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Halloween Window Silhouettes, Bubble Tape, and Spider Lights. In that order.

Hooray for Halloween nights! That slight chill! The sounds of crickets who refuse to admit that they're out of season! Dagger-shaped clouds bathed in moonlight! Ahhh, the only thing missing is the knowledge that I can enjoy it all night and then sleep until 3 PM. Would Halloween nights be a valid reason for quitting my job?

Earlier, we stopped at CVS on a spooky hunt. CVS never has too much great stuff, but they do have the biggest Snapple selection I've ever seen, and this helps compensate for things. Below are tonight's finds.

Halloween Window Silhouettes: You've seen these cheap, plastic Halloween window "covers" for years, in every conceivable style. If you're like me, you've probably avoided them. They seem bulky, tacky, messy and kind of pointless. No matter what a company prints on an enormous plastic window cover, it's still an enormous plastic window cover, and it's probably going to look like shit taped over a window.

Or so I thought!

I got a pair of skull-themed Window Silhouettes, which admittedly look pretty badass -- like an x-ray of a skull with alien red eyes tacked on. Problem is, they're not window-sized...they're door-sized. I can understand why the makers of Halloween Window Silhouettes didn't want to limit their potential market to people with full-length glass doors in their homes, but a spade is a spade. These are Halloween Door Silhouettes.

The package claims that you can "trim" the plastic to make the things fit in windows, but I'm having a hard time seeing how this is possible. The entire silhouette is almost 5.5 feet tall, and even the skull alone is well past 4 feet tall. In a standard window, you'd only be able to fit the left side of the skull's jaw. I should've known something was up when I saw the "buy one, get one free" banner over these at CVS.

But! If you're lucky enough to have a full-length windowed door, you are in for glory and prestige of unfathomable heights.

That's our back door -- it's a sliding one, featuring glass panels with Venetian blinds trapped inside. Not the ideal scenario for a Halloween Door Silhouette, but it absolutely works.

The picture does not do this thing justice. We taped it on the door from the inside, shone a light through it, and up above is how it looks from the outside. A humongous, disembodied glowing skull surrounded by pitch blackness. Really awesome, and the effect improves with distance. I heard some kids a few house away roaring their approval, which both filled with me with pride and made me realize that the families who live behind us can see what I'm doing in the yard. The more I think back, the more I'm concerned.

In short: They're one of the most inexpensive Halloween decorations ever, and they're everywhere. Even if you can't find these wicked skulls, you'll have no trouble finding the plastic window/door covers in a multitude of other spooky styles. If you've been passing 'em up, it might be a good idea to reconsider. So long as you have really, really big windows to work with.

Halloween Bubble Tape: Hmm. Not too impressed. It comparison to 2006's "Mummy Tape," this is not a big event. For 2009, Hubba Bubba's unleashed a new type of Halloween Bubble Tape, in a sleek black case with a neat vampire sticker on the front.

That's all well and good, but the flavor? It's original. Plain old original! No black raspberry! No blood orange! Not even a ghoulish grape! Sure, a closer inspection of the label while at CVS would've confirmed this and saved me some disappointment, but who would expect plain old original bubble gum to come out of a package like that?

I absolutely hate it when companies only dress up their products' packaging for Halloween. It's so chintzy and illegal. The only saving grace is that Hubba Bubba reportedly has an assortment of monster stickers available, so even if you aren't chewing anything extraordinary, at least you can collect gum cases with vampire, mummy and other monster sticker labels on them. The downside? To open the packages, you have to tear right through the middle of the monsters' heads.

I hate being forced to decapitate monsters. I feel that doing so is a decision I must come to on my own terms.

Dangling Spider Lights: Niiiiiice. A box of ten Dangling Spider Lights only cost me 7.50, and it can easily be argued that a ten-pack of large, plastic spiders would be worth that price even if they didn't light up. But they do!

Within the mix are three different spider styles with three different light colors, and my camera really didn't want to portray them in a positive fashion. Trust me, they look much cooler than that. The lights perfectly straddle the line between being "creepy lights" and "party lights," so depending on your intent, you can either make you home look like a haunted crypt, or like a place where people go to do the Charleston with flasks of gin in their free hands.

