Spirit Halloween 2023

Hey everyone! Well, judging from the date on my last blog post, it has been a really long time since I've been on here. As in, nearly a year. I hope you have all been doing well during that time. While I haven't been blogging, I have taken a ton of photos from the Halloween displays in stores. So there will be plenty of that content coming up! 

Let's start with Spirit Halloween. The Spirit store I visited is in the local mall and took up a good amount of space. They had plenty of large moving props. This spider is one of my favorites:

The spider lurked behind this door and popped out when motion activated.

Here's another classic. I liked their use of bright neon lights.

This devil figure was pretty creepy. He starts in this crouched position.

Then he shoots up fast and high! He's nearly touching the ceiling.

I'm trying to remember what he said! All these creatures had something spooky to say, but I can't seem to remember what. Not that this one would need to say anything to be scary.

This one made my mom jump, which I found pretty funny. Especially since she was saying how the props weren't too scary, she knew what they were going to do, etc. 

Now, I don't pretend to know what this thing is. It was the sudden movement that was so scary. I was joking that this one looked like it was assembled from random prop parts. 'Ol doll face, ghost body, carrot fingers!

I'm not sure what this clown torso was supposed to do, because I think his battery was low. But it would be pretty cool if it walked on its hands.

There was this sort of tomb-like structure that housed more critters. The structure was one of my favorite parts of this store. It was just this really cool display with flickering lights and lanterns.

This was the ceiling area inside the structure. That bright green light was moving around. This is one of those times where the store display is what I want to bring home most.

This scarecrow is one of the characters who lives inside the tomb.

When you reach inside the candy bowl he leaps to life! I was pretty startled by this one when I saw it for the first time years back.

There were several characters lining the outside of the structure too, like this screaming lady. I was going to call her a vampire, but she doesn't have fangs.   

A very large Killer Klown from Outer Space was there. I think he just laughed.

Check out this entryway! Again, I'd like to bring the display home.

Mars Attacks! I've actually never seen this movie, and there's every reason that I should have.

This skeleton shakes his head. It's just a fun, classic design. I think he could fit well with a pirate-themed display.

This jack-o-lantern is a favorite prop of mine. He looks like just a normal pumpkin.

But then... Pow! His mouth pops open really fast, revealing pumpkin guts.

There were some more tomb frames near the entrance/exit of the store.

This area is where you'll find the more decorative Halloween items (mostly movie-themed.) Here are a few favorites. 

Pretty cool welcome mat:

Disney's Haunted Mansion inspired...

I was actually back at Spirit today, but I didn't have my camera. If I had brought it, I would have taken a picture of new Hocus Pocus stuff they had in. They had a journal that looked like "The Book" from the movie. But when I was there several days back, this glass was my favorite Hocus Pocus item.

You'll no doubt recognize these from A Nightmare Before Christmas.

They had plenty of movie-themed signs. I'm a big original Halloween movie fan, so I appreciated that "newspaper article" at the bottom. 

Today, I noticed that they had in a neon sign for the Bates Motel. When you turn the sign on, the neon lights up and one letter flickers. I was surprised to see that they stocked the shelves since I'd been there. So it is worth checking back!

Have you guys been to Spirit Halloween yet? I'd be interested in exchanging notes on what you've seen! 

Close Encounters and a Clown ~ I'm Loving IT!

Some of you may find this hard to believe, but I just watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind for the first time! I'm not sure why I hadn't watched it yet, but the reason I watched it now is because I won the Collector's Edition of the movie from TheGreatWhiteDope, whose blog can be found here:

http://thegreatwhitedope.blogspot.com/

The DVD set would have been a generous prize in itself, but that's not all I received!

I also received a book titled The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade: The 11 1/2 Anniversary Edition. Prior to opening this book, I knew absolutely nothing about Penny Arcade. So that was something else new for me!

My third gift was an I'm Loving IT t-shirt from http://tshirtbordello.com

For anyone who doesn't recognize the clown as Pennywise from Stephen King's IT...

I've actually never seen Stephen King's IT, which is odd since I've seen a lot of King's movies. I probably should watch IT, if I'm going to be wearing this t-shirt around. I did look up a few YouTube clips from the movie, but I couldn't get over Tim Curry being under all that clown makeup! Recognizing him was just making me laugh. You have to give Tim Curry credit for trying the many different looks we've seen him in!

Here I am modeling the shirt. I ended up with several similar photos, so I put them together to make my first gif!

While I was taking the photos above, I saw a runaway dog zip past the window. I ran outside to see if I could catch it and ran into a neighbor. She was asking me if I caught the dog, even though I was standing there alone. She was also saying various weird things about how "that dog better get caught before he's a splat on the highway", when she got distracted by my shirt. She was kind of looking at my eyes and then down at the shirt. Eyes. Shirt. Eyes. Shirt. She finally just stared at the clown and went "Uhh". So it's getting attention already!

Back to Close Encounters. I'm going to give you a few of my thoughts on the movie. I'll try to leave any spoilers out, on the off chance that I wasn't the last person on earth to see this!

I really enjoyed Close Encounters. Two things that struck me were the optimistic attitude behind the movie, and the slower pace in which it moved. I'm not really complaining about the pace, it's just that I think I'm used to the fast paced, action packed style of more modern alien movies. In a way, Close Encounters showed me a lot of what I expected from a Steven Spielberg film. I say that because the movie was supernatural and magical, but at no point did I feel threatened or fearful of what might happen. Close Encounters was surprisingly nonviolent for a movie involving aliens landing on earth.

