It is time for my annual column where I go through my inventory and discover I have no Halloween postcards for sale. There ARE Halloween postcards, and postcard mongers who can offer you a fine array, but these folks exist at a higher financial level than I can compete with, and therefore I have to seek my Halloween terrors elsewhere. The postcard featured at the top here, for example, strikes a lot of people as a grotesque horror. But it was intended, back in the day, to be funny.
This, also, could do as a Halloween card only in a pinch. Yes, the man saying “ootsy boo boo” to the baby IS a tad frightening. But this artist was great at grotesque faces, and if you look more closely, with a saturnine attitude, everyone in the picture seems to be wearing a weird mask.
And you can’t call it a Halloween card simply because the joke is frightful. (People would start asking why I write Halloween columns all the year long.)
If we look for genuine nightmares in our Halloween greetings, we might take this picture of a health spa where large men drinking from the mineral springs to renew their youth discover all the restrooms are already occupied. Can’t immediately recall any really four-star horror movies that used this idea, but perhaps we’d be ahead of the curve. (Or at least at the front of the line.)
Here we do finally get into genuine horror movie material. Pity it was sent as a happy congratulations card.
And this cabinet card, from a line which did the same thing as souvenir postcards but in an era when picture postcards were barely a blip on the radar, was intended as a celebration of heroic engineering: not nightmare fuel for prospective passengers.
This was simply a convenient way of showing a person was in the city without having to do any shooting on location. It was NOT intended as the first in a series of science fiction horrors in which giants stomped all over defenseless cities.
Anyway, that’s what people tell me. I do wonder.
This was meant to simply be funny, not horror fodder at all. “Lobster” has been used for various people over the decades, sometimes for a rich man, sometimes for one who was merely surly. This card laughs at the idea that any woman would voluntarily get into bed with an unpleasant person just because he’s rich. It’s the incongruity that matters, the unlikelihood: not the scary picture.
You can tell by the victim’s face here that he is perfectly comfortable having the seat of his britches mended. You were supposed to laugh at the joke about “closing up the rear”, not quiver on the edge of your seat with suspense at whether the short-sighted attacker can be trusted with that needle.
I have TRIED to sell this as a Halloween card on the basis of completely untrue rumors (always useful for selling things) that it represents an unaired Twilight Zone episode in which the hero (is that Mickey Rooney again?) wishes to be pursued by women. This would be the closing shot, where you can wonder whether they will toss him on the grill…or just be left in suspense about where the incoming beach bunny is going to take hold.
This seems at first glance to be a large man giving small pig a humanback ride, but if you look closely, you will see he is a butcher. The image is grotesque, but it just won’t DO as a scary Halloween postcard. Everyone is smiling.
Blogsy Babbles 