I Have A Question for You This October

October is just around the corner.  A busy time of year for the Drive-In.  There's the Countdown to Halloween, of course, for which Rabbi no doubt has plenty of ghoulish delights up his sleeves.  As for myself, I struggled for a while with something to do to celebrate my favorite time of the year.  I want to do a marathon of a supremely spooky series, but which one?  Well, Tales from the Crypt is a bit gore-y for my tastes.  The Twilight Zone has been analyzed to death.  I'm craving something... old, but not too old.  Something that really scratches that nostalgic itch I've been feeling.  Something to fit this frightful holiday.  Finally, I thought of the perfect show.  Which leads me to my question...

Little Shop of Halloween

Halloween is, to my mind, the holiday that works the strongest nostalgia magic. Christmas has people looking for the newest hot gift. Thanksgiving swirls around the turkey dinner and the mad rush to get home from college or wherever. But Halloween... Halloween seems to always come to us from the past. Even the modern decorations usually have a vintage element to them. What is it about the Halloween experience that makes it so timeless? 

Pictured: every Halloween display since 1958.

The Spooky Old House On the Hill

Many simple pleasures have been destroyed due to the arrival of better technologies: letter-writing, playing outside, all-day cooking. It was less than 20 years ago that the only way to find answers to questions both crucial and trivial was to read a book. Now, it takes approximately 3 seconds to pull things up on Google. Thanks to iPhones, people are connected 24/7. Nothing takes effort anymore. Video and computer games keep children inside with a mountain of junk food. At least when we burned our brains on cartoons Saturday morning, they were usually done by noon, at which point my mother would shoo me into the Great Outdoors to play, discover, and yes, learn. The pre-internet and cell phone years had their problems, sure, but things definitely seemed more idyllic.

Now, one could blame all of this on nostalgia, the fact that being children made us less aware of society's issues, and any other number of things. And to a point that's true. I certainly didn't know what a recession meant when I was 10, nor did I care. I just knew that the weekend was mine, and my buddies and I were going to discover hidden treasure like in The Goonies.

"Freaky Fun For Everyone!"

If you're like me, your love of the macabre started early. It's hard to pinpoint exactly when I turned to the dark side, but one thing certainly brought the ghastly home: Madballs.

Oh, do get your mind out of the gutter. I'm talking about these: