[OCTOBERFEAST  is the greatest celebration of the year, a revelry dedicated to pop-culture’s most nutritious Halloween detritus. Plastic screams and artificial sweeteners have never been more bountiful. In the old country, villagers refer to the extended party as  Satan’s Snacktime]

If you ain’t ready for a snack on this penultimate day of the OCTOBERFEAST, then you haven’t been partying hard enough. But if you count yourself amongst the hordes of mischievous maniacs that’ve been on a month-long plastic-horror marathon, then you probably need some sustenance to get to Hallow’s Eve. If only just a handful of somethin’ or other.

Fortunately, today is the day for Heretical Confirmation known as Jack O’ Lantern carving. Yes, the day before Halloween is when many of the Feasters disembowel their pumpkins, recite the unholy words, and transform them into gourded sentries. While this rite is important in that it helps cast an orange glow over the conclusion of Satan’s Snacktime, it also yields a most appetizing byproduct.

Pumpkin seeds.

It’s hard to find a treat as intrinsically connected to the OCTOBERFEAST as roasted pumpkin seeds. Sure, apple pies and pumpkin pies and candy all certainly play their respective parts, but they also periodically pop up at other times of the year. But roasted pumpkin seeds? When was the last time you snacked on some of those sonovabitches at Christmas? Most likely, never. Which is a damn shame, because they’re crunchy and salty and fun as junk to make.

Tomorrow’s the day we’ve all been waiting for. Samhain. Hallow’s Eve. The Big Orange and Black Dance. Make sure that you’ve got enough energy to last through its day and night. So just as marathoners gorge on pasta the night before their twenty-six plus, make sure you chomp on pumpkin seeds until they stab your gums and make `em bleed.

Need a recipe? Look no further!

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[OCTOBERFEAST  is the greatest celebration of the year, a revelry dedicated to pop-culture’s most nutritious Halloween detritus. Plastic screams and artificial sweeteners have never been more bountiful. In the old country, villagers refer to the extended party as  Satan’s Snacktime]

Like any worthwhile annual event, OCTOBERFEAST owes its greatness not only to the current torchbearers but also its precedent-setting pioneers. If not for John Carpenter, we’d be without Halloween and They Live. How many of us would’ve ever embraced horror if R.L. Stine hadn”t made it palatable to our impressionable little minds? Thanks to Stingy Jack, October evenings are   dotted with the warm glow of orange monster-faces.

To all these heroes, and too many others to name, a token of appreciation must be gifted.

But there is another who deserves even more praise. This man has been dead for nearly seven hundred years, but without his poetry we’d be devoid of one of the most fundamental premises of our modern Hallow’s Eve festivities. In truth, had this dude failed to bang out his seminal work, we could very well be bereft of some of the world’s finest horror movies, metal songs, Hot Topic shirts, and ill-conceived biker tattoos.

The fact of the matter is that Dante Alighieri’s Inferno defined Hell with an attention to detail that had never before been conceived.

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[OCTOBERFEAST  is the greatest celebration of the year, a revelry dedicated to pop-culture’s most nutritious Halloween detritus. Plastic screams and artificial sweeteners have never been more bountiful. In the old country, villagers refer to the extended party as  Satan’s Snacktime]

As you no doubt know, OCTOBERFEAST is the annual celebration of shock-and-awe entertainment, those dastardly bits and pieces that we can’t help but love with mouths agape and eyes closed. The same way that cavemen would streak past brontosaurus nests for cheap thrills, we need to scare ourselves silly sometimes. And to do this, we watch scene after scene of gruesome murders, horrifying mutations, and savage acts of violence.

Again, the reason we meet year-after-year to celebrate this tenth-month carnal carnival is the fact that there are deep-seated desires in all of us to explore the sweet ugliness. Unfortunately, there are those that think indecency has no place in entertainment. That depictions of decapitation are in poor taste. That zombie movies are not only insidious but also trite. Hell, this moral imposition isn’t a new idea, but the self-righteous are proliferating at unprecedented rates.

Fortunately, there are heroes amongst us.

In 2007, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino teamed up for the exploitation-throwback Grindhouse. This double-feature consists of two original flicks shown back-to-back which are also accompanied by faux-trailers. If nothing else, the experiment was a deal for the fans just in terms of economics: one regularly-priced ticket granted a viewer access to far more material than that which is provided by any standard flick.

With that being said, Grindhouse is also a horrific tour-de-force, a masterpiece for those who love blood and guts and gore and camp.

The first entry in the two-movie feature is Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. This flick is an over-top-zombie flick that sees Rose McGowan stealing the show not only with her scantily clad body, but also her firearm leg prosthesis. There’re gross-out moments with zombies exploding, laughs-a-plenty with some characters being more concerned with BBQ recipes than the end times, and conveniently missing reels. To top it all off, the movie has Bruce Willis.

That’s right – McClane himself.

On the other hand, Tarantino’s Death Proof presents a brand of terror that is more grounded in its intentions. This second flick sees Kurt Russell playing Stuntman Mike, a washed up stunt driver longing for the glory days of Hollywood during which the stunt people reigned supreme. To get his kicks now that he’s been replaced by CGI, Stuntman Mike offers hot babes rides in his car. Of course, there’s a catch: Mike’s stunt car is completely death proof for the driver, but nearly guaranteed to kill a passenger if it crashes.

