The 31 Days of Halloween: Day 29

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.

Playing tricks on treaters

I can't be the only person to have disguised themselves as a scarecrow, sat immobile next to the door and waited to scare trick or treating children. Now that I've brought it up, you kinda want to do it too. Be honest. Halloween night is all about the fun you can have. Here are a few cool traditions I celebrate that you might enjoy as well.

As an enormous horror film fan, I'll take any chance I can to expose more folks to the flicks that I love. Luckily, I own an LCD projector. I hang a white bed sheet in my bay window and project films onto it (from the inside). The effect looks really cool and I give any kid who can guess the film double candy. That's the difficult part though, my film selection can't be gory or contain nudity, which in the horror genre ties my hands to mostly black and white features for the 60's on back. Though last year I did show Tremors, which some ghoulish visitor recognized.

Another fun trick to play on treators uses a fog machine to great effect. Take one of your jack o'lanterns, one with a menacing face, and carve an addition hole in the back of it. This hole is to accommodate the fog machine's nozzle. You shoot it as the kids approach for excellent scary effect! One issue may be that this can blow out the candle inside. To combat that use a glow stick instead. Green is especially creepy.

My last tradition is designed to treat the parents in the neighborhood. It's only fair to help them enjoy the evening too. To that end, I hollow out a pumpkin but don't carve a face on it. Instead, I install a small tap in it and fill it with pumpkin beer. Traditionally I fill it with my own homemade pumpkin brew but any you can purchase should have the same effect. It's an excellent treat to offer and most folks are appreciative.

Whatever you particular special Halloween traditions are, celebrate them with gusto!

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.

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.