The 31 Days of Halloween: Day 30

Halloween is the best time of the year. It's a wonderfully indulgent time, where your inner ghoul is given societal license to be put on display. To celebrate it to it's wicked fullest, the Midnight Cheese will be posting every day in October with excellent ways to enjoy the season. Whether it's horror films, video games, books or activities, check back every day for some new Halloween fun.

Halloween

Maybe you thought this would be the film I spotlit for post 31, but while this isn't the best film about the holiday, it is one of most influential horror films of all time. This modestly budgeted film is the father of the modern slasher film and, in a rush to capitalize on a burgeoning craze, ushered in a brand new shift in the horror genre. This is thanks largely to an excellent and tight script, great camera work, a career defining performance from the well established Donald Pleasence and a fortune telling explosion by scream queen to be by Jamie Lee Curtis.

This top grossing independent film of all time is accompanied by director John Carpenter's hypnotic keyboard-synth soundtrack (which just kicked in as I'm writing this) and is the best use of a William Shatner mask ever. You guys know all this, I'm not telling you anything new here.

Halloween has become sacred yearly viewing during the season by horror nerds and has come to be a staple of AMC's Fear Fest. In fact, why are you still reading this? AMC is showing films from the series, starting with the first, all day beginning with the first at 9:30 am.

Start a new tradition or celebrate it again for the 30th time.

The 31 Days of Halloween: Day 25

Halloween is the best time of the year. It's a wonderfully indulgent time, where your inner ghoul is given societal license to be put on display. To celebrate it to it's wicked fullest, the Midnight Cheese will be posting every day in October with excellent ways to enjoy the season. Whether it's horror films, video games, books or activities, check back every day for some new Halloween fun.

Costume Quest

What gives a video game the pedigree to be called the literal embodiment of all things Halloween? Is that even possible to confer upon an interactive experience? If we agree that this is within the realm of possibility, for which of it's qualities did I decided to go in this direction? The sum total of all it's qualities, of course.



Costume Quest was released last Halloween season by developer Double Fine, in a bite sized downloadable format and at a reasonable price ($15). Double Fine is a studio known for their immense wit and eclectic, charming games. In Costume Quest they manage to distill down the childhood wonder of everyone's (who counts) favorite holiday into an interactive journey that anyone could enjoy. By no stretch of the imagination is the combat gameplay overly difficult- it isn't supposed to be- it is engaging though. The narrative and the nostalgia are the main draws here.

The story has you taking on the role of one of two twins, Reynold (a boy) and Wren (a girl). New to the neighborhood, whichever of the siblings you choose is tasked with walking their twin around to trick or treat. You are costumed as a blue cardboard box robot and your sibling is adorned as a giant piece of candy corn. As fate would have it, a group of marauding monsters called "Grubbins" are ransacking homes and stealing all the candy to bring back to their own world. Your brother or sister is mistaken for the biggest piece of candy ever and kidnapped. It's then your mission to save them any way you can (or mom and dad will totally kill you!). In your quest you'll gather a party of likewise costumed children and battle an assortment of villainous monsters across several landscapes.



How can a few kids in rudimentary costumes fight these grubbins? Through the magic of Halloween! When combat commences the costumes transform from crummy arts and crafts to the embodiment of the imaginative creature they represent. So the default cardboard robot costume becomes a 50 foot tall robot warrior, replete with missiles and a rocket powered punch. Each costume has it's own special attack and role in combat, which is turn based and very reminiscent of older (read: better) Final Fantasy games. And there are plenty of monsters/animals/heroes to choose from. In your travels you'll come across costume patterns and must collect the pieces that make them up to unlock them for use.

The overworld which you'll be exploring is a rich tapestry woven with equal parts snark and nostalgia. There are items to collect, kids playing hide and seek to find, houses to trick or treat at (the in game currency is candy) and Halloween festivities to explore. Bobbing for apples is one way to earn experience (xp) and unique items. You can barter your collected candy for battle stamps, which confer special holiday themed benefits in combat. There are also special, Garbage Pail-esk cards which you can collect and trade with other kids.