Before I retire, how about a Halloween survey?

In the comments, discuss your experiences in watching scaaaaary movies as a child. This is a free-for-all survey -- you can take that direction however you'd like. If your parents brought you to see a horror movies in theaters when you were way too young for it, confess. If you snuck in a viewing of The Exorcist when you were nine-years-old and couldn't sleep for weeks, tell us about it.

My own experiences wouldn't have as much to do with any specific movie, but rather the manner in which they were watched. My parents were never very strict about bedtimes (I honestly cannot recollect a time when I had one), nor did they particularly care if I slept in my bedroom or not. (To this day, I prefer couches.)

As such, it was typical for me to sleep downstairs, where nobody else slept at the time. I'd camp out on our old sofa in front of our enormous old television -- a luxury item purchased after one of my parents' rare Atlantic City victories, if I remember correctly.

I didn't have an irrational fear of scary movies, but I also knew how to live within my limits. I avoided watching them when I was home alone, or worse, home alone at night. Of course, we all fall off the wagon sometimes, and there was more than one time when I was on my own in the evening hours, downstairs, watching a movie that I definitely should not have been watching.

Whenever this happened, I had one of two responses. In some cases, I'd eventually freak, change the channel, turn on every light in the house and essentially create a kind of virtual daytime. In other cases, the movie and darkness would just totally paralyze me, and I'd be unable to crawl out from under the blanket, even it was just to change the channel to some inoffensive uppity late-night infomercial. Nothing quelled abstract fear like the sight of Jack LaLanne juicing celery.

The latter cases were pure torture, but I loved 'em. There was something exhilarating in that fear, even when it got so out of control that I was convinced I was seeing ghouls and demons in every window and every mirror. It's hard to replicate that rush once you grow up, much as I try. I still love to watch scary movies in the dark, but I can't say that it stirs my soul much. Then again, the kid version of me would've never kept a 7' audio-animatronic Jason Voorhees in plain view.

I hope your stories are better and more specific than mine.

Posted by Matt on 10/06/2009. E-mail me!



Discussion Thread: 185 comments

Ok, first, that skull ROX! Plus it’s CREEPY , IF you stare at it long enough! Spider lights are great too. The scariest movie moment that sticks out in my mind, is the first time I saw Killer Klowns from Outerspace as a youngin.
I had a SEVERE fear of clowns before I even saw it. After watchin it, I wouldn’t go near one of those demonic things even if you threatened my life! Not only did the clowns in this flick look demonic, they sounded that way too. And lets not forget their UTTERLY INSANE sounding laugh! And of course I watched it alone and with the lights out. Plus it was storming out too. All in all a PERFECT Halloween night! Needless to say, I had REALLY passive parents when it came to TV and movies. lol They honestly didn’t care at all what I watched.

Chestnuts roasted by ULTRAMAN @ 10/07/2009 1:10 AM

My parents were never particularly fussy about the movies I chose to watch – mostly because I was a certified weenie, and I opted not to freak myself out. (Example: the “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” tape case at Turtle’s Video freaked me out for quite a while…as did the cover of “Hellraiser.”)

Once I finally pulled myself together, I did manage to sneak (at least I felt like I was sneaking) a USA Network showing of 1988′s “Cheerleader Camp.” Having survived that monument to questionable film-making, I have been a horror-lover since.

Chestnuts roasted by Mel @ 10/07/2009 1:15 AM

My mom ran a pretty tight ship so I never watched the horror movies the kids at school got to watch. I was always curious how the kids at school watched Rated R flicks because in my little kid head, everyone’s house had the same rules.

Chestnuts roasted by Jeff Mack @ 10/07/2009 1:30 AM

venison: I had the exact same sort of relationship with VHS box covers, your description of it was perfect. I must admit I miss that odd combination of feelings now, it’s something that I just don’t experience over anything anymore… a particular combination of emotions that I suppose has been relegated to stay back in my childhood.

