Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Local Décor: Scary & Fall



More scarecrows, fewer pumpkins.

Walking around, feeling the season turn, but isn’t every day the season turning, becoming more of what it could be or becoming less of what it is? I’m not sure about scarecrows. I guess they are harvest motif effigies. But I find them sort of scary, monster like, beings without souls. I just don’t trust them.

Halloween seems to get more popular every year.



The house and apartment decorations in the neighborhood indeed has proliferated, more apparent, more in number. Is it a cause or an effect regarding the increase in our youth popluation.

Whatever, it’s fun. It’s kind of like Christmas, which blends winter celebration imagery with sacred (Christ Child, manger, angels, shepards, holy family) and secular (Santa Claus, reindeer, candy canes, snow man), Halloween mixes autumnal celebration, which are really harvest time images—leaves and pumpkins, gourds, sort of Thanksgiving, with the usual ghoulish stuff, of cobwebs, bats, skulls, black cats, witches.

The harvest time? Celebrating nature's bounty, as we have done since pagan times.

The skulls and other grave yard stuff, scary because they remind us of our own innate mortality.

That’s why we laugh at it.

The harvest maybe because we always have doubt about life after death, might as well emphasize what life we can verify.

I’m a horror film fan and as usual at this time of year, I’m going through the Universal films, and at the J.C. Film Forum, there’s been some horror (here and here). I get caught up in the spooky vibe. I liked Let Me In.

Trick or treat.

Nightmare before Christmas.

That first frost is almost here.

Happy Halloween.

I liked this one, it’s subtle the joke, the cobwebs over the bicycle too. Would you dare steal this?



Saw this at the Landmark Loew’s Theatre in Jersey City during their near sold out show of Nosferatu. Should have been there. They always do something fun for their annual halloween film series.

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