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(How do YOU Halloween?) Ray Bradbury, the Voice of October

By. Professor Horror

This spooky season I asked my writers at Professor Horror to contribute pieces about how they observe and celebrate Halloween, and they responded with so much enthusiasm that I have been grinning at my inbox for weeks. I got explanations of first Rocky Horror experiences, love letters to a 90s favorite, and many, many slashers, and every single piece reminded me that there is no one right way to do this holiday. Reading them made me think about my own traditions, and whenever I picture little me growing up and celebrating Halloween in the Midwest, I see fall colors, spooky decorations, and Ray Bradbury. Bradbury was a Waukegan, Illinois native and the Midwest’s great poet of the macabre, a writer who could make a small-town porch light feel like the edge of the whole world. I have been a fan since I was small, and for me Halloween always requires some reading or watching of his best work. He wrote numerous novels and short stories that were adapted into movies, television shows, Simpsons episodes, and graphic novels, but two of them stick out to me above the rest: his novel SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES and the animated film THE HALLOWEEN TREE. Since I was itty bitty I read one and watched the other every Halloween season. It was not just because the stories take place in October or involve Halloween itself, but because they FELT like October. No matter where I was reading or watching, I could smell the leaves and feel the cold air on my cheeks. Bradbury taught us that Halloween is a feeling as much as a date on the calendar, and that his October is an argument for never fully letting go of childhood.

I was 9 years old when THE HALLOWEEN TREE premiered on television in 1993, and I watched it every October for quite a while (sometimes more than once in the same season). The film is based on Bradbury’s novel, and he wrote the screenplay and narrated it himself, so his voice carries us through the whole story. That detail matters to me, because it makes the film feel less like an adaptation and more like Bradbury sitting beside you telling a ghost story. The novel has a big group of kids, but the film tightens the focus to four friends who set out trick-or-treating on Halloween night, each dressed as a different fixture of Halloween tradition: a mummy, a skeleton, a witch, and a gargoyle. Their fifth friend is Pip (the greatest boy who ever lived) who loves Halloween more than anyone but is also gravely ill. When his spirit is suddenly swept away, his friends chase after him to a strange house and discover the Halloween Tree itself, a towering tree hung with glowing jack-o’-lanterns, each one representing a piece of Halloween’s past. From the first time I saw that tree, I understood that this was a Halloween that went deeper than candy.

The supernatural elements in the film are very real, and I think that is part of why it worked so well on me as a kid. His friends must save Pip’s life, which gives the story real stakes. At the center of the rescue is the old man who has taken Pip’s spirit, Mr. Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud (voiced by Leonard Nimoy) in a performance I can still hear in my head. Moundshroud is part guide, part trickster, and part Death himself, and he makes the kids a deal. If they want to save Pip, they have to travel with him through time and learn where Halloween came from. What I love most about this structure is that the rescue mission is also a history lesson. The kids are not just running from something frightening. They are learning about death while facing the possibility of losing their best friend, so the history lesson is never separate from what is happening to them.

The history lesson is where the film turns analytical, and this is the part that I now recognize as one of the seeds for my own work. Moundshroud takes the kids back through the ages to the places where their costumes began. They see mummies in ancient Egypt, where the dead were wrapped and preserved as part of a belief that death was a journey, not an ending. They encounter ancient rituals associated with witches and Samhain, and the medieval cathedrals where gargoyles were carved to watch over the living and ward off evil. They land in Mexico, where skeletons are celebrated on the Day of the Dead as a way of honoring the people we have lost, which is a very different attitude toward death than the fear many of us grow up with.

 Bradbury takes some liberties in bringing these distinct cultural traditions together under the history of Halloween, and the Day of the Dead in particular has its own roots and meaning apart from Halloween, but what matters to the story is how people across different times and places have confronted mortality through ritual and remembrance. The kids begin the night thinking of their costumes as nothing more than fun, and they end it understanding that every mummy wrap, skeleton bone, and witch’s hat carries centuries of human beings trying to make sense of mortality. The film argues, quietly, that Halloween is not a silly holiday but one of our oldest ways of facing the fact that we all die. When the kids finally save Pip, they do it by each giving up a year of their own lives, and that sacrifice is the film’s real answer to what it means to love someone who is slipping away. Now as a horror scholar, I spend my days digging into the history and meaning of everything horror, but one of my first exposures to what would someday become my craft came from Ray Bradbury and Mr. Moundshroud. He showed me, at 9 years old, that a costume can be a text worth analyzing.