There's a lot of content here, all of it a loving glance back at the Halloween experiences of your childhood. This game is so excellent that all fans of Halloween need apply. Lucky for you, it's become available on the PC via Steam, so you can experiences it even if you don't have an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. It's not overly long, clocking in between 5-10 hours. You've never played a game that's celebrated the holiday this much. It's a love letter to Halloween and you are missing out if you've never experienced it.

The 31 Days of Halloween: Day 24

Halloween is the best time of the year. It's a wonderfully indulgent time, where your inner ghoul is given societal license to be put on display. To celebrate it to it's wicked fullest, the Midnight Cheese will be posting every day in October with excellent ways to enjoy the season. Whether it's horror films, video games, books or activities, check back every day for some new Halloween fun.

The Hazing

In preparing a list of topics to discuss for this month long count down, I was bound to come across titles which I had just simply missed out on and was unfamiliar with. In googling for films which take place on Halloween, one in particular caught my attention. I don't know what it was about The Hazing that stopped me from passing it by, but if I'm being honest with myself it was likely the hot girl(Nectar Rose) in the playboy bunny costume wielding a chainsaw on the cover.

What I watched was a rough amalgamation between Evil Dead, House on Haunted Hill (1999) and Night of the Demons with a lot of flair and tons of style. Your basic plots follows five pledges, three guys and two girls, who are participating in cross fraternity/sorority scavenger hunt event. The plan is for them to all meet up in the old creepy house with their collected items, where their pledge masters are waiting with a bunch of gimmicky scares. Of course, things go from wacky teenage hijinx to "oh my god is that my spleen?" faster than you can say "oh my god that IS my spleen!".

Tiffany Shepis is excellent as one of the pledges. I get the impression that she was given license to really have a great time with the role and she certain does steal a lot of the scenes she's in, hamming it up. Nectar Rose also shines as another one of the pledges who does not react to shit hitting the fan at all how you would have expected. Most of the male leads are unremarkable, except for Brad Dourif as Professor Kapps, whos research into occult rituals and human sacrifice is what sets our whole ride into motion.

While it is now out of print, you can watch The Hazing (aka Dead Scared) on Netflix's instant streaming service. That's where I came across it. It's hard to find Halloween movies that are this much fun. You'd think there'd be more, given how much horror fans love the holiday. Here's one more, at least, to add to your list.

The 31 Days of Halloween: Day 22

Halloween is the best time of the year. It's a wonderfully indulgent time, where your inner ghoul is given societal license to be put on display. To celebrate it to it's wicked fullest, the Midnight Cheese will be posting every day in October with excellent ways to enjoy the season. Whether it's horror films, video games, books or activities, check back every day for some new Halloween fun.

Pumpkin Carving

If you haven't already, your prep for this activity is to read day 19's entry on picking you pumpkins.

Once you have the perfect pumpkins, you'll also need some tools. If you'd prefer to carve the classic way, with simpler shapes, a large kitchen knife is all you may need for the face itself. If you're planning to do a more intricate design then I suggest an inexpensive carving kit which includes a very useful saw. But before we get there, we'll have to hollow that baby out first.

For the hole in the top of you pumpkin, you want to give yourself enough room to work, so plan on a generous circumference. Make sure that you make the cut for the top at a good angle inward, not just up and down, so that when you put the top piece back it rests in place instead of falling through. You're going to want a wide spoon and a bowl for scooping out the guts. The bowl is to separate out the pumpkin seeds, the spoon to assist you is cleaning all the pulp off the inside walls of the pumpkin. You want to be thorough here, don't leave any loose pulp as it could be a fire hazard once it dries out. At the same time, don't scrape away so much that you walls are very thin, it can cause your jack 'o lantern to rot prematurely.

