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This chapter describes and assesses the various customs and beliefs in which Presbyterians indulged at springtime, Halloween, and Christmas. Presbyterians observed holidays because they marked the passing of the seasons and allowed them the opportunity to relax. They utilized alternative beliefs and practices because they made practical sense and accorded with a belief in God who was omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent. The efforts of reformers to eradicate anti-social and superstitious aspects are addressed, and comments are made about the persistence of these customs and beliefs.

The subject of this chapter is the growing popularity of Christian alternatives to Halloween haunted houses. The most famous of these is Keenan Roberts's Hell House, a multiscene morality play that uses the techniques of horror entertainment to illustrate both a general and a specific narrative of social and political decline. These phenomena became very popular — attracting the attention of both supporters and critics — and explicitly engage the hot‐button political issues central to New Christian Right activism and organizing. Hell Houses' individual scenes illustrate to adolescents the harms (such as abortion, gay weddings, and school shootings) awaiting them in a society that — nominally committed to tolerance and social harmony — has unwittingly drawn them toward hellfire.

This chapter examines the religious and cultural significance of the dead in later 15th and early 16th-century England. It explains the late medieval theology of purgatory, and its diffusion in popular religious literature, sermons, and other cultural media. It also explores ‘points of contact’ between living and the dead, including beliefs about revenants contingent on ‘bad deaths’ or appearing at the season of Halloween. The character and importance of late medieval funerals and post-mortem intercession (masses, obits) is assessed, and the strong imperative for people to be ‘remembered’. It is suggested that while there is little evidence for any ‘decline’ of belief in purgatory before the Reformation, the demands of intercession were placing considerable social and economic burdens on society.

This chapter traces the long campaign on the part of Elizabethan and Jacobean bishops, theologians, and ordinary clergy to eradicate from the nation all traces of purgatory and intercessory prayer, such as bell-ringing in churches at Halloween. It looks at the provision of new rules and ceremonies, and the attempt to provide a new framework for the liturgical and ritual commemoration of the dead. Puritan objections to alleged remnants of intercessory prayer in the official liturgy are discussed, as are concerns and anxieties around funeral sermons and the provision of doles to the poor at funerals, the continuing practice of iconoclasm against tombs, and official attempts to inhibit it. The chapter also discusses a resurgence of interest in praying for the dead in Laudian circles in the early 17th century.

Also known as the Halloween Massacre, on November 3, 1975, President Ford announced a number of changes within his cabinet which included Henry Kissinger's removal from his post as national security adviser. Though he was able to retain his job as secretary of state, this apparent demotion of Kissinger is a clear indication that he had become a political liability to Ford's administration. This chapter illustrates how the demotion of Kissinger in November 1975 and Ford's loss in 1976 are intimately linked to a broad criticism of U.S. foreign policy. It demonstrates how the secretary of state became a visible target for those wishing to move into the White House due to his penchant for secrecy and unapologetic realpolitik. Despite Ford's attempt to minimize the secretary of state's visibility, Kissinger's public image remained partly to blame for the downfall of the 1976 Ford bid for the presidency.

Chapter 32 begins with Bradbury’s reaction to news of Federico Fellini’s death on Halloween, 1993, and explores Bradbury’s sense of Halloween as a time of “fervor and excitement,” but not a time of happiness. Bradbury’s reflections on the later Fellini films gives way to the more positive process of bringing The Halloween Tree back to its original concept as an animated film with Hanna-Barbera and the Turner Broadcasting System. The chapter concludes with Bradbury’s work on two unrealized science fiction film projects, a proposed remake of the 1950s classic Forbidden Planet and short-lived plans for a sequel to The Day the Earth Stood Still. The chapter concludes with an examination of “Beyond Giverny,” Bradbury’s speculative American Way essay on life in the cosmos.

Chapter 45 concludes Bradbury Beyond Apollo with an assessment of his legacy, prefaced by an account of the memorial to Bradbury staged by the Planetary Society as the Mars rover Curiosity landed in early August 2012. Chapter 45 wraps up the three-volume biography with a summary of the well-known early story collections and novels that anchor Bradbury’s twenty-first century reputation, and a parallel summation of the important achievements of the last forty years of his career. These include The Halloween Tree’s affirmation of life over death, the six-year run of Ray Bradbury Theater, the role of “The Toynbee Convector” as Bradbury’s settled view on human endeavor, his visionary but sometimes controversial articles, and his delicate but compelling Somewhere a Band Is Playing.

