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eldritchhobbit) wrote2017-10-29 10:17 am
eldritchhobbit) wrote2017-10-29 10:17 am
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Halloween Countdown 2017, Day 29
Tomorrow night (Monday, October 30th), PBS will be airing a new entry in its “American Masters” series, this one titled Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive. This began as a Kickstarter project, and I’m proud to have been a backer! Read more and see a trailer and clip here: PBS to Tell the True Story of Edgar Allan Poe.
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The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies Issue 16 (Autumn 2017) is now online and free for everyone to read. There is so much delicious content in this issue, perfect for the season! Don’t miss it.
“Perhaps the most famous popular-culture evocation of children indulging their wildest Halloween fantasies about a murderous war between the young and the old can be found in Vincent Minnelli’s classic MGM musical Meet Me in St. Louis. The film was released in 1944… but, in a delightfully unforgettable sequence, depicts Halloween as practiced in 1903 Missouri. Mild forms of mock mayhem are encouraged by the adults, and the children wildly fantasize about torture and murder. Eight-year-old Tootie Smith (played my Margaret O’Brien) accepts a dare to throw flour in the face of a hated neighbor, whom she believes poisons hapless cats and incinerates them in Needless to say, she scares herself far more than the householder. Nonetheless, she runs breathlessly back to the other children to recount her own rapturous apotheosis of the encounter. ‘I killed him!’
The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies Issue 16 (Autumn 2017) is now online and free for everyone to read. There is so much delicious content in this issue, perfect for the season! Don’t miss it.
“Perhaps the most famous popular-culture evocation of children indulging their wildest Halloween fantasies about a murderous war between the young and the old can be found in Vincent Minnelli’s classic MGM musical Meet Me in St. Louis. The film was released in 1944… but, in a delightfully unforgettable sequence, depicts Halloween as practiced in 1903 Missouri. Mild forms of mock mayhem are encouraged by the adults, and the children wildly fantasize about torture and murder. Eight-year-old Tootie Smith (played my Margaret O’Brien) accepts a dare to throw flour in the face of a hated neighbor, whom she believes poisons hapless cats and incinerates them in Needless to say, she scares herself far more than the householder. Nonetheless, she runs breathlessly back to the other children to recount her own rapturous apotheosis of the encounter. ‘I killed him!’
“On Halloween it was possible to have whatever outrageous thing you wanted. Roles and fortunes could be reversed, imbalances balanced, scores settled. Like Margaret O’Brien’s Tootie, you could even fantasize about homicide.
“As another Margaret (this one named Mead), noted, ‘Long ago in medieval Europe, there was a folk belief that Halloween was the one occasion when people could safely evoke the help of the devil in some enterprise.’
“And, whatever transpired, you could always blame it on the bogeyman.”
- David J. Skal, Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween