“Aren’t you that bloke who was JUST complaining about people telling you every single year that the original jack-o-lantern was a hollowed-out turnip?” Yes, curried candy corn, but I have to see those videos. I don’t have to read my own blog.
MY Halloween refrain, while repetitive, at least adds a little variety by way of illustrations. See, every year about tis time I complain about how hard it is to present a Halloween blog because I have almost no actual Halloween postcards for sale. The one at the top of this column, though nightmarish, is for an artistic experience held in July of 2010, while the one next, thugh spooky, strikes me as cheating, since it is one of those museum postcards showing a 19th century painting (which is, I am told, a spooky comedy, since, if you look closely enough, you will see two nonchalant cats who are the source of the scary sounds the family is investigating by dead of night.)
This is more the sort of thing I need but, again, it is a modern card and also, since it involves a camping trip, unlikely to be set in October, at least in MY part of the world.
Genuine vintage Halloween postcards are so popular and so hard to get that you just won’t find them in my inventory. What I’m looking for, and don’t have, is postcards at least half a century old which deal, with, say, bloodsucking monsters who prey on humans by night.
Or cryptids who haunt our imagination.
But since I have to rely on what I have in stock, I am helpless when it comes to shwing pictures of massive menacing giants bearing down on their victims.
Devouring them with not a scruple. Or even an onion ring.
I search in vain for at least one solidly spooky mad doctor.
About the only thing my inventory is good on—and though appropriate for Halloween, it is hardly specific to that holiday—is the threat of violent death.
Postcards were having their way with all manner of mayhem long before the Three Stooges made their careers with it. But though the Stooges did a number of excellent spooky films, this vibe just isn’t specific enough.
I mean, I could do a whole blog of postcards involving the threat of violent death, but no matter how I spoke of them, you’d detect a humorous axe scent. (Yeah, some of my jokes are scary, but that brings the problem full circle.)
And eventually, I have to come back to the postcards I use over and over because they are genuinely creepy. (The smile does it for me, even after I have realized that’s a flower petal and not a knife he’s brandishing.)
Maybe I should expand beyond the postcards in inventory and try some of the books and magazines instead. (And even THIS is cheating. This illustrates an article on the history of fur trappers in the wilderness who took cats with them. Not spooky at all, since…. Reader? Faithful reader? Hey, over here! I should have warned you not to look into those eyes.)
Blogsy Babbles 