and arrows that the world would inevitably throw my way. As such, he would often try to "toughen me up." I was enrolled in self-defense classes. He tried to teach me how to box. He told me that the only way to handle bullies was to hit them back, and harder.

But I was only interested in collecting my Smurfs in peace. I couldn't throw a punch to save my life. And I learned that the best way to handle the slings and arrows was to assiduously avoid them, and stay in Smurf Village.

Still, my father persisted. One of his tactics to toughen me was to make me watch one whole horror movie at Halloween. He would take me to our video rental store and tell me to pick a horror movie to watch. Then, when we came home, I had to watch the whole movie. No exceptions.

You must understand, merely standing in the horror section of the store scared the hell out of me. We're talking about the very start of the VHS industry, when most video tapes came in big boxes -- and, for the horror films, those boxes often had lurid, gory illustrations.


I can't even remember what movies I had picked. If it had blood or any sort of skeletons in it, it most probably did me in. I personally preferred the Universal monster cycle of the 30s and 40s, but apparently Frankenstein & Dracula didn't count as horror to my father. I could see the reasoning, I guess. Drac and Co. were positively cuddly by that point, victims of the marketing and licensing machine.

So instead I watched some modern supernatural horror and slasher films. "Watched" is not quite an accurate term, because I spent most of the movies with my hands in front of my eyes. I would make a little slot between two fingers through which I would view slivers of the horrible doings on the screen.

Then one Halloween night, when I was 12, my father died. A transit worker, he was asked to cover the body of a homeless woman who had just committed suicide by jumping in front of a train. Apparently, the sight and stress was too much for him, and he died on the subway platform of a heart-attack.

My mom canceled Halloween for a couple of years after that. And even when the official cancellation was over, the holiday was a bit taboo in my family.


But one development that came about after my father died was my newfound ability to watch horror films. Now it was I who went on my own to the video rental store to find them. And they really didn't scare me anymore. I sometimes laughed at how dumb they were, how fake.

For I had seen my father in a box, mortician's makeup providing him with a pale and ashy variation of his usual olive skin tone. Even his fingernails had been meticulously clipped and polished. Nothing could really be scarier to me, than those noticed details.