In a few hours, we’ll be celebrating our favourite time of the year. As I’m writing this post, Soforah is cooking our traditional Pumpkin Pastas and a delicious Tiramisu to keep us going through our horror movie night. The apartment is decorated, the tree leaves have the right colour and The Headless Horseman is once more riding the skies of Azeroth, all is good… So here’s our program for this year’s celebration:

We’ll first be collecting as many Tricky Treats from the Candy Buckets of The Dragon Isles and Khaz Algar. Then we’ll be watching the Family Guy’s Halloween Special and the latest Simpson’s Tree house of Horror (from season 35, do you believe that?!) while the Gratin will be in the oven. During the dinner, we’ll watch the original Halloween movie then we’ll be stuffing ourselves with the dessert while watching Longlegs.

While coming back from groceries shopping this morning, I found this flyer in our mailbox and it made us incredibly happy to see that Halloween is still kicking, even in our neighbourhood.

If you wonder why I’m using this illustration of Brand New’s album cover for the Halloween post… Well, it’s because The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me is probably the most iconic album for this season. Since the day we first heard it at Caroline music (Liège) many years ago, this album has been the embodiment of all we love in this season, from the album cover to the excellent “You won’t know”.

Finally, I’ll leave you with this timeless gem from internet:

Happy Halloween!

The All Hallow’s Eve series introduce the psychotic ART the clown from the Terrifier movies. Being a fan of the Terrifier franchise, I had high hopes for All Hallow’s Eve. Truth be told, it was very bad. I don’t mind amateurism in horror, I think that sometimes it adds to the vibe of the movie (especially in the found footage genre), but amateurism apart, it is unwatchable. Slasher movies rarely make me nod off, but this one was a 83 minute long battle against sleep.

While some actors did a better job, others had the charisma of a wood stick. Not one you could take a liking to. The storyline is a big bag of “I don’t know where I’m going with this”. I’ve read on IMDb that “the alien in the second story was originally going to be a puppet, but when the puppet didn’t work, it was replaced by a man in a suit instead”. I can tell you, it looked like a dude in a very poor quality Halloween costume. For a slasher this is pretty bad.

I will not watch the other two All Hallow’s Eve movies, and most certainly not recommend watching this to anyone.

Our annual Halloween tradition is to decorate the apartment with Jack-o’-lanterns, eat pumpkin oven pasta and watch horror movies. This years’ movie line-up was supposed to be Insidious: The Red Door and The Pope’s Exorcist. We changed this last minute to watch the heavily advertised Trick or Treat 1986 on Bloody Disgusting.

A bullied teenage boy is devastated after the death of his heavy metal idol, Sammi Curr. But as Halloween night approaches, he discovers that he may be the only one who can stop Sammi from making a Satanic comeback from beyond the grave. – IMDb

If you like the 80’s, heavy metal, old cassettes,… this movie is an absolute gem. I can’t believe – with all the horror I’ve watched and music I’ve listened to – I’ve never heard about it before.

Both Gene Simmons and Ozzy Osbourne appear in the movie. Simmons was offered the role of Sammi Curr, but he opted the cameo role of Eddie’s friend, rock DJ Nuke, instead. He claimed that he did this as a tribute to famous rock DJ Wolfman Jack, his childhood idol. Osbourne, however, has two scenes as a conservative preacher denouncing rock/metal. It made me laugh that of all people, Ozzy was the one doing these scenes. The irony!

I have to admit that if Sammi Curr (portrayed by Tony Fields) would have been real, I would have been a great fan. The song Trick or Treat by Fastway is a hit, I’ve instantly added it to my playlist. It’s weird to discover “new” things of the 80’s in 2023 while I grew up in that era. Too bad Fastway didn’t release more albums than the OST for Trick or Treat, I would have loved their music.

Such a great discovery! Thanks to Sardoken for checking Bloody Disgusting while I was preparing the pasta. A perfect Halloween themed movie for all the metal heads out there!

Four years after the events of last year’s Halloween Kills, Laurie is living with her granddaughter Allyson and is finishing writing her memoir. Michael Myers hasn’t been seen since. Laurie, after allowing the specter of Michael to determine and drive her reality for decades, has decided to liberate herself from fear and rage and embrace life. But when a young man, Corey Cunningham, is accused of killing a boy he was babysitting, it ignites a cascade of violence and terror that will force Laurie to finally confront the evil she can’t control, once and for all. (source: IMDB)

Once more, we don’t agree with the critics. I had read so many bad things about this movie that I was almost afraid to watch it. While it’s not perfect, it was a nice entry in the franchise and, most importantly, we had a great time watching it.

