Halloween 1989

Halloween, 1989. The holiday was on a Tuesday that year, as it is this year. It was surely one of my most awkward Halloweens.

I was in eighth grade. Tim Burton's first Batman movie was the biggest blockbuster that summer, and was still my favorite movie when autumn rolled around. By October, I had decided to be the Joker for Halloween. Around the middle of the month, I dressed as the character for a youth group costume party at church.

Although I don't remember where I bought the face makeup, it was probably at the local Sav-on Drugs. It was pretty cheap stuff as I recall, because the white paint dried out quickly and was thoroughly cracked by the end of the night. Of course, I painted my mouth into a wide red grin a la Jack Nicholson, and sprayed my head with green hairspray. (Using hairspray was nothing out of the ordinary for me back then!) For the costume, I wore black jeans along with a button-up shirt that had a small checked or plaid pattern colored with purple and/or green—the closest thing in my closet to a Jokeresque outfit.

That night, my younger sister went out trick-or-treating with her friends. My older brother was at home, hoping to watch Night of the Living Dead on television—probably on the popular show Night Flight—but Mom didn't approve of the subject matter. After a long workday, Dad was probably resting on the couch between trips to the front door to hand out treat bags.

We had put up several cardboard decorations inside and out, from the "HAPPY HALLOWEEN" sign on a closet door to the smiling paper pumpkin hung outside the front door. We had a carved pumpkin lit up on the front porch outside, but also a pumpkin inside the foyer on which my brother drew the face of Mad Magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman.

Just outside our side door into the garage, I set up a large ghost figure I'd constructed a couple weeks earlier. The head was a basketball covered in black electrical tape and fitted with a long blond wig. The body was a simple wooden contraption covered with a white sheet. I vaguely recall it having at least one moveable arm. I somehow thought that this figure would be visible to trick-or-treaters on the sidewalk near our house. But since only the head was visible from outside the fence, I doubt anyone saw it but me.

Mom drove me around the neighborhood in our Dodge Caravan so that I could trick-or-treat. Wanting to document the trip, I took along our large camcorder and made a few shots out the passenger window. Street lamps and objects in the car's headlights occasionally light up the shadowy video, though it remains pretty dark throughout. However, I captured a fairly good shot of the front of one neighborhood home, with its warm jack-o-lantern faces, yellow porch light, and softly glowing windows.

By the time we returned home, an episode of Matlock ("The Star," which pays tribute to horror films of old) was playing on TV. My sister had come home as well, and we sat by the fireplace in the living room, examining our bags of sweet Halloween loot.

As an eighth grader, it was one of the last times I trick-or-treated for myself. I enjoyed the holiday in my own introverted way, though it was a far cry from the excitement of earlier times, such as Halloween 1982 when I dressed as the Incredible Hulk. But now I experience the excitement of Halloween in a different way—as a father. As the leaves pile up and the nights grow chilly, I anticipate walking my sons along the streets of our neighborhood and up to those warmly-lit front porches. 

(Updated Sept. 24, 2024)

School Costume Parade and Halloween Party (1989)

Halloween festivities, as I remember them, were never quite as joyous when the holiday fell on a school night.

Friday night was the best night for trick-or-treating, of course, because you got the holiday plus a full weekend afterward. Saturday night ran a close second. I remember being in sixth grade and talking with a friend on the school playground a day or two before Halloween, which in 1987 was on a Saturday. I joked to my friend that I might eat so much candy on Halloween night that I'd be too sick to go to church the next morning. We both laughed about it, but when the time came I didn't end up gorging myself on candy.

This year Halloween is on Monday. While the rest of the week will undoubtedly be a letdown, most young students will be thrilled that much of the schoolwork they'd normally be doing that day will get pushed to Tuesday. Instead of students trudging into school wearing the glum expressions typical of Monday mornings, a host of superheroes, ghouls, cowboys, princesses, and unidentifiable creatures will light up the hallways with exuberance. Teachers will line them up for costume parades, and treat them to cookies, candies, and other sugary delights.

My sister shared with me a fabulous video from Video Dotti's YouTube channel. It's a home movie shot at Sandburg Elementary School in Centennial, Colorado, on October 31, 1989. I've rarely seen such a glorious parade of costumes.

Most of the 1980s favorites are there, often multiple times: The Noid, Freddy Krueger (or sometimes just a Freddy glove randomly included on another character), the Karate Kid, Jason from Friday the 13th, Pee-Wee Herman, Ghostbusters, Batman, and more. My favorite may be the floppy E.T. costume seen a couple minutes into the video.

It doesn't take long to notice how much looser the times were, considering the types of costumes and accessories that were acceptable then. The camouflage-clad, rifle-toting Frankenstein wouldn't fly nowadays. Nor would the disfigured, scythe-wielding ghoul.

I'm guessing at least half of the costumes shown in the video would now be prohibited due to weapons, gore, full-face masks, and costumes that restrict movement. From a quick search online for school Halloween costume guidelines, I learned that some schools now even limit the amount of face paint that students can apply. 

Another thing evident in the video is the teachers back then knew how to make the holidays fun. Check out this classic classroom decor, particularly its Halloween-themed bulletin board.

Teachers also knew how to party, especially if "party" meant supplying plenty of sugar in the form of candy apples, cookies for decorating, gummy worms, other individually-wrapped candies, and a smoking cauldron of Halloween punch. Oh, to be a school kid at Halloween!

