The period of time between the beginning of October and the end of December is a very special time of year, a time when television shows, websites, and retail stores alike dress themselves up in holiday themes.

The “holidays” being Halloween and Christmas. But what happened to Thanksgiving?

As we approach that time of year when our forefathers first came to our nation as illegal immigrants and destroyed an entire race of people — but come on, those pilgrim hats are just adorable – one wonders at what time Thanksgiving became the holiday that slips through the cracks in fantasy stories.

The answer is very simple: like many things in fantasy, it’s all about magic.

Halloween and Christmas, by their very nature, are magical holidays. Halloween, a descendant of Samhain, is a celebration of all things macabre and horrific, the only time of year when children are allowed to embrace their dark sides and become the demons that they really are, a time of year when all it takes is a mask to transform someone from something plain into something sinister. The veil between the living and the dead grows thin, and spirits roam the night. (Kind of like what’s happening on Legend of the Seeker right now.)

Christmas, of course, holds a very important religious significance to Christians, and the story of the nativity is an all-you-can-eat buffet of magic and miracles. Beyond its religious core, Christmas has taken on a new, secular fantastical identity with the story of Santa Claus and his Christmas Eve mojo. And how often have we heard the phrase “The magic of Christmas?”

So, sorry, Thanksgiving. What with your shady, murderous origin and your lack of supernatural attributes, you fall a little short when compared with your siblings.

In fact, the only Thanksgiving-themed episode of any fantasy show I can recall was the rather brilliant episode “Pangs,” during the fourth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Hey, who feels like a quickie review?

Pangs

Five Torches (Out of Five)

As usual, rather than being a throwaway gimmick episode, the writers dealt with a very real issue — Willow’s anger at Thanksgiving being celebrated due to the aforementioned atrocities — as well as moving the plot forward cleanly and cleverly.

This episode set up many plot points that would affect the rest of the season: Spike’s slow but inevitable crawl towards the side of good, Angel not truly being out of Buffy’s life, and the group’s awkwardly growing distant from one another. By this point in the show’s life, the lead actors were a well-oiled machine, playing off each other with great comic timing, and the episode boasts one of my favorite lines by Xander, who had been cursed with all sorts of diseases (venereal and otherwise) by a vengeful spirit: “Can we get back to me and my new syphilis?”

In short, this episode rocked.

Who knows, maybe another show will come around in a few years with a great Thanksgiving episode with a fantasy twist. Until that time, however, we’ll just have to make watching “Pangs” an annual November tradition.

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Back again for another highly opinionated — some might even say downright cranky — look at the week in fantasy. You’ve been warned!

THIS IS HALLOWEEN, THIS IS HALLOWEEN!

If it wasn’t clear from all our Halloween coverage this week, I’m a real fan of the holiday.

And if it wasn’t clear from my article on how to make the “perfect” haunted house, I’m a real fan of haunted houses too.

In fact, I’m reminded of the very confounding dilemma I had every year as a kid on Halloween: do I want to create and control an elaborate Halloween display for the trick-or-treaters who come to my house, or do I want to go out trick-or-treating myself?

Experience the joy and satisfaction of creativity and self-expression — or eat candy?

It’s a dilemma I still find myself wrestling with today as editor of TheTorchOnline.com: Do I want to interview Lucy Lawless or Craig Horner or Anthony Stewart Head or Lynda Carter? Or do I want to eat candy?

The ideal solution? Eat candy while editing TheTorchOnline.com! Which I do.

THE WORST HALLOWEEN CANDY

Speaking of Halloween candy, does anyone really like Kit Kats? Or Heath bars?

Here are my choices for the very worst Halloween candy:

• Raisins. Seriously? What do you not understand about the word “candy”?!
• Wax anything.
• Candy corn. Tastes as waxy as wax lips.
• Dum dums. Honestly, how cheap can you be?
• Chick-o-sticks. I don’t think anyone ever ate these. I think they’re putting us on.
• Milk Duds. Impossible to eat without losing a filling.
• Dots. See “Milk Duds.” Plus, they have no taste.