As a young child, I had a fear of blood. If I was to venture a guess, I’d say it was probably caused in part by being in a mild traffic accident as a kid and seeing my mother’s face all bloodied. Subsequently, I tended to avoid horror films, and wasn’t exposed to a lot of them in my earliest years. Still, a few would manage to slip by, and I do remember being freaked out by the low-budget cinematic wonders of Slugs and Terror at the Red Wolf Inn. I remember the severed head (heads? It’s been so long I don’t remember the details) in a fridge from the latter film spooked the living daylights out of me at the time.

That all tended to fade around age 9 or 10, however, and I began to see what the genre had to offer in the way of “safe” fears, the adrenaline rushes that were not caused by any actual threat, but by good (or what seemed good at the time) storytelling, and the occasional cheap, but nevertheless effective cinematic “gotcha!” shots.

Now, as an adult, I’ve become a jaded gorehound, chuckling at the very scenes that would’ve sent me into absolute fits of terror as a kid. Funny how things turn out.

Chestnuts roasted by Jugendsehnsucht @ 10/07/2009 1:32 AM

Not a real fan of horror movies, I’d rather read reviews or watch specials about them than actually watch them, but of course that is how I do a lot of things.

I believe though my earliest experience with the horror genre that I can remember is being confined to my cousins room because he and his friend was watching Chucky in the living room. I being a noisy little brat did happen to catch a quick look at it as I crossed the living room to get to the kitchen for some reason or another. Didn’t scare me much though. All I got to see was Chucky’s big head filling up the screen.

Now I have watched a few since then pet cemetery, some of the chucky’s and the blar witch project. But none of them really scared me, I always felt something was wrong with the stories. Mostly I think it was that I always try to think of a way out, as if I was watching a scenario that could possibly happen, and most the time the answer I would come up with fared a little better than what the protagonist did.

Of course with the Blar witch Project, Never going into the woods with a bunch of idiots was my first thought.

Chestnuts roasted by Rookee alding @ 10/07/2009 1:45 AM

When I was 13-14, the Blair Witch Project’s online viral marketing started. I was fresh faced to the internet. I’d sign onto AOL with our dial-up modem and after 25 minutes of busy signal finally get to check out the new website additions. Maybe I’d spend a ten minutes waiting for a new video to load or I’d start searching around for more information. A friend and I were absolutely obsessed with it, passing the same links back and forth every day.

When it finally came out we were there day one. Dropped off by our parents no less. I felt no motion sickness as people tended to report but as the scenes counted down to the end when we see the guy facing the corner my heart was pounding.

We walked into the mall parking garage laughing, “oh that wasn’t too scary, hahaha, but you have to admit that was a good ending!”. Let me tell you, I couldn’t sleep without a light on for weeks. I was convinced not that a witch would get me, but I’d open my eyes in the middle of the night to see a man in flannel standing in the corner facing the wall.

Just heading over to the website now bothered me. My only hope is someone will write another comment after me so I have something else to read and take my mind off of it.

Chestnuts roasted by Jess @ 10/07/2009 1:59 AM

I remember being like 10 years old and seeing what had to be some crappy movie on T.V. about a ghost or something. There was a wood chipper. The kid’s hat fell into it. He just had to climb into it to retrieve it. Even at that age I was like ” dont do it!” Of course the ghost or whatever turns the damn thing on and its all screaming and blood shooting out the other side. Then the icing on the cake: a hand falls out. I still remember to this day I was eating caramel corn. I felt like barfing. Couldnt eat it for a while after that. Have never seen whatever the hell that movie was since, so its still stuck in my mind as horrific. Im sure parents dont think that cheesy stuff will be so bad but you never know what will stick.

Chestnuts roasted by citygirl @ 10/07/2009 2:20 AM

My mom was another one of the stricter parents. I remember begging to watch Gremlins on tv when I was 7 o r so, but mom said it would scare me too much. I didn’t see it until sometime in college. So of course, any real horror movies were out of the question. Just like a couple others said, the horror section at the video store had a kind of thrilling allure, because looking at the covers was the closest I could get to seeing any of them.

Books were a different matter entirely. Goosebumps became a big thing when I was in third grade, and along with those I’d also check out stacks of anything that looked scary. Mom never told me I couldn’t read a book. One ghost story book I read when I was probably 9 or so had an illustration of some kind of skeleton with rotting flesh wearing suspenders,and that image has never left me. Sometimes I still imagine it chasing me upstairs.