The earth in this movie is a planet filled with people who are curious about the aliens and would rather communicate with them than kill them. In fact, I don't remember seeing one gun through this entire movie. There might have been one, I just don't remember it. The closest we got to any aggression was one cynical army officer who plans to spray people who get in the way of his mission with something that will put them to sleep for six hours. Even he is not remotely mean spirited.

Like another supernatural Spielberg project Poltergeist, the plot of Close Encounters involves a family with several children. Unlike the children in Poltergeist, who I found sweet or funny in a sassy sort of way, the kids in Close Encounters are a loud, bratty bunch of little gremlins.  I kept wishing the aliens would appear and somehow beam them up, except I didn't wish them on the aliens. Anyway, these children belong to our main character, Roy and his wife, Ronnie. Without spilling too much of the plot, Roy has an encounter with a UFO and is completely fascinated by the experience. His wife and kids, not so much. Although, in Ronnie's defense, it would be hard to be thrilled with the whole experience while your husband is acting like a nut.

Meanwhile, across town, a woman named Jillian is having her own experiences with the aliens. Her experiences are more scary than Roy's, as her son is abducted. You'll notice that the aliens chose to abduct the sweet, quiet child, and not the brats mentioned before. Here you'll see Jillian and her son Barry during the spooky abduction scene. 

I found Jillian to be really likeable. I kept thinking what a nice person she was, without realizing where I've seen her before! I didn't recognize her as Melinda Dillon, the woman who played another nice mom in one of my favorite movies: A Christmas Story.

Both Roy and Jillian start to see the same visions after their encounters with the aliens. This leads them together on an adventure to learn more and retrieve Jillian's son. I'll stop there and not reveal any more about the characters, in case some of you haven't seen this movie.  I do want to mention the alien's spacecraft, though. It was really beautiful. It was covered in blinking lights and made little musical noises which were a means of communication. The music reminded me a lot of that old game, Simon. Do you guys remember that game? You had to hit these big colored buttons to mimic the noise the machine just made. 

The game even kind of looked like a spaceship! 

I wanted to show you the Close Encounters spaceship in action, so you can see what I mean about the musical noise communication:

This DVD set included a disc full of extras. There was a making-of documentary that was really lengthy and full of interviews and trivia. A highlight of that for me was seeing the little boy, Barry as an adult. He had a lot of cute stories from his days as a four year old, working on this movie. 

Thank you TheGreatWhiteDope for this generous prize pack! I really enjoyed finally seeing this movie and weirding out my neighbor with my new t-shirt. This is a generous bunch of gifts, and believe me I had to work for them! TheGreatWhiteDope really puts together a challenge. I was actually proud of myself for being able to answer the questions necessary to win this!

I'm interested in hearing all of your thoughts on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Stephen King's IT, The Simon Game, or whatever else relates to these prizes!

Midway Memories and Associations

Does anyone else feel like there's a dark underbelly to carnival midways? If I feel that way, I certainly have some good reasons. Actually, three reasons are coming to mind right now! I'll explain what's going through my head when I visit a midway, while showing you some photos I took at The Wisconsin State Fair's midway a few days ago.

This clown was part of a fun house I walked past at the midway. Looking at him, my mind instantly went to something scary from my childhood. That "something scary" was this guy:

As any faithful reader of this blog knows, I loved the show Are You Afraid of the Dark? when I was young. A very memorable episode of the show involved a spooky fun house and the legend of a ghost clown. That episode still spooks me even though I'm now an adult, and I've never had a fear of clowns!

If you're in my relative age group, you probably know about Zeebo the clown. If you aren't familiar with him, here's a trailer for the episode "The Tale of Laughing in the Dark"

When I was in high school, I first read what was to become my favorite book: Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury. I've never read any other book that painted such clear images in my mind. There's a definite darkness behind the carnival in that story! If you've read that book, you know why I think of it every time I see a carousel. I won't spoil it for you if you haven't read the book, since the carousel is central to the plot.

I also first watched one of my favorite movies as a teenager: The Lost Boys. I'm sure most of you have seen that movie, so I won't be spoiling anything by saying that I also think of it when I see a carousel. When watching kids circle around on bright, colorful horses, my mind is filled with images of young, 80s vampires!

Why are carousels never this cool in real life?

I may not have seen Kiefer Sutherland on the midway, but I did run into a few other interesting characters...

I found Cousin IT airbrushed onto the side of a fun house. Another cool find were the pirates painted on the side of The Ghost Ship ride.

This guy was standing in front of the ride.

I have no idea what this next creature was supposed to be. Maybe he was an evil gargoyle. Whatever he was, I thought he was cool! This creature's eyes shifted back and forth as he made low, grumbling noises. He was sitting outside the midway's haunted house.

Nice hairy belly, hey? Here's a close up of his face:

This hairy gremlin had a little friend who was sitting on top of the haunted house.

Does he remind you of anyone? He reminds me of...



Do any of you have some childhood associations with carnival midways? I mean, are there any movies, books, or TV shows you've come to think of every time you're at a midway? Maybe some of you even have my same associations.

Well, tomorrow I'm going to our local Renaissance Faire. You might remember my Ren Faire blog post from last year. I hope to get many more pictures to share with you this year!