Halloween Happenings

While some elements of the Halloween season are and will continue to be hindered by the ongoing apocalypse we are currently going through, the great thing about the season of spook is just how many fun things there really are to do. And really, when it comes to Halloween, some of the most enjoyable elements are those little things, from lighting that dusty Pumpkin Fart Dollar General candle that’s been sitting on your bookcase since last October, to the dangerously dark shit you get from eating too many Halloween Oreos. 

As is the case every season, I’ve been witch’s tit deep into all things Halloween, and whether you like it or not, I’m going to share some of what I’ve been up to with you right this very second. 

HallowBaby Halloween training continues...

The decorating process is still, well, in the process, but this year I decided to start creating some fun decorations of my own, which is something we hadn’t done since 2013 when I posted these two videos (Indoor Halloween Decorations Outdoor Halloween Decorations). 

So far this year, with some inspiration from the Demon Queen of the Demented (better known ‘round these parts as my wife), I hand cut this Haunted village out of poster board, which as you can see will be backlit by some seriously spooky orange lights. We plan to do more with this, but this is the main theme for the mantle, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. 

We also decided to do a witch theme this year, which will be highlighted by a not-quite-started and more complex cauldron for the front/outside of the house, and a more simple cauldron for the fireplace inside the house. The inside cauldron was done by encasing a set of orange LED lights in some expanding foam sealant to create the look of burning embers, and the cauldron is simply a $1 cauldron with some green LED lights inside and some spider webbing around the edge to make it look as if a bubbling brew is boiling over. Once everything is all said and done, I plan to post a video of how it all looks. 

I don’t think I need to go into detail about the state of the cinema in 2020, but while things have been pretty bleak on the multiplex front, the drive-in made a bit of a comeback this Summer, and I am lucky enough to have a couple drive-ins near me. As a result, I have been able to take in a ton of movies at the drive-in, which really kicked off at the beginning of the Summer with a viewing of Jaws. Following Jaws came some family friendly drive-in trips to see ET and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, both of which are big favorites in my household. 

As cool as all that was, things really kicked into gory gear over the last month, where I was able to catch a double feature of A Nightmare on Elm Street paired up with The Lost Boys and a double feature of The Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2. It was all pretty awesome getting the opportunity to see movies that are so integral to my development as a horror fan on the big screen, and at the Drive-in no less. Hopefully they’ll keep the goodies coming throughout October. 

There’s plenty more I could go over, but at this point you’ve probably begun to decay due to boredom. So with that being said, I hope you have found some nice Halloween silver linings to keep your spirits up so far this season, and if so, I’d love to hear all about it!

Chucktober 9!

Oh, hey there. It’s been awhile. In fact, it’s been almost a year. I don’t feel like dwelling on the lack of content on this here ol’ blog over the past year, as it really all comes down to time, which I have very little of. But hey, I’m here now, and that’s all that really matters. Right? RIGHT?!! Don’t give me that look…

I honestly don’t really have any plans for what I’m going to do here during this fine month of Chucktober. Normally I would have a ton of stuff all prepped and ready to rock and roll your black little soul. But that’s simply not the case this year. However, regardless of not having anything planned, and regardless of not knowing what kind of content I’ll be doing, let alone how much I’ll actually be putting out, I simply cannot ignore the fact that it is my favorite time of the year, and Chucktober plays a fairly sizable part in that. Needless to say, I simply cannot let the month slide by without trying to do whatever I can to get some sort of content up, as minimal as it may very well be, as Chucktober has been a part of my Halloween celebration for 9 years now.  

Anyway, seeing as it is indeed the season of scary, I figured I’d share a few photos of the Halloween happenings that have been going down in my life.

You may be familiar with Hallowbaby aka my baby, who is not much of a baby these days. In fact, just today when I asked her how she felt about being Hallowbaby, she was quick to inform me that she is not Hallowbaby, she is HallowBigGirl. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. In any event, here are a few photos of Hallowwhatever enjoying a day of pumpkin picking and overall Halloween fun.

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I just recently picked up VHS copies of The Official Eddie Spuhghetti Halloween Companion Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 courtesy of Here Lies. To give you a quick history of these companions, each tape is meant to play out like a 6 hour block of Halloween-inspired television, complete with movies, Halloween specials, TV episodes, and kick-ass, retro Halloween/horror-centric commercials.

Vol. 1 is now completely sold out, but there are a few copies of Vol. 2 left if you still rock a VCR and have a hankering for Halloween. Just hit up OSI 74 to grab yourself a copy before it’s too late. 

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Lastly, we finally got some decorating done outside. I went heavy on the spider webs, which I know I’ll regret come November. The lights at the top actually flicker. Because they’re spooky. They can also make exaggerated, Frankenstein electricity sounds if I so please, which is pretty cool. There is still more work to do, but I’m happy with what we have done so far.