Halloween 1982

Halloween 1982 was a big event for me.  I was 6 years old at the time and obsessed with The Incredible Hulk.  The previous summer was mostly spent running around the yard with cut-off shorts and no shirt, roaring menacingly at my sister.  But I was small, white, and blond.  Although I sometimes forgot this fact when I was truly in character, it was very embarassing when my dad had his video camera zoomed in on me, knowing that I didn't look anything like Lou Ferrigno.  In fact, one particular video shows me running in front of the camera and, in my best Hulk voice, pausing to offer this explanation to the audience: "I'm not painted green because I didn't have time!"

 



But that Halloween, I didn't want to make excuses anymore.  I wanted to BE The Hulk.  So, my mom found a black wig at the drug store and some green grease makeup.  I put on my cut-offs and a plaid shirt with rolled-up sleeves (with a green t-shirt underneath and wadded socks to make my biceps bulge).  And I had the best time that night, carrying my plastic pumpkin bucket, and flexing proudly for the video camera, allowing my dad to zoom in all he wanted.

Looking back at the video, I was still a pretty underwhelming Hulk; the makeup was uneven around my mouth, which just made me look dirty, and though my mom did her best to fix it, the shapeless wig looked like a ski cap.  But it was a special Halloween for me, one of my favorites, and I had a good night trick-or-treating with my older brother (the demon baseball player) and my younger sister (Tweety Bird).  Judging by the size of his treat bag, my brother was expecting a lot more candy than I was.

1970s Halloween Home Movies

The Zombie Movie (1994)

Here is a video I made with my friends back in the 90s. Back then we didn't have a lot of money (some of us still don't), so we would amuse ourselves by making short, no-budget videos. One particular friend tended to be cast as the monster in our videos, mainly because he was the largest member of our group. Here he plays a bathrobe-clad zombie.

The Mummy Is Brought Back To Life (1987)

THE MUMMY IS BROUGHT BACK TO LIFE

CAST
THE MUMMY AN-TARR...PAUL
THE WOMAN/PRINCESS RA-ANTEF...PAMELA
THE ARCHAEOLOGIST KASON-ANTEE...JIM

SCENE ONE: The archaeologist looks at a coffin that he had found. With it came a scroll. The archaeologist wipes the sweat from his brow and decides to get some sleep before he reads the scroll.

SCENE TWO: That night, the archaeologist wakes up. He opens the scroll and reads it. (Show scroll.) The archaeologist shrugs his shoulders. He lights his pipe and goes to bed. (He leaves his matches on the couch.) The coffin shakes. The mummy breaks his way through the coffin. He finds the scroll. He wants to bring his beloved princess to life. So he burns the scroll as a sacrifice. He runs out of the room. The archaeologist comes back in and remembers that he had forgotten his matches. He sees what had happened to the coffin, and he runs out of the room in search of the mummy. As he goes around the corner, he comes face-to-face with the mummy. The mummy chokes him and continues the search for his princess. He finds a cottage. In it he finds a woman that he thinks is the princess. When she sees him, she faints. He catches her and carries her off.

THE END

This is a story I wrote sometime near October 1987, knowing that my friend, Jim, would be coming over to my house. Of course, I had to recruit my sister to play the female part. I intended to make this into a movie by having my dad videotape us. The above story was likely a synopsis I wrote out to show my dad what the movie was about, assuring him that we had a plan and weren't just going to waste videotape.

As I recall, Jim came over and I expected us to have enough time to make the movie. I put on white socks, white sweat pants and a white T-shirt (so that I wouldn't have to use as much bandaging), and then I had Jim help wrap gauze around my head, neck and arms. It was nearing time to bring it all before the camera, but, apparently, we had reached the time limit for Jim's visit. My dad said it was time for him to go home. As Jim left, I stood there: seemingly expressionless behind a veil of gauze; however, tears welled up in my eyes as my dream of making a Mummy movie was shattered. At least, until "The Haunted Coffin."

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1987)

As the notebook paper title card suggests, there were times when my anticipation of Halloween led me to more ambitious projects than simply carving up a pumpkin. In 1982, my dad purchased a video camera for the family. Now, mind you, this wasn't a camcorder. This was a full-size video camera that had a separate, external recording deck. Basically, it was a camera connected to a VCR. By 1987, we were a pretty video-literate family, and there were many projects I had rolling around in my head. This particular video idea probably came about as a result of reading Thomas Aylesworth's Monsters from the Movies. In one of his chapters, he tells about the various filmed versions of Robert Louis Stevenson's story Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Inspired by reading about John Barrymore's famous performance, I decided to film my own version.

This was a pretty bare-bones production. I used some test tubes from a chemistry set I had received a Christmas or two prior. The transformation into Hyde was accomplished with some makeup from a kit I'd bought (the kit is visible on the couch as the camera pans to the floor). The special effect, where the camera is stopped and then restarted after the change is made, did not come out as well as I had planned (I supposed my dad jarred the tripod slightly between shots). And my sister appears briefly as Dr. Jekyll's girlfriend.

The highlight of the video is probably my choice of music (which I dubbed myself): the first movement of Beethoven's 5th for the Dr. Jekyll scene, and some organ music (from a Halloween sound effects tape) for Mr. Hyde's scene.

I made this video on 27 September 1987.

[Update 10/25/2023: The makeup kit mentioned above was called the Create-A-Face Complete Makeup Kit, manufactured by Imagineering Inc. in 1985. And thanks to an anonymous commenter from 2012, I learned that my long-lost sound effects tape was titled "Horror Sounds of the Night" and manufactured in 1986.]