This chapter explains that Halloween is more than simply a setting in John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), but that the film is indeed centrally concerned with the contested meanings of the day when it takes place. The film is a cultural artefact of how Halloween was thought about in the 1970s. In other words, it is not just called Halloween; it is about Halloween. The chapter then studies the history and dangers of Halloween, which traces its roots back to the Celtic harvest festival of Samhain. Halloween is often constructed as a rare time when the anger and discontentment of children, and indeed their capacity for violence, may be demonstrated. The character of Michael Myers is driven by a need to pursue the carnivalesque and violent aspects of Halloween to their violent extremes. It is here where the theme of masking becomes critical. Michael commits his sister Judith's murder wearing a Halloween mask, which reveals his true nature more clearly than his actual face ever could.

This concluding chapter about exploitation-horror cinema focuses on how the form evolved in the 1970s before concluding when the advent of more ‘gruesome’ special effects wizardry prepared the wider genre from a period of change at the end of the decade. I ascertain that George Romero’s film ‘Martin’ was the prelude to this factor – with ‘Halloween’ predicting a new market for stylish productions that could compete against Hollywood’s biggest and best. As with hardcore sex films, horror films would develop into a VHS staple in the 1980s – arguably the true lineage of the gritty, confrontational horror of such classics as ‘The Last House on the Left’.

Bradbury’s six-year odyssey to celebrate and explore the history of Halloween opens chapter 3, culminating in the shift from a screen project to the 1972 publication of The Halloween Tree. In 1972 Bradbury also opened the “Cosmic Evolution” lecture series in San Francisco, sponsored in part by the NASA/Ames Research Center. Chapter 3 concludes with Bradbury’s entry into the world of writing conferences, first with Writer’s Community at Squaw Valley and then with the annual Santa Barbara Writers’ Conference, where he would lecture and work with writers for more than thirty years. At the urging of Shel Dorf, Bradbury’s role as a perennial featured presence at the San Diego Comic Con also began in the early 1970s.

This chapter establishes that Roman Polanski's Macbeth used the conventions of the horror genre to represent William Shakespeare's play on screen. It considers how Macbeth is placed in the wider historical context of the horror genre itself. It also examines how Macbeth fits with the Folk Horror The Wicker Man (1973) or slasher classic Halloween (1978) and shows how the film is situated within the history of the horror genre. The chapter illustrates how Polanski managed to combine an eleventh-century setting and William Shakespeare's poetic idiom to illustrate some very modern concerns in Macbeth. It analyses how Polanski used William Shakespeare's play to form a critique of contemporary society, exploiting and anticipating an emerging trend in horror of the film as social commentary.

This chapter describes how Halloween is referenced throughout Wes Craven's Scream as the definitive slasher text in its own time that was received by some critics as a genre-savvy confidence trick in its own right. It notes the numerous references to Halloween in Scream as an example of periods rewriting the past to create their own heritage, consequently imposing understandings from the present on to the past. It also emphasizes how it became common for 1980s American horror cinema to playfully incorporate references to past-genre films via excerpts, character names, or dialogue quotes. The chapter talks about how Scream is sceptical about the horror genre as a whole, openly highlighting the weaknesses of the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels and critiquing its exploitation of young actresses. It explores Halloween's main purpose in Scream's narrative that is climactically used to mirror the onscreen action in the film.

This introductory chapter provides an overview and a synopsis of John Carpenter's Halloween (1978). Halloween is an acknowledged horror classic, and one of the relatively few horror films added to the National Film Registry by the U.S. Library of Congress, an honour accorded to it in 2006. A large part of the effectiveness of Halloween lies in its willingness to be basic and uncomplicated. Even its stylistic flourishes, highly ambitious for such a low-budget independent production, are smoothly integrated, instead of being showy and ostentatious. Carpenter has characterised Halloween as an exercise in style, and freely uses the term ‘exploitation film’ to describe it. The chapter then considers the relationship between Halloween and the slasher film. It also assesses the role of urban legend themes in Halloween, and how the film evokes a practice that anthropologists and folklorists have dubbed ‘legend tripping’.