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So for now I shall bid you farewell. As previously mentioned, I don’t know how much you’re going to see from me, but if I didn’t post anything at all, I would feel really sad. But sad I won’t be, because it is indeed Chucktober, so lets kick this party off on the FRIGHT foot!

The 2016 Halloween Party Music UBER MEGA-MIX!

The darkest clouds are up ahead, as the season of sorrow hangs overhead.

The spookiest sounds pulsate oh so light, but grow they will throughout the night.

The skeletons dance with little care, as witches cackle and let loose their hair.

Listen closely my little dear, as the sounds of THE 2016 HALLOWEEN PARTY MUSIC UBER MEGA-MIX IS HERE!!!

It simply wouldn't be Halloween without my yearly hand-curated Halloween party music playlist. Well, I guess it would be Halloween, but it would be a whole lot less uber, and that's really just not, uh, uber.

Anyway, as I do every Halloween season, I've made some minor tweaks to the playlist, adding a few new tunes, changed the order, etc. Basically doing whatever it takes to make this the only Halloween party playlist you, your friends and your family will ever need. You're welcome.

Jump on in, kiddies, because the water is warm! With pee.

Chucktober 8: Resurrection!!

Welp, despite coming fairly close to completely skipping the festivities this year – you know, due to life (petting cats) getting in the way and all – I somehow managed to pull up my bootstraps and am here to present to you the 8th annual Halloween extravaganza event of the season in the world of all time ever, Chucktober!!

It's absolutely insane for me to think that this is the 8th Chucktober. It seems like it was only yesterday when I starting this whole thing. Though, that's likely due to alcohol-induced memory loss. Anyway, there really was a point when I made the decision to go ahead and skip Chucktober this year. With having a young demon child of my own (who is literally carved out of Halloween, as I've learned… not that I have had any influence) and a fairly busy work schedule, I simply wasn't able to make the time to do all the normal prep that goes into one of these things.

Hallowbaby doing Hallowthings

Buuuuuuut, a few weeks back I felt a slight sadness at the thought of not doing ANYTHING for Chucktober – especially seeing as it's been a part of my life for 7 years now – so I took as much time as I could spare and was able to put a few things together. Granted, this will be a light Chucktober, but as my grams always used to say, a little Chucktober is better than no Chucktober. Grams was a Saint. Also, there ARE 7 years worth of Chuktober for you to dig into, so if you find that you are extremely bored one evening, feel take a trip to Chucktober past. Just don’t come back crying if you pick up any venereal diseases along the way.

With all that nonsense being said, here's to yet another season of sickness, and without any further ado…

LET’S GET THIS PARTY STARTED!!

Halloween Happenings: Drunken Pig

As many of you are well aware, the Halloween season is well underway. In fact, it’s impossible not to notice if you’ve stepped foot into any type of store over the past month or so. As is the case with every Halloween season, I am gourds-deep in everything orange and black, and I thought it would be nice to share with all three of you just what I’ve been up to in the days leading to…

CHUCKTOBER!!!

If you’ve been a long-time reader of CNAMB, then you should be familiar with Bolo, the mighty gourd plant that I started growing some years back. This season Bolo came on STRONG and grew so large that things got a little scary for a minute.

Unfortunately, however, Bolo fell ill, and do to his size it was tough/expensive keeping him healthy. As a result, Bolo kicked the bucket pretty early this season, but not before giving us a handful of new gourds to decorate our crack house with.

What’s interesting is that each year Bolo gives us vastly different looking gourds, and this year was no different. This is specific to the five oddly shaped gourds that were best described by a friend as vaginal, something that might come in handy one of these lonely nights.

As is the case every year, I am spending my days of darkness enjoying as many seasonal beers as possible. After coming across this shrine erected by the mighty Kroger, I knew the season had officially begun!

Below are but a few of the many Fall/Pumpkin beers I’ve been enjoying…

And of course, no Halloween season would be complete without me ingesting a ton of Halloween influenced junk food. I am a complete sucker for Halloween packaging, something I am only slightly ashamed of, and I have been doing nothing more than adding to my potential for developing diabetes.

Here’s a sample of my inability to control myself…

Normally by this time of year, I would have most of my Halloween decorating done. However, the days leading up to the month of madness have been overtaken by something other than Halloween. Specifically the fact that my mail-order bride and I have a child on the way, which I think is an acceptable reason to not get a lot of Halloween decorating done. 

What’s sort of fitting about this whole baby thing is the fact that she (as in a girl!) is due on November 4th, which is obviously right around Halloween. What are the chances, right?! Anyway, I have my claws crossed that our daughter will be born on Halloween day, but outside of black magic, I have very little control over that whole thing.

