It started when I was a kid.
My parents had rented the comedy Dracula: Dead and Loving It from Blockbuster. The great Canadian actor Leslie Nielsen begun my love affair with all things weird and eerie.
Attending a Christian private school didn’t encourage my new found love for vampires and Halloween, but I didn’t mind my reoccurring role of being a cat or a princess each year.
My wonderful and strong Christian home enjoyed the night of trick-or-treating, but not my year-round obsession with the holiday. So, I kept my love a secret.
Sneaking into the living room late at night to watch HBO’s The Crypt Keeper behind my father’s chair and taking advantage of my father’s lack of parental guidance on what I watched, I quickly fell in love with being scared to death. And, boy, was I a chicken. These acts of rebellion usually ended with me sleeping with my mother every night of the week.
For some reason, a majority of the human population loves to be scared. That’s the reason horror movies are still thriving.
So, whenever I had the chance to go into the American chain store Party City with my mother, I took it. I remember running to the back isle to look at all the scary Halloween masks and covet the vampire fangs and fake blood. Even though I sometimes felt the masks eyes were watching me, it felt exhilarating to brave the Halloween isle.
In high school, I tended to forget who I really was. Instead of trying to find myself, I let others mold me into who they wanted me to be, as high school girls tend to do. I forgot about my passion for Tim Burton and vampires. It wasn’t until I watched Interview With The Vampire in my senior year that I fell back in love.
Now that the era of being ‘cool’ or an ‘outcast’ is over in the world of university, I have fully enjoyed and embraced my love of all things dark and macabre. Halloween means more to me now than ever before.
It’s an intoxicating history of rituals. The idea that the veil between the world of the living and the dead is thinning is both terrifying and exciting to me. This year, I will be going to the Haunted Tour in downtown Fredericton. Although my passion of all things horror is alive, I plan on being scared out of my wits – and enjoying it.
Halloween is a way to hold on to child-like ideas, fun and memories. It’s the one night a year when you can be anyone you desire to be, and believe that vampires, werewolves, witches and all things magical and mystical walk the Earth. Who wouldn’t want to believe in a more exciting world where anything can happen and mythological creatures exist?