Bradbury wasn't the only one who understood that Halloween stories could teach children something about life and death. In our How Do YOU Halloween? series, Bee Delores makes a spirited defense of HOCUS POCUS, finding a story about resilience and the people who help us survive beneath all the Sanderson sisters' glorious nonsense.

If THE HALLOWEEN TREE is where my love of horror history began, SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES is where my love of horror atmosphere settled in for good. The novel, published in 1962, follows two thirteen year old best friends, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade, who live in the small Midwestern town of Green Town, Illinois. The boys were born only minutes apart on either side of midnight, with Will arriving on October 30 and Jim on Halloween itself, so their very names and birthdays tell us that Will is a child of the light and Jim is a child of the dark. That contrast powers the whole book, because the friends love each other deeply but want very different things from the night. I went on so many adventures inside this story as a kid, running down those sidewalks and sneaking around town after dark with them, that Green Town started to feel like a place I had actually lived. I can still vividly remember the first chapter, when a lightning rod salesman named Tom Fury comes to town and walks the neighborhood. He places his hands on the porches of Jim and Will, one house at a time, and predicts that a storm is coming, and it is coming for Jim. Even now, picturing him standing there with his palms on those porches gives me chills, because he seems to know exactly where the danger will land.

That storm turns out to be Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Carnival, which rolls into town in the dead of night and turns the quiet October into something much stranger. The carnival is full of the kind of imagery that horror fans love and that I suspect shaped my own love of circus horror: a carousel, a hall of mirrors, a tattooed Illustrated Man, and a Dust Witch who drifts above the town in a balloon. What makes the carnival so frightening is that it does not simply attack people but offers them what they most want. It sells people their own longing, and the price of that longing is their freedom. The carousel is the most unforgettable example, because riding it in one direction makes you older and riding it in the other makes you younger, and the carnival uses it to trap people in the very wishes they cannot let go of. When I first read this as a kid, I was firmly on Will and Jim’s side of the story, running right alongside them, and the carousel was simply a terrifying trick. As an adult and a scholar, I now read it differently, as a story about how fear of aging and fear of loss can become something that devours us. Since Fury’s prediction was aimed at Jim, the boy who is always drawn toward the dark, it makes sense that the carnival works so hard to tempt him with what it promises. Bradbury understood that the most effective monsters in horror are the ones who understand our desires better than we do.

What saves Will, Jim, and the town in the end is not a weapon but a person, and that person is Will’s father, Charles Halloway. Charles is a quiet, older man who works at the library, and he spends much of the novel convinced he is too old and too tired to be any help to his son. As a kid I mostly saw him as the grown-up in the background of Will and Jim’s adventure, but the older I get, the more he becomes the character I watch. He discovers that the carnival feeds on fear and despair, and that the thing it cannot stand is joy. The book teaches that growing up does not mean you can no longer enjoy a carnival, run with the wind, or laugh out loud, and that laughter is a form of courage. I think about that lesson far more than I expected to as an adult, because adulthood constantly pushes us to treat joy as childish and fear as the only serious emotion. Charles Halloway shows that a grown man can be afraid and still choose to laugh, and that this is not weakness but a kind of defiance. There is something here that reminds me of THE HALLOWEEN TREE, too, because both stories are about people confronting death and discovering that love gives them the courage to do it. Pip’s friends are willing to give up years of their lives to save him, while Charles must overcome his fear of growing old to save his son. One story asks what children are willing to sacrifice for someone they love, and the other asks what adults must overcome to protect the people they love. For me, that courage in the face of the dark is what makes this novel feel like October, a season that asks us to look at the dark and then smile at it anyway.

Every October I look forward to the decorations, the fall colors, and all the horror movies I will watch with friends, but this season also reminds me not to grow up too much. Bradbury’s October is a place we are allowed to return to, a season where the child we used to be and the adult we have become can sit at the same table. It has been quite a while since I last read SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, so I know I am due to revisit Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Carnival. Every year I plan to sit down with Ray Bradbury again, the way you might return to an old friend who knows you better than you know yourself. I intend to ride the carousel backwards, but not too far, because Bradbury knows better than anyone what happens to the people who go too far. Just far enough, though, that I can keep enjoying my Halloweens for as long as I can.

Of course, not everyone's Halloween involves sitting down with a book. For Pleatherface, THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW became something entirely different when they experienced it with a theater full of people who knew every callback. Their How Do YOU Halloween? essay explores how a film that initially struggled to find an audience became a tradition that people have kept alive together for fifty years.