Transcript for the Piece Audio version of The Changing (and Ghoulish) Faces of Halloween

Halloween Script

QUOTE 1: (0:15) We started in 1989. We originally owned a paper and party goods store; then we started with a few Halloween things. We were a little late in the season so we couldn’t get a full array of costumes and things.

This is Janice Arvenakian. She and her husband founded the Halloween Outlet in Worcester, Massachusetts.

QUOTE 2 (0:17) And we were fortunate enough to meet somebody who sold us a bunch of factory seconds I guess you’d call them, costumes with holes in them and things like that and we hung them around our store and that was our beginning.

Now the store offers some 28,000 square feet of products that appeal to fright seekers of all ages. Christine Arvenakian, Janice’s daughter, also works in the store.

QUOTE 3: (0:08) And my mom would say you want this? It’s got a hole in it. And people would say it’s Halloween, I don’t care if it has a hole in it.

As in past years, the most popular items this time around come from the movies

QUOTE 4: (0:13) Always like Leatherface, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Michael Myers from Halloween – hope I don’t get it wrong! – Freddy, Freddy Kruger, Jason – everybody, a lot of people want to be scary again.

Again?

QUOTE 5: (0:08) After Sept. 11, not too many people wanted to be scary, but we’re going back towards the gore again, which is great.

Ah, the gore. At the Halloween Outlet, it starts with rats – really life-like rats:

QUOTE 6: (0:10) This is our favorite rat of the season – I don’t even want to touch it – that’s the biggest seller this year, my rats.

Things go quickly downhill from there. Christine Arvenakian describes a new display:

QUOTE 7: (0:25) It’s an overweight man vomiting into a barrel. Looks like he had a few too many at a party last night (hurling sounds)

This and the dozens of other animatronic presentations are rising from the dead throughout the shop as the compressed air system builds up to speed. A granny on a rocking chair suddenly leaps up and screams; there’s a mad doctor with a huge rotary saw (need I say more?). Over in the corner, a man hanging from a tree quivers as the very life force seeps out of him.

All these alluring displays are for sale, running anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars a pop. Chances are your local haunted house was stocked by these nice people in Worcester.

Other products at the Halloween Outlet point toward greater interactivity in ghoulish fare. Consider, for example, the electric chair – a five-foot tall pile of iron and steel grating that comes with its own storyboard:

ACT:

The drama begins over the roar of a generator and the pleas of a tearful girlfriend as they strap you in.

ACT: By order of the governor…

And then they throw the switch.

ACT

This electric chair might compare to the mechanical bull in Urban Cowboy – it moves around a lot. Of course, the chair is not going to throw you, because there are grips on the arm rail. A nice touch: the grips heat up during the show.

ACT: Justice is served. Stand clear for the removal of the body…

This is a Boy’s Own World vision of Halloween – ghouls and gore and hot little French maid costumes (oo-la-la monsieur!), complete with faux lace aprons. Fish net stockings are extra.

What possible relation can there be between this and the Halloween of tradition? Lesley Bannatyne, editor of the anthology A Halloween Anthology, explains:

LES 1: (0:14) There is continuity. Halloween has always been about the other world, spirits in the church about the dead. You can pray them to heaven. They were out, they were in purgatory, you can still see it in the products that are out there.

But it is, Bannatyne says, a continuity that has followed a rather windy course. Consider ghost stories, like Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, where Ebenezer Scrooge is visited upon by ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. Like the Dickens tale, horror films until recently were not considered Halloween material.

LES 3: (0:17) They started to release scary movies at Halloween not until about the seventies, so this is new that ghost stories have situated themselves around Halloween. And we wouldn’t think of ghost stories at Christmas, but until up to this century, ghost stories were all about Christmas.

And then there has been the ever-changing demographic of Halloween revelers. Thirty years ago, it would have been unthinkable for adults to buy Halloween costumes for themselves. Yet adults are now enthusiastic consumers of the Halloween spirit and have brought new meaning to the whole idea of the unimaginable:

LES 4: (0:25) It’s more than witches and ghosts and pumpkins and cats, it’s the guy who dressed as a tornado with the spray bottle for mist and a wind machine. It’s the phalanx of people who dressed as Imelda Marcos’s shoes in the Greenwich Village parade – you know, a whole office full.

Bannatyne in talking about her Halloween Reader says that the wonderful thing about the holiday is how its core ingredients have made themselves felt over the years.

Which is why a Halloween poem written by John Kendrick Spangs in 1910 still speaks to us a century later. It is called, appropriately enough, Halloween.

LES 5: Two verses from poem

I’m Jackson Braider.

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