In any event, my mail-order in-laws were awesome enough to throw my mail-order bride a baby shower, and seeing as she is due right around Halloween, Halloween was indeed the theme for the baby shower.

Below are a few photos of the decorating they did, which I think came out pretty darned fantastic!

That about does it for now, kiddies. Hope you enjoyed this in-depth look into all the Halloween Happenings I have been enjoying over the past month or so. Now I have to get my rock-hard ass in gear and start setting up for Chucktober, so soon thou shall see you!

Halloween Happenings: Outdoor Halloween Decorations!

We are knee-deep in the haunted marshes of October, and after a frightening amount of rain and a few days of wicked wind, my witch bitch and I were finally able to put up our outdoor Halloween decorations!

Last year was the first Halloween where we started to go all out with our outdoor decorations. Sadly, however, last year was a little rough for us, as a lot of what we had done as far as decorating goes was rocked by the lame weather that comes with living in a wind tunnel (you can read more about that here). But hey, it was a learning experience, and with last year under our proverbial belt, we went into Halloween 2013 armed with the smarts to do things a little different as a way to counteract that loser wind.

Anyway, some things are similar to last Halloween, namely the Rave to the Graveyard being back in full effect. Also, we did get a new Pumpkin Light Cover Guy, which was one of last year’s horrific wind casualties. Outside of that, we do have a few new additions, specifically the two jack-o jerks offs and the skele-whore, both of which we built ourselves. Of course it’s pretty obvious that they’re homemade, but they only cost us about $15-$20 in materials to make all three. Plus they were fun to make, so there’s that, too.

I’ll stop jibber-jabbing and let you get to watching the video. Hope you guys dig our decorations, and be sure to keep your eyes peeled for some of Bolo’s babies!

Halloween Happenings: Indoor Halloween Decorations!

While October is still more than a few days away, the Halloween celebration has been in full-swing here at the CNAMB dungeon of doom. Naturally my bare breasted vampire woman and I have already spent countless hours perusing the Halloween goodies that all the stores have to offer, looking for various ideas and sales and such. Furthermore, and the reason why I’ve brought you all here today, we’ve already decorated the inside of our humble abode of doom, which you can see for yourself in the video below!

Hope you all enjoy our spooky decorations, and I’ll be seeing you all in less than a week for the start of Chucktober!

Halloween Happenings: Why Not Take All of Me?

Whew… Halloween sure is an extremely busy time of year around these parts. Outside of all the epic awesomeness that I have brought to you throughout Chucktober here on CNAMB, I have also had my devilish little hands dipped in all sorts of other wicked things that you should certainly enjoy on this All Hollow's Eve!!

First up, the master blaster of disaster, Aaron of The Death Rattle, was kind enough to ask me to partake in a special Halloween edition of 13 Questions. Aaron put together some fantastic questions that I truly enjoyed answering, so if you love you some me and would love to learn a whole lot more about what makes my blackened Halloween loving heart tick, then please take a moment to stop by The Death Rattle. And while you're there, check out all the other maniacal little goodies that Aaron always has up his sleeve (and sometimes in his pants)!

13 Questions (Halloween Edition): Matt House

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Next up, Ryne of the always fantastic The Moon is a Dead World was gracious enough to ask me to partake in his super celebration of all things All Hollow's Eve with the Halloween 15, which features a slew of wonderful guest bloggers sharing their thoughts on 15 different films hand selected by Ryne himself. When Ryne sent me the list of films to choose from, one movie immediately jumped off the email: director Aldo Lado's Who Saw Her Die?, a Giallo that I have been itching to review for quite some time for reasons you will have to read about for yourself. 

 

Please take a moment to check out my thoughtful take on the near fantastic Who Saw Her Die? over at The Moon is a Dead World, and since your heading over there, you might as well take a stroll around and check out all the other Halloween horrors that Ryne has up his sleeve!

Halloween Fifteen #12: Who Saw Her Die? (Featuring Matt House)

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That does it for the time being. Thanks for dropping by, and I hope you enjoy these egotistical Halloween treats I have brought you, but more importantly, I hope you are having a frightfully fulfilling Halloween!

Halloween Happenings: Tales from the Front Yard!

I wanted to take a quick moment to share some of the front yard decorating my domestic partner in crime and I had done for Halloween this year. Unfortunately, however, as exciting as this should be, this post is plagued by sadness and despair. More on that in a minute, though. In the meantime, I'll go over these sick pics real quick so you can see what we did!

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Here are a couple of jack-o'-lanterns that my slave lady and I carved up to ward off demon's during the Halloween season. This was only our second Halloween carving jack-o'-lanterns, and I think they came out pretty rad, especially considering we did them freehand. Ain't no stencils up in dis piece!