When it comes to the design itself, you've got loads of options. There are complex designs you can print out and trace onto you pumpkin, stencils you can buy or you can freehand it. I prefer to freehand draw whatever spooky face comes to me with a pencil and then carve it out: sort of like Michelangelo letting the marble block tell him what shape is hidden underneath but far less noble and immortal. Once you're finished, pop in a candle, put the top back on and viola!

Don't forget to roast the pumpkin seeds, these delicious and loaded with vitamins. Place them on a baking sheet, sprinkle salt to preference and roast them for 30 minutes at 300 degrees (obviously once you've already cleaned and dried them). They're good for as long as it takes you to enjoy them. Even if you're skeptical, give this a try, I've surprised more than one person which how delicious see are.

Let me know how you fare, I love seeing great Jack 'o Lanterns!

The 31 Days of Halloween: Day 5

Halloween is the best time of the year. It's a wonderfully indulgent time, where your inner ghoul is given societal license to be put on display. To celebrate it to it's wicked fullest, the Midnight Cheese will be posting every day in October with excellent ways to enjoy the season. Whether it's horror films, video games, books or activities, check back every day for some new Halloween fun.

Sleepy Hollow

Reach back deep into your memory. Do you recall The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr.Toad? If at least as old as I am, you'll recall this famous Disney cartoon, made in 1949, which showed every year on one of the local TV stations. Perhaps these may jog your memory:




I don't know for certain when the Headless Horseman became enmeshed with Halloween, but if I had to wager a guess, it is very likely that The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad is at the center of it.

It was a yearly treat for me and shaped my mind's image the Headless Horseman, the town of Sleepy Hollow and all that's involved in this classic folk tale. After reading the book in grade school, I still had the images instilled from this cartoon hardwired into my brain. It wasn't until 1999 that the wild vision of Tim Burton rewired everything about the way I envisioned Ichabod Crane and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Burton started by making some pretty radical changes to the mythos. Ichabod Crane transformed from a timid school teacher to a squeamish forensic science wielding investigator from New York City, though he still held on to the cowardly, sheepish traits established in the folk tale and portrayed in the '49 cartoon. He confirms on screen that the Horseman is in fact a vengeful ghost, where as it was heavily implied originally that he was a costumed local bully, in competition for the hand of a wealthy land baron's daughter. And Burton also gave Crane a compelling back story, shown in dream sequence flashback, which I won't spoil for you here.

As you could have expected, Sleepy Hollow's setting is heavily Gothic, as is usual with Tim Burton films. It even toes the line with some early, steampunk-esk futurism, mostly with regards to Ichabod Crane's pseudo-forensics. Everything is dark and dreary in this town without hope. The atmosphere is so realized that it can almost be viewed as a character in itself.

The last link that makes Sleepy Hollow so successful is it's ridiculously star studded cast. Just check this out: Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, Christopher Walken, Christopher Lee, Miranda Richardson, Michael Gough(Alfred!) and even Casper Van Dien (who clearly doesn't want to live forever)! In particular, Walken stands out as the Hessian mercenary turned headless ghost of vengeance.

If you want to watch the very best version of the classic folk tale come alive, check out Sleepy Hollow. It totally couldn't hurt to check out The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad as well, for old times' sake.

The 31 Days of Halloween: Day 4

Halloween is the best time of the year. It's a wonderfully indulgent time, where your inner ghoul is given societal license to be put on display. To celebrate it to it's wicked fullest, the Midnight Cheese will be posting every day in October with excellent ways to enjoy the season. Whether it's horror films, video games, books or activities, check back every day for some new Halloween fun.

Pumpkin Beer

Many of the characters in our chosen genre of film die horribly. Torturous, painful, mangled- not nice demises. Some of them can see it coming yet few of them make an effort to ease their own passing. Today, true bereavers, I shall ease your shuffling off the mortal coil, whether it be at the hands of a mad man or the end of a machete, with liberal applications of delicious libations. Oh, but not just any beer will do, not during October.

