Eat the children!

Sometimes I wonder if people celebrating Halloween even want trick-or-treaters to show up at their door. The little kids, anyway. The yard decorations are absolutely horrifying, and a long ways from the stuff that was around even twenty years ago. 

The Angel of Death prepares to bite the head off a little girl

 

How can a ghost have stitches?
I always heard "Witches get stitches."
Or something like that.

Stack o' skulls and the Murder Clown
Acrobatic Team

I realize that compared to a lot of over-the-top yard displays, these folks are barely more than a papier-mâché pumpkin and a green witch Glitter Plaque. But I think when I was a little kid I would have had to at least screw up my courage, maybe shut my eyes and run to the front door -- less for the candy than from the greater fear of being labeled a chicken or a baby. 

Skeletons scared me when I was a boy, I can admit now, and no rational discussion of the utility and importance of human bone structure could cure me of it. I went through a phase where every time I had to turn a light on in a dark room, I anticipated a skeleton waiting for me. I never told anyone, and God help the kid with that same phobia today, because there are plenty of lifelike skeletons to be had for prank purposes. Fortunately, after a couple hundred skeletonless light engagements, I stopped worrying about it. But let's just say that having a vivid imagination is not an unmixed blessing. 

The other confession I have to make is, scary as this stuff is, it was nothing compared to the shooting gallery illustration. This "fun" bit of artwork was in an arcade, either in Seaside Heights or Coney Island -- I have not been able to find it online -- and featured an idiot man with a rifle barrel turned backward, as happened in Looney Tunes many times. But instead of just being blackened with gunpowder, the rifle had blown a hole in his head and a hole in the abdomen of the woman behind him. Both reacted with some surprise. I could not look at it; it would ruin my day if I did. The concept of "body horror" was not so well known then, but that was how it affected me. What made it really sickening (like, made me want to throw up the contents of my mind) was that it was supposed to be funny. 

Maybe I was the weird kid, I don't know. But to my credit, no matter how scared I was, I would get up to every door on Halloween to demand my candy. I could not back down in front of my peers. Plus, candy comes first on Halloween. The pumpkins and ghosts and the rest are really an add-on. You gotta get the good stuff.