All this said, I’ve noticed my candy tastes are changing over the years. I used to say, “Don’t waste my valuable candy real estate on nuts or peanuts!” But the older I get, the more I realize that, hey, peanuts are pretty good in chocolate.

Which doesn’t mean that the inside of a Reese’s Peanut Butter cup doesn’t still taste like dog vomit to me.

THE “FEMINIZATION” OF SCI-FI, OH, MY!

Earlier this week, I linked to a horse’s ass upset that science fiction, which he terms “a very male form of fiction,” is becoming more inclusive:

There is an undeclared war on real science fiction on TV and in movies.  The former Sci-Fi channel, now “Syfy,” is a good example of what has been happening to science fiction on television.  In 1998 Bonnie Hammer took over the Sci-Fi channel and declared that “more female viewers were needed.”  Over the next several years, the Sci-Fi channel became increasingly feminized, losing many of its traditional male viewers in an attempt to go after female viewers….The re-imagined re-delusioned Battlestar Galactica is a good example….While the original series had its problems, it was standard science fiction with men doing and accomplishing things.  The new series instead had a lot of relationship drama and whiny men who were generally unable to find their way out of a wet paper bag.

Later, he goes on:

This season three gay characters will be added to various shows on “Syfy”, one of which will be part of a “communal marriage” with “heterosexual and homosexual couplings.”  This will mean less programming where men actually get things done and more relationship drama, which will inevitably drive even more men away from the channel.

For the record, I still think this might be parody. But if it’s not, it goes way beyond sci-fi. It’s part of this infuriatingly stupid attitude that the world has somehow been “invaded” by women, racial minorities, and gay people, to the exclusion of white men.

News flash: women, racial minorities, and gays have always existed. They just weren’t allowed to fully participate in society until very recently. White men did control everything, but not because they were doing it better: it’s because they wrote the rules and refused to play fair!

Affirmative action, indeed.

But the greater picture is that full participation by minorities isn’t just good for minorities; it’s good for everyone! At the very, very least, it makes for better, more interesting, more realistic, much more sophisticated science fiction!

(Incidentally, anyone who thinks that the horrible, hackneyed Star Wars knock-off that was the original Battlestar Galactica is better than the sublime remake … well, wow, I’m not sure how to respond to that. That person is either (a) completely blinded by irrational prejudice, or (b) experiencing a different reality than the one I’m living in.)

The thing is, I hate to pit “white men” against “everyone else,” even rhetorically, because I absolutely believe that most white men can see that all these social changes are far and away a good thing. It’s only idiots like Glenn Beck and this writer who think otherwise.

And they sense that their sad, tired way of looking at the world is quickly ebbing away, which is why they’re so angry.

THE TINDER BOX TAKES ON THE IDIOT BOX

This upcoming week is all about V, the remake of the 80s mini-series and series. I’ve seen the pilot, and I’ll have a full review on Monday. But suffice to say: I loved it.

And we also have Sam and Dean getting stuck in TV hell in “Changing Channels,” this Thursday’s episode of Supernatural, in which the Trickster sends them into an alternate universe where they’re characters in various TV shows. This show does like their “gimmick” episodes, doesn’t it? But you know what? For the most part, they work.

THE TINDER BOX AT THE BOX OFFICE

Opening in theaters this weekend, perfectly appropriate for Halloween weekend, is The House of the Devil, which is getting great reviews. Here’s the trailer:

Well, this week’s flame has sputtered out, but join me again next week when I promise I won’t be nearly so cranky.

Oh, who am I kidding?!

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So you think you’re being sooooo clever by going to your Halloween party dressed as Treebeard with a cardboard trunk or the White Witch with a crown made of actual ice.

Trust me, you’re not.

By contrast, here are some fantasy-themed Halloween costumes you should definitely consider:

• Andy Sirkis in his “green-screen” Gollum suit.

• Shrek’s Lord Farquaad — but doing it on your knees has been done. Consider cutting your legs 0ff.

• Baby Gandalf.

• When it comes to Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Willow Rosenberg, everyone rushes straight for Vamp Willow or Angry-at-Tara’s-Death-Evil Willow. We say shake it up and go for boring, first season Plaid Willow.

