Katie Pumpkinhead’s Pumpkin Patch

 I went for another walk tonight. The sky was so gray and gloomy, it was absolutely perfect. These are the moments I live for, the moments I have to soak up before they're all gone. As I walked, I felt fully immersed in the October atmosphere. Once again as if I were in a movie or Halloween special. It's one of those evenings where you can just feel it.  But there is such a strange melancholy to this, the final countdown to Halloween.  October, for me, is life in its truest form. The time everyone and everything stops hiding. Decorations and costumes are more like windows to the soul. What you dress up as, how you decorate...it all feels like a reflection of what's just beyond the surface. The parts of us we hide, but wish we didn't have to.  It's strange how fleeting it is. I walk tonight, and it feels like a celebration, but also a painful goodbye.  I look around at all of the decorations I see, and know they won't be here soon. Some of them will disappear imm...

  When I was little, I often dreamed of witches. I blamed it on the abundance of witch decor I saw as a child. The nearby farm with the witch attached to the wooden orange moon. The house I trick-or-treated at every single year, that fashioned an old lamppost into a witch flying across the moon. It was all so deeply ingrained into my Halloween experience. When I got a little older, I started to believe that there was a witch out there watching over me. That she would come to me, maybe on my sixteenth birthday, like Sabrina on my favorite TV series, and whisk me away into my real life. I didn't see Halloweentown until my thirteenth Halloween had already passed, but I definitely had my suspicions after the fact that perhaps my parents had just let my powers grow dormant, or something. Clearly I was meant to be on the bus back to that town.  The older I've gotten, I've stopped searching the skies for Santa Claus, stopped imagining faeries in colorful gardens, all of that. But ...

 I keep seeing these social media posts, saying things like "This October isn't October-ing the way previous Octobers Octobered", or something along those lines. (This picture was found on a random Instagram account so I'm unsure of the artist.) To be fair, I feel like these kinds of posts pop up for every occasion. Every month, every holiday...there always has to be some mass complaint that it doesn't feel like years past. (Don't even get me started on how every single New Year's Eve post is always about how much the previous year sucked.) I understand it, sometimes...I think, in general, we are all always chasing the feelings we got from certain holidays and moments in time as children. I don't know that Christmas has felt Christmas-y to me since I turned eighteen-ish. It's hard not to feel like something is broken, when you're reaching for something that is no longer there, ripped away by the inevitable phenomenon of growing older.  However,...

 I went for a walk tonight. I don't often take walks in the dark, as the streets in my neighborhood are not really built for pedestrians casually strolling after the sun goes down. Sidewalks are minimal, brush is overgrown, there are bumps in the road... But, the October air was simply too delicious this evening to not take advantage of it. And so I set off, on a very small, deliberate journey. I find that Halloween-time hasn't changed a bit since my childhood. There are always the houses that are dark and seem almost sealed shut. My street is a strange array of the bright and the dark. A few houses from home, my path is lit nicely. Then I descend into darkness.  But then, as I pass the little bridge, actually part of a driveway, that reminds me so very much of the bridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, I am suddenly greeted by a burst of light. A voice, a memory, in the back of my head, says, triumphantly: Once you cross that bridge, my friend, the ghost is through; his power ends...

I have really been wanting to write a review of the movie Good Boy, since seeing on opening day.  This was honestly my most anticipated horror movie of 2025, although I admit the bar this year is extremely low. After being gravely disappointed by Weapons, I go into everything with low expectations.  But, as a dog lover and also a lover of experimental horror, Good Boy was a must see. I have to admit, though, I was also scared for this one. As a child, I absolutely refused to watch any movie where I thought the dog might die. I'm not sure if any of my fellow 90s kids recall a movie called Fluke, but I watched that as a child and it left me positively traumatized. (Looking back, it was extremely dark subject matter for a movie aimed at children and families...dog death aside, even. I don't think my eight or nine year old self was ready to learn so much about death in general.) My mother used to offer to rent me movies about dogs, one specific one that sticks out is My Dog Skip, ...

 I wound up watching a brand new movie for Halloween season 2025 last night: V/H/S/Halloween.  I'm going to start this off by saying I have not yet seen any of the other V/H/S movies, but I definitely want to. I just have never gotten around to it. Nothing I say in this review is meant to be a statement on the franchise as a whole as I have nothing yet to compare it to in that way. I just saw a new movie set on Halloween and came running, as I do every year. Now, I tend to have very mixed feelings about these Halloween horror anthology films. Trick 'r Treat is one of my most favorite movies of all time. I have an insane love/hate relationship with Tales Of Halloween, where I can never decide if I like it or despise it. (I should do a deep dive on that one one day.) I couldn't get past the first installment of the 10/31 movies. All Hallows Eve might actually be my favorite entry into the Terrifier franchise, if it wasn't for that alien bit in the middle. So yeah, I had n...

 I have said, since my childhood, that Halloween ends the most abruptly of all the holidays.  I can't really decide if it's gotten better or worse as I've gotten older.  It's great that a year-round Halloween community exists, of course, but October and Halloween-time are truly so fleeting. Perhaps the most fleeting things I can think of. The morning of November 1st comes, and decorations are being packed away, hidden again, as if no one can dare know, beyond the 31 days of October itself, that strange and spooky things are of interest to anyone; that "scary" doesn't always have to be a bad thing. And for that reason, for how fleeting it truly is, every moment of October truly feels precious. Every moment of October not spent somehow acknowledging or being immersed in it, seems wasted, criminal.  Sometimes, during the month of October, I feel like a person who's been told I only have a limited amount of time left to live. And perhaps I do...I've al...

  I went for my first walk in ages tonight.  The last real walk I remember going on, was a December morning, when Halloween was being discarded.  I remember seeing pumpkins by garbage cans, empty spaces where ghosts once flew.  The ghosts of ghosts, you might say.  The world hasn't looked the same, since then. But now, now it is autumn. It is that magical time when September shifts into almost-October; goes from being my birthday month to almost-Halloween.  I walk tonight, and I see the beginnings.  Not everyone has decorated yet, but it is starting. The world is beginning to look like a place I recognize once more, and old friends are appearing on lawns or in doorways, or peering down at me from windows.   I'm not sure if I'm waking up from a dream, or have fallen back to sleep.  But whatever it is, it feels good. The best I have felt in a long time. "Welcome back," I say to the decorations, and to autumn and Halloween, and to myself. "It fe...

  Today, we stand at the beginning of the road. The start of something we've anticipated for so long, it sometimes felt like it was never going to arrive.  Today the sky darkens in the most inviting shade of gray, bringing a breeze and a gentle flutter of leaves just starting to turn shades of yellow or red or brown.  Our memories harken us back to the place that feels like some fictional dreamworld each year, a world ablaze in color, celebrating the things that most people don't dare speak of, when it isn't time. It's almost hard to believe this is the same world we've existed in all summer long, with its endless days of blinding sunlight and green, green, green, as far as the eye can see.  Some are sad about summer's end, but we know it won't go without a fight. There will still be hot days, still moments where the light is too bright, although the summer has lasted so long already. Today we see the start of the most fleeting season. Summer clings on, leav...

  The most amazing thing happened to me, on a Saturday afternoon.  The date was August 30th, just two days before Labor Day; the start of September, and, thankfully, the unofficial (but official, in my book) end of summer.  I wound up at a local toy shop, coming away with some tiny plushies. (Two of them Christmas themed, ironically, as I am working toward finding the magic in all things once more .) As I exited the store, something caught my eye beyond the fence leading to the next residential street.  A very tall pumpkin man seemed to be walking toward a house. My mind snapped back to when I was six years old, the very first time the Great Pumpkin came to visit me. How I'd heard him in the night, a candle rattling around in his head as he did his work, ensuring the happiest of Halloweens for the truest of believers. How special it felt to know I was one of his Chosen.  I'd always hoped to thank him one day. I quietly tiptoed around the fence, out into the narr...

  I heard someone say, the other day, that we are heading into the final week of summer before Labor Day, before it's 'back to reality' . This was such a strange thing for me to hear.  The season that September will usher in, has always been the dream state for me.  'Back to reality' is a phrase I associate with coming back from a vacation, or the end of a magical event. I have never once thought of entering the fall season as the end of something. Fall is the event.  When I think of summer, I think of the mundane. The bright, generic reality that people seem to love to exist within. It's a time where everyone blends in, but I stand out, my eyes water-bleeding from the sunlight, my body exhausted and my energy zapped from the heat. It feels like being trapped in a cubicle at a 9-5 job, working hours of overtime every day.  I don't know that I can think of anything more mundane and constricting than summer. This is the escape people crave, but summer, for me,...

 I recently saw possibly the most hyped up horror of the 2025 season, Weapons.  There have not been many movies I've been excited to see in 2025. The only horror movies I've seen in theaters this year have been Companion, Heart Eyes, and The Monkey. Other than that, nothing has really interested me enough to spend money on seeing it in theaters. (I do need to watch Sinners; scheduling conflicts kept arising when it came to seeing that one on the big screen.) But I absolutely loved the initial marketing for  Weapons, making it look like footage from a real unsolved case, and it   has easily been one of my most anticipated movies of the year. But, sadly, I actually didn't like it.  This is not meant to be a "hot take" post in any way. I'm not here to rain on anyone's parade that did enjoy it, I just have a lot of thoughts about it that I want to unpack for myself, and maybe for anyone else who feels similarly. If you loved the movie, I'm honestly very ha...

 It's that time of year again, boils and ghouls! Spooky season has officially arrived on the scene, and Summer Summers of Summerville is just sick about it. She and her cronies are out here acting like that ghost pillow in their local HomeGoods means the beach is now closed until Memorial Day 2026 and the sun will not be seen again until next June. Did you know Halloween decor in July actually shortens people's summers? What a phenomenon!  Obviously, this is not the case. It's still, sadly, meteorologically speaking, very much summer. But those of us who want to look ahead have as much right to do so as thought that don't wish to look ahead have every right to do a strange little thing I'll never understand called "enjoy their summer". It doesn't have to be a battle, and yet, ever year, it is.  Sometimes I think summer people dwell on autumn and Halloween more than those of us that actually live for it. If you're so focused on what other people are...