The weird thing is, even though I was so sheltered from horror movies, they never freaked me out much. I watch for the cheese factor. Maybe books are just more terrifying, because you can never see that shadowy terror. It’s always lurking.

Chestnuts roasted by hobbitsubculture @ 10/07/2009 2:50 AM

Irrational? Definitely.

As a twelve year old I watched Poltergeist. To say it scared the shit out of me is an understatement. For ten years I could not sleep with a TV facing me. Even now, over twenty years later, i cant get past the opening credits. The irony? I spend evey halloween doing my best to scare the shit out of eveybody. Last year we had trick-or-treaters running back to their parents from our front door without taking a single piece of candy when they were greeted by an army of zombies and werewolves.

Heaven help you kids this year when you are greeted by a gang of people wrapped shoulder to foot in cling film having a race down the street…

Chestnuts roasted by UK Matt @ 10/07/2009 3:00 AM

My parents had some restrictions, but I had older siblings, and it was through them I was exposed to horror movies as a child. Earliest I remember was Child’s Play on TV. I was 4 or 5 and had dreams, some of them nightmares, some of them just weird, for about two weeks or a month afterward. Needless to say, dolls scared me for a while. I still have a faint memory of seeing Chucky slice his way through a door after being roasted in the fireplace. Yeah, that was appropriate for a 4 year old, but hey, Andy survived, and so did I. I think I watched Child’s Play 2 when I was, let’s say 10 (somewhere in that ballpark) and pretty much laughed my ass off.

I was also exposed to Friday the 13th part 3 and Halloween II when I was six, and I freakin’ loved both those movies. Didn’t scare me at all (granted, they were censored for TV). I just thought they were epic and fun! I saw the first F-13 when I was seven, and that actually scared the shit out of me, between Mrs. Voorhees and Jason jumping out out of the lake. In fact, I didn’t get over my fear of that movie till recently, and I’m 23! For 15 years or more, little Jason terrified me much more than hockey mask Jason.

And, I don’t know if it counts, but Terminator and T2 also scared me. The first one is a horror movie of sorts. The second is more of an action film, but it’s even more terrifying than the first. Robert Patrick still creeps me out.

Chestnuts roasted by namideo @ 10/07/2009 3:16 AM

i was forced into watching my cousin’s 2 boys (ages 3 and 5)
anyway the older one gave me a blank dvd (pirated copy) and it was his favorite batman cartoon so i put it in and went to the bathroom real quick; it was not batman, but instead was the 2004 version of dawn of the dead needless to say about 2 minutes later i hear bloodcurdling screams and crying so i rush out there to see the boys absolutly terrified at seeing a little girl bite the shit outta her dad. my cousin was none to pleased about this…

Chestnuts roasted by WALRUSONION @ 10/07/2009 4:02 AM

I remember being around 10 and at a family gathering. Someone figured it’d be a good idea to let the kids see Poltergeist, and I really don’t think there was anyoneof the cousins older than me. Well, I couldn’t even get past the tree part, and I had nightmares for days.
I’ll also admit I still can’t (or refuse to) watch The Exorcist. And I REALLY hope someone releases Paranormal Activity down here in Brazil…

Chestnuts roasted by Roddy @ 10/07/2009 7:34 AM

I remember my parents being totally OK with letting my sister, brother, and I watch any scary movie we’d pick out at the local video store. The best part was my Mom was fine with letting us watch Jason Vorhees decapitate a guy while he was hanging upside down from a tree, but we had to cover our eyes for the sex scenes. I’m not sure what kinda message that sends to kids, but I’m pretty sure that’s how Jason got his morals so screwed up. His mom probably had the same ‘violent murder is fine, but sex, now that’s just wrong’, philosophy. I can’t for the life of me remember how it worked if it was a scene where the kids got killed while they were having sex…..

Chestnuts roasted by Kate @ 10/07/2009 8:55 AM

As a kid, I seemed to get scared by anything. And I mean ANYTHING.