• David Naughton or Russell Tovey, post-werewolf transformation. (Basically, this means going to the party naked.)

• Galadriel’s depressive, low self-esteemed sister, Sadriel.

• Not Blacula, but Latino-la.
  

• Harry Potter in his “invisibility cloak.” Yes, this means you don’t really have to go to the Halloween party at all.

• Tim Burton. N’uff said.

• A Senior Citizen of the Corn.

• Leia in the metal bikini has been done, so if you’re looking for sexy, why not consider the woman with three boobs in Jabba’s palace?

• A ghost using a bedsheet with two holes cut of it. (Hey, it’s ironic!)

• Lembas.

• Raquel Welch wrapped up in antibodies in Fantastic Voyage.

• Sam or Dean Winchester. (Hey, if you look like Jensen Ackles or Jared Padalecki, you don’t need a costume!)

• Baby Dumbledore.

• A gelatinous cube.

• Selene from Underworld after she’s run out of baby powder (chafing galore!).

• Sigourney Weaver in her underwear in Alien. But this is actually a difficult look to pull off. It requires buying panties eight sizes too small — and then drying them in really high heat until they shrink four more sizes.

• Upon further reflection, we’ve decided that going to a Halloween party as the White Witch with a crown made of actual ice is pretty cool after all. But may we suggest to bring a spare crown — and be prepared to get wet?

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The first television show I remember as a kid having a “very special spooky Halloween episode” was Growing Pains, a show I adored as a child … until I had a real-life run-in with cast member Alan Thicke that left a bitter taste in my mouth. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say the man needs to learn some manners. (I’m still not finished with you, Thicke.) So, that and Kirk Cameron turning into a Crocoduck-picture-waving nutjob (seriously, look it up) pretty much spoiled that for me.

But, my goodness, do I digress! The point is that, in my humble opinion, television shows often give us their year’s best episodes when catering All Hallow’s Eve, so let’s take a look at some of the best.

The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror

I was so young when the first of what was to become a series of Halloween Simpsons episodes that I was actually scared. It began with Marge Simpson coming out from behind a red curtain onto a stage to directly address the audience, telling parents that they should probably put the kids to bed early, because they were about to show some scary stuff and didn’t want to receive angry letters the next day.

With The Simpsons now in its 789th season, the “Treehouse of Horror” episodes have been declining in quality for the past several decades, but when they started, they were awesome. I especially loved the vignette called “The Shinning,” a send-up of The Shining which was not only hilarious but actually a little unsettling, and the very first episode’s sketch which cleverly parodied The Amityville Horror.

And super props for one of their Treehouse sketches featuring Lucy Lawless in her Xena outfit.

Roseanne

One of the most groundbreaking shows of the 90’s, Roseanne had the gall to showcase a family that were not financially well-off, not living in a swanky pad, and not particularly camera-friendly, and we loved the Connors all the more for it.

One of the perennial favorites of the show was its yearly Halloween-themed episode, which usually showcased not only outrageous costumes for the cast, but imagined a humble Midwest family that was absolutely obsessed with Halloween, going to distance to decorate their house, freak out the neighbors, and play some good old fashioned practical jokes on each other. A decade after the show’s end, I still get nostalgic for the Connors around Halloween time.

As for which was the best, who can say? They were all great in their own way.

South Park - “Spooky Fish”

Evil twins from a parallel dimension are nothing new to fiction, but South Park did us one better. In the Halloween episode “Spookyfish,” we meet Cartman’s evil twin, who turns out to be the sweetest kid around. For an extra hoot, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, stuck a lame-looking goatee on the “evil” Cartman as an homage to the classic Star Trek episode, “Mirror, Mirror,” in which the crewmembers, including Spock, are switched with their evil twin selves. In this episode, Spock famously sported a goatee.

(This bit of facial hair homage was also used less humorously on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.)

But my favorite part? The fact that the whole episode was broadcast in “Spookyvision,” which amounted to nothing more than putting pictures of Barbara Streisand’s face in the four corners of the screen. Hilarious.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer - “Halloween” and “Fear, Itself”

For a show that dealt with monsters and goblins on a weekly basis, the writers of Buffy came up with a really great concept for their first Halloween episode: that October 31st is the night that real monsters take the night off. It’s not cool to strut your stuff on Halloween, because that’s amateur night.

