2023-10-28 22:00:01
The horror starts again on October 31st. However, I have long since given up trying to be frightened. Unfortunately, my previous Halloween attempts weren’t even half as fun as the merchandise industry would have us believe. Because let’s be honest: Most of the time the whole thing is nothing more than a welcome opportunity to dress up for a change.
Aside from compulsive collective destruction, I’m not generally averse to horror. At least there’s something strangely cozy about cuddling up in front of the television together and watching a horror flick that you’re either constantly squealing about or making fun of while whinnying. (How can it be that Michael Myers walks so incredibly slowly and still surprises his victims around the next corner?) But everything about Halloween that goes beyond horror movie nights has been a tremendous disappointment for me so far.
There’s nothing else sweet – nothing at all
As a child, what fascinated me most about Halloween was the idea of going from house to house in costume and begging strangers for their candy. After all, Hollywood successfully convinces us that all adults are happy about kids dressed up cutely who ring their doorbell after dark. A tip from my own experience: They usually don’t do that.
After a lot of back and forth, I finally got my mother to let me go around the houses in our single-family home complex with my elementary school friends and an adult companion. Maybe it was because the trick-or-treating custom wasn’t really known in our part of the world at that time. Maybe it was also because none of our targets could really figure out which horror figure I wanted to portray under my white sheet. (A ghost, of course, if that was up for debate.)
In any case, the results at the end of the evening were anything but what we expected. While in the films the children empty their bulging bags and bathe in sweets at the end of their parade, in Sinful Simmering we had trouble getting hold of any at all. From congenial rebuffs like “I’m not here” to excesses of repartee in response to our “trick or treat” sing-songs like “I’d rather take treat, thank you,” this evening taught us at least one thing: how to deal with relentless social rejection . Good for the future, painful for the ego.
Snacks to scare you
Whatever seems like a good idea in Halloween movies but usually goes horribly wrong in real life is Halloween snacks. After trick-or-treating died for me, in the years that followed I tried again and again to make snacks that looked scary but tasted delicious. However, my attempts didn’t seem aesthetically creepy, but somehow gruesome and creepy.
The Frankfurters with almonds for fingernails and ketchup for blood never looked like cut fingers, but simply like sausages with ketchup on which you accidentally spread a few nuts. We don’t even need to start talking about spiders made of icing or culinary eyeballs. I will probably never reach this level of scary cuisine. And have you ever tried to model a skull out of cookie dough? Me, yes. Better leave it alone.
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Mutilate pumpkins
Incidentally, pumpkin carving triggers similar massacre flashbacks for me. I basically have generations of innocent pumpkins on my conscience whose lives I first gave with my knife and then took away again with a careless cut. If I were God, I probably would have stabbed Adam with his rib too. In all the films and tutorials, and even in my friends’ Instagram stories, hollowing out and massacring pumpkins always looks incredibly easy and fun. But it is not. At least not for me.
The misery begins with the hollowing out: using a blunt spoon to scoop the innards out of a pumpkin that will soon have a face is somehow barbaric. And damn exhausting. And a huge mess. When my pumpkin facial goulash finally rotted on the doorstep a week after Halloween, we both felt it was a relief, the pumpkin and I. Now it lives on as compost. But every single grimace I made was etched into my heart. Ouch.
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Costume-Fails
The thing about the disguise is such a nonsense for me too. Here, too, my expectations of myself and my artistic abilities always inflate beyond reality – and I end up on the ground with far too much fake blood on my face and painted scars that look more like the centimeter measurements on the ruler. No YouTube tutorial helps, no instructions, no matter how minute, on the costume packaging: my scary factor is and remains the clumsiness of my costume – I shock people with their bungling.
Party-Zombies
And so that the disappointment is complete: it’s best to go to the obligatory Halloween party with a terribly frightening costume. We all have that one person in our circle of friends who asks, “So what?” three weeks before October 31st. What are we doing for Halloween?” Most of the time everyone shrugs their shoulders and then allows themselves to be persuaded to go to some mass party in some overcrowded club. Especially in an embarrassing costume and with a defaced pumpkin in your hand, you give up the party mood as soon as you get to the coat check. However, at these parties it honestly doesn’t matter how perfectly the artificial scars are on the face. For most people it’s just about a cultivated high. Then it gets scary, but just as gruesome and scary as my frankfurters with almond fingernails.
It’s amazing that alcoholic inhibitions drop rapidly as soon as there is an excuse: Oktoberfest, New Year’s Eve, Halloween – and for western Austria also Pentecost in Lignano. With a few per mille, it wouldn’t even matter if you mix up the occasions and accidentally wander into the New Year’s Eve party as a zombie in a dirndl. The main thing is breaded, then everything is blunz’n. All in all, for me this year it will probably boil down to being disappointed by a few mediocre horror films. Because if they disappoint, at least there is something to laugh about.
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