A Witch A Day

“I’d swear you had your colors done.” Will Vinton’s Claymation Comedy of Horrors  (1991) has only garnered five reviews on IMDb, so it’s probably safe to say it isn’t on many Halloween must-watch lists. That’s a pity, because animated holiday specials are rarely as funny as this. I stumbled on Horrors  just a few years ago while browsing the kid vid in the local library. It shares a dvd with Claymation Christmas Celebration  (1987) and Claymation Easter  (1992), both very funny as well. “Claymation” is Vinton’s trademarked brand of stop-motion animation, which entered the zeitgeist in the 1980s via TV spots featuring R&B quartet The California Raisins. The Raisins perform on the Christmas special. Personally, I don’t think they’ve aged well, but that may be because seeing them makes me feel old. Horrors defies easy summary. “A wise-guy pig-inventor and his snail assistant crash a convention of, um, non-mortals at Dr. Frankenswine’s castle ....” Honestly, there’s...

  Here’s a Hallmark gem from my Halloween card collection . I don’t ordinarily go in for elaborate gimmicks, but sometimes exceptions are warranted.

Old magazines are great sources for classic Halloween images—children’s magazines especially, but also the large-format weeklies like Collier’s  and Saturday Evening Post. Seen by millions, their covers celebrating (or spoofing) fads and traditions had a long-lasting impact on holiday iconography. This Saturday Evening Post  cover by Frederic Stanley arrived in mailboxes and on newsstands 91 years ago yesterday—or the day after tomorrow, depending on how you look at it. Self-taught, Stanley created 17 covers for the Post. Note the indication here of the witch’s fire, just out of view to our right, its low light picking out the contours of her mangy cat. Note too how the composition invokes the shape of the classic witch’s hat.

Halloween house decor has come a long way since my trick-or-treating days, when a jack-o-lantern on the porch, perhaps the odd jointed paper witch on the door (think Beistle), was  it.  Seems meager now, but the appearance at dusk of those candlelit faces flickering on every stoop was, for a five year old, a phenomenon to rival the rise of Brigadoon. Which, as it happens, was the name of the neighborhood in Lexington, Kentucky, where my brothers and I first went a-masking. Eventually, lighted blow-molds appeared, sometimes accompanying, sometimes replacing, the carved pumpkins. They were thought to be a bit tacky. Later, after my day, there might be strings of mini lights—not many; again, excess was frowned on. Haunts, meanwhile, were the purview of the Jaycees. The most you could expect in the way of scares while going door to door was a teenager of the household jumping from behind a bush. How things change. This year, I bought my first inflatables: an eight-f...

Illustration from The Witch’s Broom , by Chris Van Allsburg.   Vampires werewolves, witches, and the like are understood to play by certain rules. Sometimes, though, storytellers find it worthwhile to tweak the rules—or to invent new ones. The movie  The Fearless Vampire Killers  (1967) pokes fun at undead tropes by introducing the problem of how you subdue a Jewish vampire. (Hint: a crucifix won’t cut it.) Kind of silly, but—well, good question. It’s hard not to laugh. Laugh—out loud—is exactly what I did the first time I read Chris Van Allsburg’s  The Widow’s Broom  (Houghton Mifflin, 1992). I had picked it up in the bookstore purely to admire the artwork, little suspecting the sly story I was about to be told. Like the cross gag in  Vampire Killers , Allsburg’s tale is predicated on an entirely reasonable question: Do witches’ brooms wear out? The author informs us that they do and then shows what can happen when spent brooms come into the hands of ordi...

Artwork by Joseph Mugnaini Ray Bradbury reportedly wrote The Halloween Tree  in 1967 as a response to It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown . Seems he and his kids thought the pumpkin deity’s no-show was a cheat. If true, that has to have been one of the most egregious instances of “not getting it” of all time. The first version of Tree  was a script for a Halloween special to be animated by Chuck Jones. When nothing came of it, Bradbury turned the story into a book, published in 1972. He was finally able to get his cartoon with Hanna-Barbera in 1993. It is a very long cartoon. I missed the novel when it came out. It might well have made the intended impression on me, sweeping my 12-year-old self up in the rediscovery of the forgotten, or misunderstood, origins of Halloween. When I finally came to read it a couple of years ago, I realized that I had made the attempt sometime before but dropped it out of shear irritation. Man, is it overwritten! Just the description of perfect ...