Unfortunately for Buffy and her gang, one of the amateurs is a warlock who has cast a spell so that anyone who bought one of his costumes will turn into their costume. This episode, which could have been a throwaway gimmick episode, was firmly entrenched in the mythology of the show, and gave us several firsts: the first time we see Willow’s bangin’ body, the first time we see Buffy stripped of her powers, the origin of Xander’s military knowledge, and the revelation that Giles has a very dark past.

The next Halloween episode occurred in the fourth season, and “Fear, Itself” featured the gang beset upon by a demon that caused everyone’s worst fears to become manifest. With the cleverness that was the show’s staple, however, the episode really just proved how scary your first couple months of college can be. While not in the same league as “Halloween,” “Fear, Itself” was one of the high points of the season, particularly for its hilariously lackluster climax, in which Buffy must fight the fear demon … who turns out to be about six inches tall.

Xena: Warrior Princess - Girls Just Want to Have Fun

About a dozen or so years before the current vampire craze, and preceding Buffy by a year, the constantly provocative Xena: Warrior Princess aired an episode in its second season that featured Gabrielle and Xena turning into vampires, or “bacchae” as they’re referred to in this episode, servants of the evil Bacchus.

Okay, as far as being accurate to Greek mythology goes, they threw everything out the window. Bacchus (or, more accurately, Dionysus) was a god of wine and merrymaking, not a lookalike to Tim Curry’s Darkness from the movie Legend, after all. But the point of this episode wasn’t mythological accuracy, it was just to have a rocking good time, and they did just that. This is truly one for the ages.

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It’s that time of year again! That freaky-deaky week leading up to the holiday that fantasy fans, horror geeks, and scifi nerds alike all treasure above all the rest: Halloween. If I could pull it off, I’d go “Holla!” But I can’t.

So in lieu of awesome slang, I’ll instead give you a little treat for your pumpkin-shaped candy vessel instead — ten of the most awesome Jack-O-Lanterns to be found in that screwy mess of a place we call the internet. So take a break from frantically sewing your Dumbledore costume and enjoy the pumpkins!

First up is a batch for all you Star Wars junkies out there:

This one just freaks me out:

Artistic AND evil:

Some gamer awesomeness:

Hated the movie, love the pumpkin:

A possible homage to Goonies:

Disturbing and funny at the same time:

VERY clever use of the stem, which is usually ignored:

And, okay, I lied. There aren’t ten here — there are eleven. Because when I saw this pumpkin I just about fell in love…

Happy Halloween! And if you have a picture of your own awesome pumpkin, give us a link in the comments!

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I’m going to start this article off by admitting a bias: I love Elvira.

I don’t know why, exactly. But like blue-jeans, my love of comics, and that weird clicking sound in my jaw when I eat, Elvira has been around since my childhood with no sign of disappearing any time soon.

I remember as a kid seeing her in beer commercials, as well as hosting horror films on television. And while her appearance was definitely memorable, there was something about her that really made her stand out. Well, two things, actually. Look hard. See if you can find them.

These days I understand her appeal: despite her provocatively slutty appearance, Cassandra Peterson, the woman who plays Elvira, cleverly cultivated a non-threatening, goofy personality that cuts through the sex appeal and makes the character, well, a lot of fun.

Plus she has big boobs. That always helps.

So what’s Cassandra’s story? More than just a slammin’ bod, Peterson joined the well-respected comedy improv troupe the Groundlings in 1979, where she refined her comic skills that she’s so well-known for today. Shortly thereafter, she took a job as the hostess of horror movies on a local Los Angeles television station. She was such a success that she became the first horror host to be nationally syndicated, and soon the whole country knew who Elvira was.

This success led her to star in her very own movie, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, which she co-wrote, and it quickly became a staple of local programming around Halloween.