I remember when I was about 3 or 4, there would be a couple of kid’s programmes on around lunchtime that my mother would leave me to watch while she did jobs around the house. I was fine with them, until the commercial brak. And then… HE appeared. Dracula? Frankenstein? Freddy Kruger? No, something far worse — Ronald McDonald!!

At the time (circa 1982), there was an ad (commercial) with him walking around a maze, where the hedges were moving around behind him. This, coupled with his hideous face, sent me running crying to my mother even time!! Even now, I don’t eat at McDonalds.

But you think that’s bad – I was scared of SILLY things. I never got into ‘Doctor Who’ until I was older, but on the glimpses I saw of it as a very young boy… was I afriad of the Daleks? No. Cybermen? No. Various other monsters? No! I was afraid of… K-9! The fourth Doctor’s robotic dog, the thing kids were supposed to LIKE. It scared the bejeezus out of me.

But the good thing is, I think I used up most of my fear as a young boy, as now I can pretty much watch anythihg without being phased. That’s the internet generation for you!

Chestnuts roasted by Jay Firestorm @ 10/07/2009 8:56 AM

All I’ll say is: don’t stay late at your friend’s place on the edge of town, watching a “lame” horror movie about scarecrows, when the only way home is riding your bike up a looooong, unlit mountain road with dense foliage on both sides. I swear, I never pedalled so hard before or since.

Chestnuts roasted by Mycroft @ 10/07/2009 9:04 AM

This is a good survey. Looks like I’ll be binge drinking at the embarrassment bar, but O well.

When I was a kid, ANYTHING scared me, so scary movies of any kind were right out. I can remember seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time and laying in my bed that night with all of the lights in my room on, terrified. The night I saw the Garfield Halloween special for the first time put me in a similar state. Hell, even DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s “Nightmare On My Street” screwed me up for a few days. I had friends that talked up NOES and the F13 movies as comedies. I don’t know if that was just little kid bragging/lying or not, but I just couldn’t do it.

These days, through immersion therapy during my adolescence (read: I didn’t want to be the guy the whole school made fun of on finding out I had to leave the room when a scary movie was put on), I can sit through pretty much anything. But to this day I’ve never sat through a complete NOES, Halloween, or F13 movie. Not for lack of wanting to, but I feel like if the first time I see them is edited for TV, I’ll be missing out.

Keep up the great work, Matt!

Chestnuts roasted by Mike P. @ 10/07/2009 9:20 AM

First nightmares I remember having: The night after watching Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ video for the first time. I must’ve been 4. To this day it scares the shit out of me.

Chestnuts roasted by Evilsquatch @ 10/07/2009 9:28 AM

Sadly I don’t really have a story for this. My parents were very into bedtime and age appropriate movies so I missed out. The closest I cam we when I was at a friend’s house and he was really excited to watch Alien 3. I was a total pussy about it because “it was rated R!” I knew my parents would never let me watch it at my house so I knew in my head that it was going to be a bad mistake to watch it there. Eventually he convinced me and I reluctantly watched the movie… and ended up seriously pissed. Not only was the movie NOT scary, I remember finding it to be really boring. I didn’t watch another horror movie until high school because I was so put off by that one in the 1st grade. Luckily I can enjoy them for what they are now, but I feel a bit robbed that I never had a late night, scared shitless horror movie moment as a kid.

Chestnuts roasted by drew do @ 10/07/2009 9:36 AM

i have nearly life size window clings of jason and freddy i put in our front windows every year. i’m sure i piss the neighbors off because i usually keep them up until close to thanksgiving. it’s like they’re greeting me when i pull in the driveway.

as for a story, i watched whichever friday the 13th involved a girl hanging jason by his neck in a barn in my room alone one night when i was young (i think it was even an edited version on u.s.a. which shows you how much of a wuss i was). my room was in the basement away from the rest of my family and had its own door to the outside of the house. i actually made my dad wake up and get dressed and go outside because i couldn’t stop hearing “terrifying footsteps” outside. i did not sleep that night.