Which it does. Because that’s what Stuntman Mike wants, and he gets what he wants. That is, of course, until he runs into a pack of bad-ass bitches that don’t take shit from anyone, including maniacs with film-industry experience.

Grindhouse is a rare treat, as it knows exactly what it is and revels in it. Tarantino and Rodriguez manage to simultaneously poke fun at the conventions of classic grindhouse flicks while paying homage and revering them. Additionally, clocking in at just over three hours, this cinematic collection is the perfect accompaniment for a cold, dank OCTOBERFEAST eve.

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[OCTOBERFEAST  is the greatest celebration of the year, a revelry dedicated to pop-culture’s most nutritious Halloween detritus. Plastic screams and artificial sweeteners have never been more bountiful. In the old country, villagers refer to the extended party as  Satan’s Snacktime]

There exist villains so ingrained in the rotwood known as the collective conscious that they’ll always have an open invitation to the OCTOBERFEAST. The tales of these harbingers of doom and gloom are passed from each generation to the next, racking up decades’ worth of childhood pee-pee stains and midlife heart attacks. These malefactors are the perennial horrors that are relied upon to keep every new human-litter honest-via-horror.

While there’re plenty of vitamin-enriched villains to choose from, there’s no denyin’ the power of the Wicked Witch of the West.

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[OCTOBERFEAST  is the greatest celebration of the year, a revelry dedicated to pop-culture’s most nutritious Halloween detritus. Plastic screams and artificial sweeteners have never been more bountiful. In the old country, villagers refer to the extended party as  Satan’s Snacktime]

Seeing the blood-red Hallow’s Eve moon begin to wink over the horizon, the OCTOBERFEAST revelers have begun assembling their costumes. The celebrants are still pumpkin-drunk and half-deaf from the cacophony of firecrackers and guitar solos, and they stumble and shout their way through the campgrounds in search of appropriate attire. They all eventually wind up at Rusty Ray’s tent, as he’s opened up the treasure trove of clothes and jewelry he claims his great-great-grandfather stole from the Globe Theatre in 1642.

He’s not lying.

Sammy, a wide-eyed seventeen year old with tremendous acne, excitedly excavates a demon mask. He holds it in front of his face and exclaims, “Come Halloween, ain’t no fools gon’ call me crater-face! Innfakk, I’ma pinch me some titty!”

He’s not lying, either.

By shrouding ourselves in layers of feigned-flesh, we are finally able to live out those furtive fancies that our feeble human frames cannot bear on their own. In those disguised moments, we are not tired or short or cross-eyed or dying of lupus. Instead, we are mutated into manifestations of ideas, archetypal concepts that’re time-tested and universally-recognized.

Ghosts. Witches. Hobos. Pirates. Vampires. Slutty nurses.

When these new personas are adopted, agency reaches an ejaculatory peak, as we are finally providing our own definitions of self. We become beings both defiant of corporeal circumstances and confident in our own prowess. We are free to do as we please, whether that means dancing to the Monster Mash, trick-or-treating around the neighborhood, or attending an orgy.

Disguised, we are not ourselves. And surely you can see that this opens up a world of possibility. But to be fair, this gift of liberation-via-secret identity also comes packaged with a caveat.

What if we’re not the ones wearing the masks? What happens when we find out that friends and loved ones aren’t who they say they are? What if those most adept at obscuring their identities actually want to see us brutally murdered?

What if they want to see the entire planet brutally murdered?

Such is the case with one of the Earth’s most terrifying foes: Skrulls.

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[OCTOBERFEAST  is the greatest celebration of the year, a revelry dedicated to pop-culture’s most nutritious Halloween detritus. Plastic screams and artificial sweeteners have never been more bountiful. In the old country, villagers refer to the extended party as  Satan’s Snacktime]

At the turn of the century, those of us fortunate enough to have survived the apocalypse found ourselves in the unenviable position of having to reconstruct society. The first post-apocalyptic years were full of tumult, with chaos seeping into every aspect of daily living. With few raw materials at our disposal, we frantically grabbed what we could and began assembling entertainment-jalopies. Sometimes, the pieces came together to create something beautiful.

Often, they did not.

So far-reaching was this poltergeist of piebald reassembly that not even the oxidized gates and sheep’s blood fountains of the OCTOBERFEAST could effectively ward it off. No, even the hallowed season of candied fright and salubrious Satanism fell victim to this malignant spirit. The surrealism of living after the End of the World, the yearning for yesteryear’s comforts, and the attempt to continue humanity’s narrative traditions writhed about in a baby-oiled orgy lasting throughout the tenth month of the year.

Perhaps the most infamous pregnancy attributable to this orgiastic blending is Donnie Darko. Keep Reading »

[OCTOBERFEAST  is the greatest celebration of the year, a revelry dedicated to pop-culture’s most nutritious Halloween detritus. Plastic screams and artificial sweeteners have never been more bountiful. In the old country, villagers refer to the extended party as  Satan’s Snacktime]

(I volunteered to help Rendar out today with a post, so sorry for the drop in quality inc.)

Thomas Gray’s true pimp of an elegy,  Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard  is an appropos son of a bitch for this month of the Spirits and Rot. It contains one of my favorite lines in all of the classic British Literature I’ve read throughout my days, and it reminds us that just as the leaves decay and spiral down to the ground below we ourselves continue our march towards Oblivion. Smile, you’re only dying.

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