Since then she has been everywhere for almost three decades. She has starred in national commercials for Pepsi and Coors, made hundreds of appearances on talk shows and variety shows, and been a Halloween staple in America and abroad. According to her website, the Elvira costume is the most purchased female Halloween costume of all time. And wouldn’t you know, beneath all the vampy Elvira drag, there’s quite a lovely lady underneath.

Elvira even jumped on the reality show bandwagon in 2007 with The Search for the Next Elvira. But fear not, fans, this was not an indication that she was ready to slow down, merely a way to find other Elviras to make live appearances. After all, there’s no replacing the real deal.

All signs point to the fact that Elvira is still in the thick of her career. She’s carved quite a unique niche in the entertainment world: she’s sexy without being threatening, and surrounded by spooky things but is never truly morbid. She’s adorable and clever, and I for one think we could all use a little more Elvira in our lives.

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Have a question about something fantasy-related? Ask the Oracle! (Be sure to include your first name and the city, state, and/or country you are writing from.)

Q: What the HELL is going on with all the celebrity voices in animated movies?! Talk about over-kill! – Misha, New York NY

A: The Oracle agrees with you completely. Even setting aside the fact that acting talent is totally different from voice-talent (and that many celebrities’ voices just aren’t that interesting), their voices are usually just plain distracting — you can’t ever forget that, oh, yeah, that’s Reese Witherspoon as Susan in Monsters Vs Aliens. As much as I love Jack Black, he (and a LARGE group of other celebrities) almost ruined the otherwise enjoyable Kung Fu Panda for me.

Blame Robin Williams. When Aladdin was a big success, many people chalked it up to Williams’ hammy performance — mistakenly, in the Oracle’s opinion, since Williams is the least interesting thing about that movie.

(Actually, don’t blame Robin Williams for all this, because he made it a specific requirement that Disney not publicize his involvement in Aladdin — a requirement that they ignored and which led to years of truly bad blood between the actor and the studio.)

Anyway, studios like to rip each other off. Have you noticed? And every executive in Hollywood is looking for insurance that his or her latest $80 million dollar investment won’t be a bust — or that he or she won’t be blamed if it is. Enter the big-name celebrity, which is supposedly (and probably incorrectly) as close to a “sure thing” as you can get in the movies.

At this point, all the animation studios share equal blame. After their success with Aladdin, Disney continued using celebrity voices in Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Meanwhile, then-rival Pixar had break-out success with Tom Hanks and Tim Allen in Toy Story, and Dreamworks Animation dipped deep into the celebrity well for the Shrek movies (although to Mike Meyers’ credit, he insisted on doing his Shrek character with a thick accent — to the annoyance of the studio, since it meant some expensive re-dos).

Still, there’s nothing quite as bad as when a celebrity insists on doing multiple voices in a single project — as if The Polar Express wasn’t already bad enough without Tom Hanks doing seven different characters that all sounded completely alike. And the Oracle plans to take a cyanide capsule before subjecting himself to Jim Carrey in the upcoming A Christmas Carol.

Q: This may be a dumb question, but why isn’t it Dakota Fanning (or one of the other Fanning girls) in Tim Burton’s upcoming Alice in Wonderland? That seems like the obvious casting. — Evan, Decatur, IL

A: First, Burton’s version isn’t an exact retelling of the Alice in Wonderland story. In fact, it takes place several years after the events of Lewis Carroll’s original books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. In the movie, Alice is 19 years old, returning to a Wonderland that she’s visited before, but that she doesn’t remember.

Second, to his great credit, Burton specifically wanted a relatively unknown actress to play Alice so as to not distract the audience — which is exactly what he got in the actress he cast, Mia Wasikowska.

Still, Burton had no such reservations about casting major celebrities as other iconic characters, including Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, Anne Hathaway as the White Queen, Alan Rickman as the Caterpillar, Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat, and Matt Lucas as Tweddledee and Tweddledum. That said, most of these actors are British, and as we’ve learned with the Harry Potter movies, even well-known British actors tend to do a pretty damn fine job of character acting.

