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...