This is a quick glimpse of the rave to the graveyard we put together. This is certainly the most we've ever done as far as outdoor decorating goes, and I like how it all came together. I actually built the spooky looking dude on the left as well as the rave to the graveyard fence, both of which were done for under $10 in total.  

Here's a video that will give you a better look at what we did as far as decorating goes. Don't mind me being an idiot, because I don't.

 

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Anyway, as great as all this Halloween decorating was, tragedy struck. Well, actually, lame Ohio weather struck, and because we live on the flat chested part of the country, most of these beautiful decorations took a beating from Mother Nature's unrelenting flatulence. No matter how well I reinforced them, all of the rave to the gravestones were uprooted two or three times, and no matter how far into the ground I stuck him, the grim reaper dude also kept getting blown over. To top it all off, our awesome $2 pumpkin light cover was blown away and into oblivion, never to be seen again. $2 or not, that shit pissed me off like you wouldn't believe. That thing delivered an orange glo powerful enough to clean any surface.  

In the end, I gave up on constantly trying to re-secure and reinforce shit, only to have it get rocked like a hurricane on a constant basis. I've taken out all of the rave to the gravestones as well as the grim reaper dude and away they have been put for the season. At this point, I'm over it. Though, for the record, we did carve the jack-o'-lanterns after all that shit went down, so that's helped make this disaster a little easier to deal with. Keyword being little.

RIP Pumpkin Light Cover Guy 

May your orange light glow oh so brightly in pumpkin light cover guy heaven.

Halloween Happenings: A Picture's Worth a Thousand Screams!

I wanted to share some of the Halloween happenings that I've been getting into so far during this horrific holiday season, and I think this is where being addicted to Instagram is really going to pay off. For as long as I've had an account, I've been using Instagram to take pictures of clouds and flowers (you know, like every other asshole who uses Instagram and thinks they're taking amazing pictures), but it's also sort of an extension of my personality, my interests and my hobbies, all of which directly correlate with CNAMB. For example, like I do with Dumpster Diving for Gold, I share any VHS and DVD finds I make (which I need to do more of around here), and sometimes I'll share a photo from a film I'm watching at the time, things of that nature.

Something else I've been using it for is to take photos of all the Halloween shenanigans I've been getting into for the past month or so. This is where Instagram's tagging feature comes in handy, as it's actually a great way for me to keep track of all the Halloween awesomeness that has polluted my life since the season began. So anyway, I thought it would be fun to share with you some of the best stuff that Halloween has brought my way so far this season, and what better way to do it than with pictures?! Well, probably with a song and dance, but I'm in my underwear right now, and that would be pretty awkward, so I'll stick with pics for time being.

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Here's some cheap Dollar Store crap and a jack-o'-lantern porch light cover from the "Big K."

I picked up this kewl little decoration for only $6 at Horrorhound Weekend in Indianapolis (which was the best time EVER).

As per usual, I've been enjoying my fair share of Sam Adams Octoberfest, but I've also completely fallen in love with Magic Hat's own brand of seasonal beverage, Hex (I might even be having one now…).

I love Cadbury Creme Eggs with a fiery passion, and the discovery that Cadbury now makes "Screme Eggs" basically means I can die now. Well, not before I eat 70 of these things. Tonight. 

It's a fact: I haven't been able to find Monster Cereals in local grocery stores for the past few years, which is enough to create a river of sadness. But this year, Wal-Mart has that shit in stock, and I literally found their Monster Cereal setup just as I was complaining about how no one sells them!

Also, I look like an idiot.

Remember Bolo?! Well, that mo fo is back and WAYYYY bigger than he ever was before. Bolo is jacked up, bro!

And here's just one of Bolo's babies, and one example of the three or four different varieties of gourd that bitch is producing. Sick! 

And now it's my favorite part… decorations! We haven't quite started doing the outside yet (mostly due to rain), but the interior of our home is all ready to 'shock' and roll!

Some of the stuff on this coffee table has changed around a bit, but I'm too lazy to take another picture!

This handy bastard seems to find a new home every year, and each new home is a cause for a good chuckle, me thinks!

And what it all comes down to is this: the cream of the crop, the pièce de résistance, the mother trucking highlight of this whole show! After my life partner came up with the idea of putting the rave to the gravestone on top of the fireplace, it set off a chain of events that led to what I think is without a doubt our coolest looking Halloween fireplace set-up yet! Looking at it really tickles my tender vittles, and I hope you dig it, too!

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That's enough of this nonsense for this evening, but I do hope this was a somewhat enjoyable journey, and I'm sure I will do at least one more post like this as the season moves forward. There's still the outside of our house that we need to decorate (which we have epic plans for), and I'm sure there will be other cool shit that pops up that I will want to share with you! Kay, buh-bye!