Q: When exactly did Halloween go from being a “kids” holiday to an “adult” one? — Mave, Vancouver, BC

A: The Oracle can’t give you an exact moment, but he can give you the exact cause: the Baby Boom Generation. Two characteristics of that generation contributed to the change: first, less of an allegiance to tradition and organized religion, which has sometimes been unable to grasp the metaphorical meaning of Halloween, concentrating only on its literal connotations; and second, a realization that “fun” doesn’t have to stop just because you’re no longer a child (some people interpret this as an inability to “grow up,” but in the Oracle’s opinion, it’s actually expressing adulthood in a far healthier, more individually satisfying way).

There are plenty of good reasons to criticize the Baby Boom Generation, but their popularization of “geek” culture isn’t one of them. The Oracle bows down to them in grateful appreciation.

Have a question about something fantasy-related? Ask the Oracle! (Be sure to include your first name and the city, state, and/or country you are writing from.)

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It’s the weekend before Halloween, so it might be too late to put together a haunted house of your own this year.

But if you’re like us, you’ll probably be attending at least one haunted house. And afterward, you’ll ask yourself and your friends: was it any good?

In other words, it’s never to late to ask: what makes a perfect haunted house?

Give it a Theme

The single biggest mistake that most haunted houses make is merely being a mish-mash of unrelated rooms and monsters. But human beings experience and make sense of the world by looking for patterns and designs. Your haunted house will make more sense, and have much of an impact, if you hang everything on some kind of theme.

In short, a haunted house is — or should be — more than the sum total of its disembodied parts.

And for the record? “Haunted Mansion” is just about the most boring, over-used theme imaginable — followed closely by “Insane Insane Asylum”, “Mad Scientists Lab,” and “Haunted Graveyard.”

Much better? “Attack of the Giant Spiders,” “Honey, I Shrunk the Haunted House,” or “Children of the Cornfield Maze.” And what haunted house enthusiast wouldn’t want to dare “The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb,” about adventurers who get stuck in an Egyptian pyramid?

Think of it as a Story

It’s not enough for a haunted house to have a theme. A haunted house should also have a structure: a “beginning,” a “middle,” and a satisfying “end.”

In other words, a fantastic haunted house tells a story with a set-up, which introduces the theme; rising tension as the visitors probe deeper and deeper into your set-up and confront increasingly impressive scenarios; and some sort of satisfying conclusion that sort of wraps it all up and maybe leaves people with something to think about.

For example, if you’re “theme” is “The Walk of the Executed,” you’ll probably be telling the story of someone — i.e. your visitor — who is condemned to die. The first part of the haunted house might include a ghostly judge in a courtroom who makes the sentence from his or her worm-infested bench. Next up, the visitor is sent to “prison” — where other condemned and howling prisoners wait to die. After that, there’s certainly room for an unorthodox “last meal” and a place where the evil priest can ask for “last words.” The culmination, of course, is the execution itself, where the visitor is to be put to death — until, perhaps, a last-second reprieve.

(Incidentally? There’s a reason why fireworks shows save their best explosions for last. Your last room should be the most spectacular too.)

Anyway, having your haunted house tell an actual story involves the visitor in two ways: first, by tying the individual rooms together, they’ll make more sense and have more impact. But second, since (unlike a movie) a haunted house is a “live” walk-through event, your visitors can literally be a character in the action.

The more you involve them in the story, the bigger the impact.

More is More (But Less is More Too)

It’s a haunted house — hey, blood and bodies are de rigueur! But it’s important to have “quieter” moments even in haunted houses — and not just in the hallways between the rooms.

On first glance, this might seem a little like wasted space, but it’s not. Every good storyteller knows that, while the overall structure means gradually rising tension, there are moments when the tension falls again. Why? If everything is the same level of intensity, soon everything starts to feel indistinguishable – and boring.

In short, varying the intensity will keep your guests off-guard and ironically end up making them more scared.

Play With Expectations

Anyone older than the age of six has already been to about 50,000 haunted houses in their life — and we’ve seen 50,000 more monster movies. So people come to each new haunted house with certain … expectations. But this is not a bad thing! In fact, it’s a perfect opportunity to screw with your visitors’ minds.

Example: as they enter a room, the coffin slowly begins to open. Naturally, everyone’s attention will be focused there, expecting the rising of a vampire.

Which means, of course, that this is the perfect moment to hit them with a giant spider from above!