Pumpkin beers come in many base styles. They can start as a wheat beer, an amber ale, a red ale or even a stout. What really delineates a pumpkin beer from other isn't necessarily the addition of the meat of said vegetable, although that can be part of the recipe. Instead, what we've come to expect from pumpkin beers is actually the taste of the four spices used in pumpkin pie: Cinnamon, Allspice, Clove and Nutmeg. The exact amount used really depends on the strength of the beer. In my own brewing, it took two batches to really figure out the amounts needed.

What comes out ranges from the very subtle pumpkin bread like notes to smack-you-in-the-palate pumpkin pie booze. Today I'm going to suggest the two best examples of the latter to you for happy consumption on the day of your demise. I've heard it's easier to quip out snappy one liners in face of death when you're hammered.



Weyerbacher Imperial Pumpkin Ale
That "Imperial" translates roughly to "knock the unprepared on their ass". This brew from Weyerbacher is a full, rich and delicious beer with plenty of pumpkin spice flavor to back up it's 8% alcohol by volume punch. This is the first Pumpkin beer I discovered and was on the scene early on, before the explosion of imitators hit the market these last few years.

Southern Tier Pumking
This is the pumpkin spice beer. It sells out everywhere it is available. It is a desert in a 750ml bottle. You could eat vanilla ice cream while drinking this delicious explosion of pumpkin pie flavor. It weighs in at a liver crushing 9% alcohol by volume, so when you absolutely, positively have to get drunk faster than every mama-jamma in the room- accept no substitute.

Nothing is better than a delicious pumpkin beer on a crisp October night. Try not to get eviscerated out there.

The 31 Days of Halloween: Day 2

Halloween is the best time of the year. It's a wonderfully indulgent time, where your inner ghoul is given societal license to be put on display. To celebrate it to it's wicked fullest, the Midnight Cheese will be posting every day in October with excellent ways to enjoy the season. Whether it's horror films, video games, books or activities, check back every day for some new Halloween fun.

Book: The Zombie Survival Guide

By Max Brooks

This book lives right next to my official U.S. Army Survival Manual in my library. It's that important. There's an interesting and quite telling story about the placement of this book at retailers, which I'd heard years ago: Max Brooks (son of Mel) heard the booksellers placed his work in the comedy sections of their stores. He immediately contacted his publisher and demanded it be moved to the self help/non-fiction section, as surviving the zombie apocalypse is no laughing matter. I love this guy.

True to his stance in this story, Brooks considers everything from a realistic point of view. What weapons are best due to ease of use, availability and durability, what mode of transportation should you use (noise attracts the undead and cars require fuel), even where you should flee to depending on what size classification of outbreak you are stuck in. It's all here, all of those nerd-case-scenarios that you and your friends discuss ad nauseam, here and scientifically dissected for reliability and survivability.

Brooks came to the idea of writing this guide after touring colleges as a public speaker, with real weapons as examples. And his book even follows the expected guide formula. There is an outbreak journal in the back, where you can record all the historically important details for posterity, in case you don't make it (you probably won't). There's also a fantastic appendix which details all suspected recorded outbreaks throughout history. As you might have expected, a Roman Legion had the most success in putting down a larger scale outbreak, due to their extreme regimental training and tactics. You'll see this again if you read his followup book World War Z. In it, the most effective tactic for armies is to form into outward facing squares, with replacements behind for breaks.

With Halloween being the most likely time for the dead to walk the earth, I figured you deserved a chance to live. Pick this up, zombie hunters, and live to fight another day.

The 31 Days of Halloween: Day 1

Halloween is the best time of the year. It's a wonderfully indulgent time, where your inner ghoul is given societal license to be put on display. To celebrate it to it's wicked fullest, the Midnight Cheese will be posting every day in October with excellent ways to enjoy the season. Whether it's horror films, video games, books or activities, check back every day for some new Halloween fun.