Chestnuts roasted by nick @ 10/07/2009 9:40 AM

When I was about 6 or 7, my parents left my older brother and I with a babysitter to go off and do magical adult stuff. Now, if my parents had been watching us, they would have forbade us from watching scary movies. But, as it happened, this babysitter was rather elderly and unattentive, and therefore didn’t give a shit what we watched. So my brother and one of his friends switched the TV to A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. It was one of those situations where I was terrified, but also curious enough to steal numerous glances at the screen. The part that stuck out to me the most was when Freddy turned Debbie into a cockroach then squashed her to death. To say that it scared the bejeezus out of me would be an understatement; I had recurring nightmares about Freddy until I was 15 or 16 (not even exaggerating here).

Chestnuts roasted by Cheetara @ 10/07/2009 9:46 AM

to jay firestorm concerning doctor who: the creepy gray tunnel that the camera is whizzing through during the end credits coupled with the end credits music always gave me the creeps for some reason. and when i had my first (and only) doese of laughing gas for my first filling, that’s what i hallucinated, falling through that creepy thing. then the tunnel did a weird swoop, inverted and exploded out like a volcano while i silumtaneously vomited all over the dentists. weird stuff.

Chestnuts roasted by nick @ 10/07/2009 9:48 AM

I’ll say like a few others.I was allowed to watch pretty much anything.My dad and my stepmom didn’t really watch horror movies(and like Kate,I remember having to cover my eyes during sex scenes).My stepbrother(10 years older than me)was a different story.He introduced me to the likes of Freddy,Jason,Leatherface,Michael Myers and all the rest of the great 80′s slashers.I remember going into the basement where his bedroom was and he would be like “Jason come and watch this movie with me”.And it would always be a horror flick.I never thought they had an effect on me…until we moved a couple of years later.In the new house,we had large basement where the washer and dryer were along with the pool table.Anytime I would go downstairs(even if no-one was home to hear me)I would whistle or talk out loud.My reasoning for that was, that if a murderer were to come and kill me someone would notice that I had abruptly stopped whistling or talking. This same stepbrother actually had a scare of his own though.He was in the basement late one night watching NOES and fell asleep.Well,that night my uncle Jimmy(he had just been discharged from the Marines)had locked himself out and everone else was asleep.So he went around back and knocked on the window to wake up my stepbrother to let him in.Well,my stepbrother woke up in horror.He went to the back door gripping a baseball bat saying “Freddy,is that you?”.we still laugh about it til this day.And he still calls me Jason Vorhees like he has for the past 25+ years.

Chestnuts roasted by Jason @ 10/07/2009 9:55 AM

Sorry about that big paragraph.I tried in dent ing and having 2 paragraphs.But I suck at “writing” on the computer.Anyone know how I could remedy that?

Chestnuts roasted by Jason @ 10/07/2009 9:57 AM

Good God, your window skull thing is so way cool! And the blinds make it even more badass. I want to have my class portrait made in front of it!

I did not watch too many horror movies as a wee lass. But I do remember sitting in the hallway while my parents watched Friday the 13th and just listening to every ch-ch-ch and bloody scream of terror, which probably creeped me as much as seeing it would have. And I also remember moving to a new house when I was 5 and being scared every night when I went to bed. To still my fears, my parents put a little t.v. with rabbit ears in my room so I could have the warm glow to keep me company. This worked. I’d pass out, fast asleep during some awesome episode of the Facts of Life or something. But my parents would never sneak in and turn the t.v. off. So, then, I’d wake up at, like 1 a.m. to the opening credits of Tales from the Darkside. My parents would be all tucked in safe in their beds, the house would be as dark as possible, and I would be paralyzed with fear, lying in that bed, waiting on this show to JUST BE OVER ALREADY. Cause there was no way on earth I was gonna make it out of the bed, scurry over to the t.v. and change the channel (or even worse, turn it off? and just sit there in total darkness?)

Anyway, I’ve been living with Mr. Velouria for so long now, I often forget what it’s like to be alone in the house at night. And I’m a horror movie addict as an adult, so I tend to think I’m pretty desensitized to the whole thing. But every once in a while, I’ll end up home alone and I’ll get all cocky about it and pop in some horror movie. Yup. I’m a total wuss. I still get freaked out.

Chestnuts roasted by velouria_78 @ 10/07/2009 10:05 AM

The form keeps eating my story:(

Chestnuts roasted by Cheetara @ 10/07/2009 10:16 AM

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