Labor Day weekend is here, and summer is dying. While it may be desperately trying to cling to life by throwing a few more 80-degree days at us, it knows that it is operating on borrowed time. Meteorological autumn is here. The days are shortening, the air is crisping up, leaves will soon begin to turn vivid colors and drop down to fill the sidewalks and streets. Fall is upon us, and with it comes the greatest time of the year. That’s right, it is officially time to make the declaration.
What is Spooky Season?
To best explain Spooky Season, I need to first be clear about what Spooky Season is not. Spooky Season is not fall. Spooky Season is not Halloween. Spooky Season takes place during both, but it is not simply a different name for a pre-existing concept. Spooky Season is more than just the fall. It is more than just Halloween. Spooky Season is its own separate entity, born out of the fall and Halloween, but it stretches on so much deeper than both.
Spooky Season is a vibe, a mood, that hangs over the final third of the year. It does not compete with the ending of the summer, Halloween, Thanksgiving, or Christmas. Rather, Spooky Season lays on top of those things, enhancing them and adding a slightly spooky, melancholy, and ethereal feel to them. You know those late summer nights when it gets just cold enough at night where a late evening bonfire takes on an additional bit of comfiness and coziness? That’s Spooky Season sneaking in. It’s the coolness in the air that makes you want to stay up late and tell ghost stories around that same bonfire. It’s the scuttle of leaves behind you as you’re taking your evening walk that reminds you of a scene from Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street. It’s the somber quiet that fills chilly November nights that makes you a touch blue but is also strangely comforting at the same time. It’s the winter winds whistling at your windows as you watch A Muppet Christmas Carol, which, if you stop and think about it, is really a ghost story at the end of the day.
It’s my favorite time of the year and today my job is to tell you why.
Chapter One: The Horrors of Summer
I’m willing to bet that including September in Spooky Season is possibly the most contentious claim I’ve made, but I promise you that summer has plenty of spooky things about it. Summer and horror go hand-in-hand in my opinion, especially when I was a child. Summer was the season of staying up late, tuning into SNICK and catching Are You Afraid of the Dark every Saturday night. It was the time of year for escaping from the heat of the summer by basking in the air-conditioned glory of the local library, digging through the shelves hoping to find a copy of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark or the newest Goosebumps. Summer camp came with bonfires and ghost stories. As I got older, it became the time of year where I’d regularly sneak out of my bedroom after my parents went to bed to play Resident Evil 2 until three in the morning. Sleepovers at friend’s houses would involve trips to the video store to scan the horror section for the coolest boxes we could find. It was when I discovered The Evil Dead, Dead Alive/Braindead, and other movies that cultivated my love of horror early (some may say, too early). Horror was always there, hiding from the oppressive sunlight in the shadows, waiting for the opportunity to sneak out and seize the mood for a little bit.
And it’s the perfect time of year for plenty of horror movies. Summer comes with trips to the beach, and trips to the beach call up the surprisingly robust subgenre of shark horror like Jaws or, if you have truly impeccable taste, Shark Attack 3: Megalodon. Night-time bonfires recall memories of summer camp and Friday the 13th and the slew of slasher movies it inspired. Hell, even the oppressive heat and suffocating humidity reminds me of things like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The end of summer also calls up memories of back-to-school season, which brings with it “high school horror” movies like Scream and Nightmare on Elm Street (shoutout to the late great Wes Craven for gifting us with both franchises).
Summer’s always been spooky, if you know the right places to look.
Summer as an adult is far busier and more complicated than it was as a child. I no longer have summers off. My summer reading piles (which are almost always horror) nearly always wind up being half-read (at best). Summer is busy, and it’s hard to find time for all the things I used to as a child. But once Labor Day weekend hits, I find that time coming back. The slightly more relaxed pace that comes with summer winding down has always been the best time of year for me to think back about all the spooky things I loved about summer in the past. And, as a result, September has become when I start to think of Spooky Season really kicking off. There’s just enough summer left to help connect me to those childhood memories, but there’s finally enough time to really enjoy diving back into all of those things that I loved.