This chapter discusses how Halloween (1978) was developed and created. John Carpenter's name appears above the title on Halloween, but the project existed before he came on board. Independent film producer Irwin Yablans rightly claims the mantle of ‘The Man Who Created Halloween’, the title of his 2012 autobiography. The project reached Carpenter with the tentative title The Babysitter Murders before it became Halloween shortly thereafter; but Carpenter is still quick to credit Yablans for conceiving the title and the concept. Yablans' marketing and distribution ingenuity played a large role in securing Halloween's success but it went far beyond anyone's expectations, reportedly making back its original budget sixty-fold in its initial release alone. It seems apparent that Halloween was uniquely positioned to benefit from overlapping currents in the New Hollywood, the American independent cinema, ‘youth cinema’, and the horror film. Halloween was also well positioned to benefit from a new wave of academic interest in the horror film.

This chapter argues that, formally, narratively, and thematically, the character of Michael Myers is constructed as a haunted force, and Haddonfield as a haunted space. One common framework for dealing with the supernatural in literature comes from the Bulgarian structural narratologist Tzvetan Todorov. Todorov delineated three modes for the literary supernatural: the Marvellous, the Uncanny and the Fantastic. Many of Halloween's most effective moments similarly depend on Fantastic hesitation. The chapter then explores the themes of haunted houses and legend tripping in Halloween, as well as the utilization of sound in implying a kind of omnipresence to Michael's presence and perspective. John Carpenter's musical score works similarly to project Michael's presence beyond his body.

This chapter examines adolescence as a central theme in Halloween (1978) in a slightly different way, as invoking (and attempting to resolve) the rootlessness of adolescence in the Lost Generation. The character of Laurie Strode is divided between the realms of adults and children, but this capacity for category mobility ultimately proves valuable. Cast in the roles both of virgin and mother, her ability to properly navigate, embrace adult responsibilities and retrain a child's intuition is ultimately what allows Laurie to save herself. The 1950s and John Carpenter's childhood saw the birth of the teen horror film, which followed swiftly on the heels of the ‘invention’ of the American teenager as a discrete segment of the population. In a sense, Halloween is an inheritor to the ‘horror teenpics’ or the ‘weirdies’ of the 1950s, and similarly owed much of its success to its ability to knowingly target the large teenage demographic. The slasher films that followed Halloween would do the same, and it seems no major exaggeration to say that, if slasher films collectively are ‘about’ anything, they are about adolescence.

This chapter focuses on the character of Dr. Sam Loomis, Michael Myers's psychiatrist. Loomis's only accomplishments in the film Halloween (1978) are entirely outside of his training as a psychiatrist, and may even run counter to it. Terms like ‘psychopath’, ‘schizophrenic’, and ‘neurotic’ appear nowhere in Halloween, and even ‘catatonic’ appears only in the extended television cut. All of Loomis's therapeutic methods have not allowed him to understand, let alone help, Michael, and the psychiatric establishment around him has done little to recognise and prepare for the threat that he rightly feels Michael represents. Loomis provides a link to another tradition of horror fiction, in which doctors and scientists investigate and confront monsters and supernatural phenomena. His character is also reminiscent of the tormented scholars who prove to be some of the more capable protagonists in H.P. Lovecraft's short stories. Though John Carpenter's work is probably more dependent on a ‘homocentric’ worldview than Lovecraft, Lovecraft's mode of cosmic indifferentism provides a framework for addressing the old question of what motivates Michael, while reconsidering the film within the generic framework of cosmic horror.

This concluding chapter addresses the question of Michael Myers as an abstract embodiment of pure evil. In Halloween (1978), John Carpenter presents an ‘anonymity of evil’, with evil simultaneously localised within an individual and made faceless, traceless, and inexplicable. As Carpenter explains, this blankness was designed to allow the audience to ‘project their own feelings and thoughts and fears into this character so he's more than what he was, more than what was there’. The film works formally to underscore Michael's status as a dehumanised and abstract ‘evil’. The chapter then shifts the issue from moral philosophy to cinematic presentation, from ‘evil’ to ‘villainy’. Cinematic villains are often designated as pure evil but come off as less evil than intended simply because of the humanising touches performance inevitably adds. Carpenter worked against this tendency through the presentation of Michael Myers, so calculated to exclude everything that is human. The mask, which both resembles but is clearly not a human face, works to winnow away the human factor from Michael Myers. Like an actor in a Greek drama, Michael wears his villainy plainly on his face.