One Halloween night when I was a
teenager a friend and I decided to walk to the cemetery a quarter
mile from my mom's apartment and wander around. It was pretty
spooky. The cemetery in question was huge, with a dead gnarled tree
near the entrance, and odd little stone steps - we imagined that
they were perhaps gateways to Hell - leading from the pathways to
the fields where hundreds of gravestones sprawled. One almost
expected to see Colin Clive and Dwight Frye skulking about with
shovel and lantern. Another friend of ours had declined to come. He
was quite religious, and what we were doing he found both offensive
and frightening, regarding it disrespectful of the dead and vaguely
"evil" as well. As the two of us got increasingly creeped out I
suggested that we should have forced the third guy to come with us -
if we were attacked by angry specters, I said, we could have
ritualistically sacrificed him to placate them.(read more...)