Chapter Two: Obvious October
No one is going to dispute October’s inclusion in Spooky Season. Halloween has ensured that’s the case. And if you would dispute that, I don’t know how you made it this far into this article. I hope the trick-or-treaters enjoy the dental floss you hand out in lieu of candy and that your house doesn’t get too badly TPed as a result.
Though to be honest, you do kinda deserve it if you’re handing out dental floss. Even turning the lights off is better than wasting a kid’s time for some damn dental floss or a handful of pennies.
While October’s inclusion in Spooky Season is obvious thanks to Halloween, it really does need to be said just how great of a season the Halloween season can be. Haunted houses and hayrides were always one of my favorite activities as a kid and, wouldn’t you know it, they still rule as an adult. The bonus is that now my wife and I can travel as far as we want to go to one, so I can go to ones that I only dreamed of going to as a child. During the pandemic, I started hosting weekly horror movie streams in my personal Discord and that is a tradition that lives on today and is something that I greatly look forward to. In fact, I’m beginning the process of planning out double-headers now just to get ready for when they start back up in a few weeks. Another tradition born out of the pandemic is the night-time spooky walks to check out particularly well decorated or over-the-top home haunts. There are some incredibly creative people out there who pour their hearts and souls into decorating their yards and houses for Halloween and it can be great fun taking a brisk evening walk with a hot cider to check out what people are doing.
The other great thing about October is the games. There are just so many great horror games out there. You have your classic survival horror games from the PlayStation and PlayStation 2 era like Silent Hill 2, Resident Evil and Fatal Frame. You have indie gems like Lost in Vivo, and a myriad of unique and weird stuff haunting the depths of Itch.io. There are even modern classics like Resident Evil Village, Signalis and Phasmophobia (which, by the way, makes for an EXCELLENT game night with your friends). And these are just videogames. There are also tabletop boardgames like Fury of Dracula, Horrified, or Mysterium. Legend has it, there are even some people out there who have built entire spooky collections of Magic: The Gathering cards for spooky Magic nights (it’s me, I did that, you can hear about it here). There are absolutely endless ways to spook yourself out while having a blast in the process.
And there are so many more things that I haven’t mentioned yet. Carving Jack-o-Lanterns. Binging the classic Treehouse of Horror episodes of The Simpsons. Making far too many runs to Spirit Halloween to perfect your Halloween costume. Making a kid’s trick-or-treat night by recognizing their obscure anime costume and letting them know it’s awesome. October is just pure fun.
And that’s why Spooky Season does peak in October. October is just a pure distillation of the fun side of horror. But Spooky Season doesn’t end there. Oh no, there’s so much more yet to experience…
Chapter Three: The Melancholy of November
November is a weird month. While the falls here are beautiful, they are also sometimes very brief as winter can suddenly show up in mid-November and bring an end to all the fall-festivities well before anyone is ready to say goodbye to them. As I spend most of October doing much more Halloween-y kind of fall activities, November presents me my last opportunities for all the other fall activities. Feasting upon apple cider donuts at an apple orchard. Cozy backyard bonfires. The last few pumpkin spice lattes of the year (I welcome anyone about to comment calling me a “basic bitch” to instead find some joy in their sad lives and get off the internet for a bit). Chili cook-offs. Walks in the park complete with crunching leaves underfoot.
But to be real, as much fun as all those things are, November has always been hard knowing that a cold and lonely winter is right at its heels. There’s a slight sadness in the air as I’m saying goodbye to so many of my favorite seasonal activities for another year. Thanksgiving presents the opportunity to see friends of mine who have moved out of state for the first time in months, which is always fun, but bittersweet as that time is so fleeting. Winter here can be real rough, so there’s a slight existential dread that fills the air as we all wait for the first signs that winter is fast approaching. So as such, I find November to be a really melancholy time of year. There’s joy to be found in November, but it’s fleeting. Lonelier times are coming, and they are coming soon.