It’s More Important to be Fun Than it is to be Scary

Who exactly is a haunted house ultimately made for? Hint: it’s not the creators.

Yes, it’s the visitors. After all, they’re the ones paying to get in, right? And if nothing else, you want good word-of-mouth. Always remember this.

Everyone comes to a haunted house to be scared, but no one comes to be splashed with water or hit in the face or lose their balance or get poked by a loose nail.

It’s also possible for a haunted house to be too scary, or at least too unpleasant. The gore can be a little too realistic, and the monsters can be too in-your-face.

If it’s a choice between between “cool” or “scary,” we say go with cool every time.

Pictures are from Spider Rider’s Halloween.

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Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2, not to be confused with the Rick Rosenthal-directed 1982 film of the same name, is set to debut this Friday. This is, as evidenced by the title, Zombie’s second Halloween film, the first one coming out in 2007 and being, of course, a re-imagining of the notorious 1978 slasher classic, John Carpenter’s Halloween.

Though up until now the movies had a mostly-vague continuity, everything was rebooted once Zombie took over, thus starting the story again from the beginning. When movie franchises go on this long and are sequeled, retconned, and reimagined within an inch of their lives and our wallets, it makes one a little cross-eyed. But maybe we’re just thinking about it too hard.

So what’s the skinny on the movie series named after the scariest night of the year? Well, on Halloween night in 1963, a 6-year-old boy named Michael Myers, for reasons no one could understand, brutally stabbed his teenage sister to death. He was locked away for the next fifteen years and studied by a psychiatrist named Dr. Sam Loomis, who concluded that the boy was simply pure evil. No condition, no mental illness, just evil in human form.

On Halloween in 1978, he broke out of his asylum and went after his younger sister, Laurie, who didn’t even know he existed, pausing along the way to slice and dice her friends. After a battle with the surprisingly plucky Laurie (during which she stabs him in the neck with a knitting needle, in the eye with a hastily unbent wire hanger, and in the chest with a knife), he is shot repeatedly by Dr. Loomis and then falls out a second story window.

But he lives.

The sequel picks up right where the first film left off, and in the end Michael is set on fire and seen dropping dead, engulfed in flames.

But he lives!

In other sequels, Michael is run over, shot a bajillion times, buried alive, and beheaded.

But still he lives!!!

So what’s the deal, really? Is he just so into killing people that he’ll take a bullet or two, or does it really not affect him?

Well, the beheading, which seems the most difficult to recover from, occurred in Halloween: H20, and was immediately retconned in the following sequel to show that Michael switched his clothes and mask with an EMT worker, and that EMT worker was actually the one who was beheaded. So that explains that “death.”

But as for the other instances where death seems inevitable, yet Myers lives on — what’s up with them?

Is he a zombie? Is he immortal? People can do unbelievable things when they’re psychopathic killers, but they can’t cheat death.

According to Debra Hill, Carpenter’s writing partner, Michael Myers is immortal…sort of:

“The idea was that you couldn’t kill evil, and that was how we came about the story. We went back to the old idea of Samhain, that Halloween was the night where all the souls are let out to wreak havoc on the living, and then came up with the story about the most evil kid who ever lived. And when John came up with this fable of a town with a dark secret of someone who once lived there, and now that evil has come back, that’s what made Halloween work. We didn’t want it to be gory. We wanted it to be like a jack-in-the-box.”

So there you have it, right from one of the writers of the original. At least as originally envisioned, Michael Myers was never meant to be merely a psycho with a knife - he was a force of and for evil.

And evil never dies.

Wooooooo….

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It’s no secret that most horror films follow pretty specific formulas (varying somewhat depending on their sub-genres — slasher, supernatural horror, thriller, etc.)

In fact, the idea of the formulaic horror film was even parodied in the classic self-aware horror movie Scream, a movie so chock-full of meta-consciousness that it even started its own horror sub-genre: scary movies that feature characters who have seen all the scary movies.

But perhaps no horror movie cliche is more observed and understood than that of the Final Girl — the lone female who survives to the end of the movie, long after most of the other characters have been killed, and inevitably confronts whatever Big Bad may be threatening her. It is with this character that we have come to discover the term “Scream Queen.”