Halloween Decoration

Decorating for the scary season has evolved quite a bit over the last two decades. As Halloween gains more mainstream acceptance among the traditional "big boy" holidays, the options available for turning a house into you very own little shop of horrors dramatically increases.

If you're looking to decorate on a more classic, traditional scale, we suggest you create a few scarecrows, get a hay bail or two and (once we're a bit closer to the 31st) carve those Jack ' Lanterns. Being an extension of a Pagan fall harvest festival, hay bails and pumpkins were setup at harvest time, not originally specifically at Halloween. That's carried over and melded with our celebration. Scarecrows were (and still are) easily and cheaply made, which is why they became a popular decoration in the first place.

If you're tastes lean a little more knee deep in gore or soul deep in the macabre, there are plenty of low tech options: bloody severed limbs, fake tombstones (of varying realism or with wicked puns on them), plastic skeletons and rubber bats. If you're a technology loving Halloween nerd, the last few years must have been awesome for you. From the cornucopia of string lights, to full blown animatronics- you really aren't wanting for options.

I like to use a projector and bed sheet in my bay window on Halloween night to projection horror films while the Trick or Treaters do their ghostly rounds. Of course, that's only setup on the night of.

The point being, as with all things Halloween, make it your own and have fun with it!

Halloween Season is Almost Upon us.

Halloween has been my favorite holiday and season for as long as I can remember. I'm sure most of you dear readers are of a similar persuasion, after all it's the time of year where our kind of movies shine. Everything ghoulish and monstrous is in the spotlight, at least for a week. When I was a kid that week seemed like an entire month but now that I'm older and working, it whips on by like a Jason Voorhees machete and is clean through the other side before I get to enjoy the kill the season.

And so it's with the spirit of Halloween looming that I'd like to spend a few minutes recounting some of my favorite traditions.

Pumpkin Carving

Warding off wayward spirits is all well and good, but what if you want to do it with some style and you're hungry? Jack 'o lanterns are a tradition which originated in the British Isles, where they carved turnips and other similar sized vegetables, in which they placed a burning ember. When these folk settled in America, they adapted this ritual to the indigenous pumpkin.

Pumpkin carving has become far more intricate over the last decade but, for my part, the act is a deeply personal one. I do a quick, rough sketch of a frightening face and then carve by hand. This produces varying levels of quality, but I think it's more the character of the pumpkin asserting itself to protect my house from the evils of the night.

And of course, there are many things to make from the sacrificial pumpkin's hallowed innards: baked pumpkin seeds, pumpkin bread, pumpkin pie, pumpkin beer. Don't let it go to waste.

Treating the Trickers

Sure, some of them don't care, so long as they get free candy, but I enjoy adding a little something extra, of the non-razor blade variety. When I was just a child there was an old gentleman on my block who spent the year making wooden toys for all of the children; horses, cars, soldiers and the like. I'm not so handy. However I do love my horror flicks. So I project horror films into my front bay window. As you can imagine my choices are limited to older movies, so that parents don't call the cops on me for exposing little Susie to Saw.

Therein lies the fun: any trick or treated who correctly identifies the movie gets extra candy. Last year, none of them recognized Vincent Price in The House on Haunted Hill but a bunch of them got the second feature Tremors.

The Exhumed Films 24-Hour Horrorthon

Now entering it's fifth year, the Horrorthon is the ultimate showcase of classics, trailers, sequels and monsters. It's an endurance test, a tradition and an unparalleled experience all rolled into one. I don't believe that I could adequately explain what's going on in my head at 4am, having been watching films already for sixteen hours, and have something like Boarding House unspool before me. Perhaps it's something between sorrow and joy, closer to elation but mixed with confusion.

Taking place the weekend of Halloween, the Exhumed Films Horrorthon has become a must attend event for horror fans from many states, which quickly sells out months ahead of time. I snagged my tickets in July.

Starting on October 1st and running right up until the best day of the year, Halloween, The Midnight Cheese will post suggested films, videos, books, games and activities every day to help you enjoy your season.