And that’s why I find November to be such a good time for the more contemplative side of horror. That melancholy kind of horror that provides both a chill but also makes you think about life and where yours is at the moment. Horror that is less about fun escapism and more about using the narrative power of horror to tell a story about the human condition. Stories about a person going through something real, something scary and something heavy, but coming out on the other side a better, stronger person. While September and October are about the fun side of horror, the cheesy slasher movies, the vampire and werewolf stories, the costumes, and the fun of being scared, November is the time for the transformative and empowering side of horror. The kind of horror that gets into your head and heart and makes you confront a truth that might be hard to confront, but once you do, you come out the other side a better person.
It’s also the right time of year to watch Thankskilling, which is a movie about a murderous, talking turkey. Like I said, November is kind of a weird month.
Chapter 4: Rediscovering Christmas
Any discussion about my inclusion of December in Spooky Season has to start with the fact that I am a non-religious person who celebrates a very secular, American version of Christmas. While Halloween has always been my favorite holiday, Christmas has always been number two. And that secular American Christmas is kind of weird as an adult. As a child, the myth of Santa Claus helps hide a lot of just how odd and commercialized Christmas is. But as an adult without that lie to hold onto, it’s harder to look at Christmas and not see the ugly side of it as well. And the more you try to divorce Christmas from that commercialization, the more you are left wondering just what Christmas actually is. Without gifts, Christmas can kind of feel like a second Thanksgiving, but with worse weather and more cookies.
That’s not the holiday that I loved as a child. And for a while, I found myself really starting to sour on Christmas in general. And I hated that. I am not the kind of person who is okay with letting the magic fade from life as I age. I really needed to find something to help me rekindle my love of Christmas and find something about it that can make it feel more resonant to me as the non-religious adult that I am today. And you know where I found that spark? The spooky and weird side of Christmas that’s always been there.
Christmas is easily the second spookiest holiday behind Halloween. Christmas is absolutely loaded with ghost stories beyond the obvious ones like A Christmas Carol. In recent years, America has embraced the concept of Krampus, to the point where my wife and I regularly get Christmas photos taken with Krampus at a local punk bar. We sip hot chocolate while watching Gremlins, Black Christmas and even garbage like Silent Night, Deadly Night 2. I pop on the classic Tales from the Crypt Christmas special, And All Through the House and watch it under the light of our Christmas tree (which absolutely has a Necronomicon ornament on it). Hell, I now even have weird indie horror games to play at Christmas like Christmas Massacre and we go to special one-night Christmas themed runs of our favorite haunted houses every year.
It’s not a traditional Christmas, but dammit, it’s my Christmas. By embracing the spookier side of Christmas, I’ve found a much more authentic form of my second-favorite holiday that lets me still hold Christmas up with some degree of the magic that I did as a child. That’s not for everyone, but that’s okay. It’s for me, and I love it. And it helps take some of the sting off of winter’s arrival, which for those who live in areas with particularly brutal winters, is priceless.
Chapter Five: What’s the Point?
So why am I rambling so much about Spooky Season? It’s not to sell you on the idea. It’s not to make you view this time of year in the same way that I do. If you take anything from this article and manage to find a way to appreciate the spooky side of this season, I’ll be thrilled, but you do you. I’m writing all of this because this blog is all about the things that I love, and I absolutely love horror and this time of year.
It’s also because this is what I’m going to be writing about for the next few months. I am currently looking at a long list of articles about various spooky topics that I want to write. And honestly, I know that this list is waaaaaaaaay too long for me to realistically work through entirely while still writing about other things I want to write about. But that’s okay, because there will always be next year to get around to whatever I don’t get to this year. And who knows, maybe you’ll even get a little Halloween treat from me next month.
So, put on some good spooky music, grab your favorite Halloween candy, and get ready for the best time of the year with me. It’s finally time to get spooky.
The Cult Classic 
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