The phenomenon is particularly noteworthy given that most other movie genres still either mostly ignore female characters, or portray them in superficial or stereotypical ways.

Perhaps the Final Girl that sparked the current trend in horror is Laurie Strode, a young babysitter played by Jamie Lee Curtis who was stalked by a masked serial killer in John Carpenter’s terrifying masterpiece Halloween.

In many ways, Laurie is the prototypical Final Girl: she begins the story as a normal, unassuming young woman, a student in high school, in fact. She often questions her own abilities just in everyday life.

But when the going gets tough (and her friends get hacked and slashed), she discovers an inner strength she didn’t know she had and becomes capable of fighting back against the bad guy, and often succeeds in vanquishing him.

In fact, it almost sounds like your standard Hero Myth.

So does this make the horror genre, well … feminist?

It’s true that these movies sometimes include scenes of women being victimized, enduring things that male characters are rarely subjected to — and sometimes seemingly for the “entertainment” of the audience.

And let’s face it: these movies are almost always written and directed by men.

But unlike almost every other film genre, women are usually the “movers” in horror films — the protagonists, the central characters who drive the action.

What a concept!

Some even see a kind of feminist symbolism at work: the killers, who are almost always male, symbolize the misogynistic hatred that some men have for women, and are often armed with a knife or stabbing instrument — a representation of the phallus in its most violent form — which they then use to murder the Other (women) along with their own rivals (men).

The Final Girl, in order to defeat the Killer, must then assume a phallus of her own — grabbing a butcher knife from the kitchen, finding a shovel in the garage — that she then turns upon the owner of the true phallus, the Killer/Man.

Once the Killer is slain, the Final Girl will often look with revulsion on her murder weapon — a symbol of her momentary descent into masculinity — before she casts it aside, hoping to never be forced to wield it again.

In many ways, this is unabashedly pro-female. And yet usually these movies are targeted to young, adolescent males, with the promise of not only gratuitous gore, but the high probability of seeing a young woman topless.

But that’s specifically slasher films. What of horror films that deal with the supernatural?

Recently, there was a spate of horror films based on Japanese movies, such as The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water, etc. All of these films featured a woman as the protagonist who goes up against not a flesh and blood male killer, but evil spirits and ghosts.

Intriguingly, these films place the female’s intellect above all their other attributes — as the stories mostly involve them having to solve some sort of mystery in order to discover why they are being plagued by the restless evil dead.

But what about when women are also the antagonists? In 1968, Roman Polanski terrified the world with Rosemary’s Baby, a chilling demonic thriller about a young urban couple who move into a creepy old apartment building that hosts some eccentric neighbors.

Rosemary, played by Mia Farrow, soon becomes pregnant, and is attended by her elderly neighbor Minnie, who, it later turns out, is conspiring with just about everyone else in Rosemary’s life to help bring the devil’s child — Rosemary’s child — into the world.

Never was a kindly old woman creepier.

And in 1996, goth high school girls had their day in the sun (or, more likely, their day hiding from the sun) when The Craft opened in theaters. The film featured four girls, all outcasts, who spend their day learning spells and magic, which they use to their own selfish ends.

When one of the girls, Sarah, realizes the harm they might be doing, the alpha girl of the group, Nancy, turns the other two against her, and the suspenseful plot leads up to an all-out magical battle as the two girls take each other on.

Despite the stereotype of horror films being a guy’s-movie type of film, anyone who’s gone to see a horror film in the theaters in the past decade knows that girls and women are extremely well-represented in the audience, often outnumbering the men.

Why would this be? Well, women no doubt enjoy seeing other women on the screen in powerful roles, not as militant post-gender warriors, but as realistic women who become heroic when the situation calls for it. Duh.

Filmmakers, of course, know full well the price they must pay to be able to tell these “feminist” stories: in order to draw the adolescent boys into the theaters too, they have to offer more than a little gore and a female nipple or two.

But when you consider that in 2009, these female-driven stories still aren’t really being told anywhere else, well, that’s a price worth paying, don’t you think?

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