Halloween 2014 — Scaring Kids and Scoring Tracts

This year we all dressed up. Our family theme was supposed to be “horror movie,” but Charlotte kinda put the kibosh on that with her hysterical insistence on being Elsa. Or did she?

 “The movie is not about ghosts but about madness and the energies it sets loose in an isolated situation primed to magnify them.”

-Roger Ebert

Exhibit A: Elsa and Jack

Let’s talk about a movie in which the menacing main character is a danger to family members, whose volatility increases after a long isolation inside a giant, ornate, high-ceilinged building in a cold, desolate landscape. Perhaps the acquisition of a brand new leadership position set off an unraveling this character cannot control.

(Read the rest here, and you must — it’s my absolute favorite thing ever written about Frozen)

Anyway, thematically incorrect or not, here’s our in-character take on what a horror movie should look like:

Yep, Sienna and I were zombies (and I leveled up with zombie housewife, complete with apron, dangling curlers, and one high-heeled shoe that gave me this great, if painful, shambling gait). The boys were werewolves (as you can see, it comes naturally to my Ogre), and Charlotte was “Heeeeeere’s Elsa!”

I made a hard-and-fast rule about no gore, because I didn’t want to scare the neighborhood littles who doubtless have more discriminating parents, but I still managed to scare a few kids. One, who actually knows me, stood stock still and kept her little eyes warily glued to me until I had safely gone a few houses down. To be fair, I think the one-shoe-shambling thing was more frightening than the costume itself, because once I removed the shoe nobody seemed to notice the costume. Except my awesome neighbor, who was like, “are you a walk of shame?” Which made me laugh hysterically and file it under “future costumes (when the children have outgrown trick-or-treating and we go to adult parties again, or for the first time).”

Oh, and God bless Ave Maria for unexpected gifts. Someone was handing out Chick tracts. I didn’t actually get one (probably because my family is beyond hope), but my awesome neighbor gave me hers.

Next year I’m seriously considering Buffy as our family costume theme. Charlotte could totally pull off Drusilla.