What we didn’t like: Definitely Jamie Lee Curtis. I know that Laurie vs Jason is pretty much the core of this new trilogy, so she had to be in its final episode, but it’s time that both the actress and the character take a break from the franchise, forever! She’s boring, heavy and kind of disruptive of a nice plot.

What we liked: The romance between Allyson and Corey. Both characters are great and their story is amazing. It was so good that it could have been a movie on its own.

In the end, the mix of the “Laurie & Jason” story with the “Allyson & Corey” romance gave a nice rhythm to the movie. It’s definitely not as good as the original, but it’s much better than Halloween kills. I’m glad that this trilogy could receive a proper ending.

Being horror fans, Halloween has always been a special day for us. We decorate our table, we eat Soforah’s infamous pumpkin pastas and we watch horror movies.

This year, we’ll spend our afternoon hunting Baa’l, World of Warcraft’s Secret Demonic Goat. Then, we’ll watch Halloween Ends (which is very scary, not because of the horror, but because of the extremely bad reviews), followed by the new Hellraiser.

When you celebrate Halloween in a country like Belgium, where barely anyone decorates his house and no trick or treating is going on in the streets, you can’t help but feel lonely. That’s why I’ll be playing Caroline Kornstar’s Lonely Halloween until our ears bleed, because something has to bleed on Halloween, right?!

This is a timelapse of us building the LEGO Haunted House (10273). 

We wanted the house to be ready for Halloween but we didn’t think that it would be that big, so we’ve spent the entire 30th of October assembling it. We’ve watched the complete first season of Sulphur Springs on Disney+ (great show), Frankenweenie and Final Destination 3 during the build. 

Just as in the previous timelapse (Building the Falcon), I made the music and I still didn’t have the time to edit the track, I just bounced the loop with Logic Pro. 

The video ends on a picture of the completed house but it doesn’t looks as great as it does in real. Also, it kinda sucks that the video stops so abruptly, I’ll find a way to make it smoother in our next timelapse, which will probably be the new LEGO Christmas House (Santas’s Visit – 10293). I’ve almost spent more time creating the vignette with Affinity photo than making the video on Imovie.

As a side note, I’d like to give a big thumbs up to Affinity Photo which replaces nicely Photoshop. We didn’t renew our Creative Cloud subscription because we want to stay as far from Adobe and it’s subscription system as we can. I don’t really do any in depth photo editing, I mostly use the software to correct the levels and add a stroke around the text. At that level, I don’t have the feeling to have lost anything by leaving Photoshop.

“A defiant teenage boy, struggling with his parents’ imminent divorce, faces off with a thousand year-old witch, who is living beneath the skin of and posing as the woman next door.” (source: IMDB)

The wretched was our main movie for Halloween eve and we’ve enjoyed it. It won’t become a classic in our collection but amidst nowadays drama garbage that poses as horror, The Wretched was a nice movie with a few scares and a good ambiance.

This is horror the way I like it: a b-movie with a creepy vibe that doesn’t pretend to do anything else but to keep us entertained on a Saturday evening. The effects were well done, especially when the monster enters or gets out of the human it uses as a host.

Extra points for the score in the first scene, I actually paused the movie to Shazam the title: Joypopp – Desire (Lueur Verte Remix). It’s always a good sign when a movie starts with a good song…

After more than 10 years farming for The Horseman’s Reins, it finally dropped for me today, on Halloween!

Soforah had hers on her first run, many years ago. This year, I killed the Headless Horseman with 5 different characters each day, and it’s on the last day that it dropped. It’s my RNG Halloween gift and I fucking love it!

As I am writing this post, Sof’ is preparing tonight’s pumpkin pasta dinner and we’re watching Frankenweenie on Disney+.

This is just another Halloween, yet it feels very different from the other years, not because of the second Belgian confinement that was announced yesterday (let’s face it, nerds are confined by nature), but because we didn’t take any days off for the occasion since we’re saving them to enjoy an entire month for Christmas and the release of Shadowlands.

However, we’ll still be celebrating this evening with decorations, pumpkin pastas (Sof’s special recipe) and 3 horror movies: Scare Package, The Wretched and The Mortuary Collection.

This morning, I stumbled on a very fitting video for a Halloween in confinement:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=pwWFDaHDXVQ

So, enjoy the creepiest night of the year, even if you’re celebrating alone.

This year for Halloween, I had prepared our traditional pumpkin oven pasta in the morning. We eat this dinner every year on Hallow’s Eve, the celebration wouldn’t be the same without. We had to skip on it last year since there weren’t any good pumpkins to be found due to the lingering drought after the summer heatwave. What blasphemy, but this year my secret recipe was back on the menu.

Around 5 PM, we started watching Halloween 1978, the number one slasher classic of all time. The fact that it’s the best of its kind, and that it takes place on Halloween, makes this movie the perfect choice for a horror night opening.

After that, we watched some episodes of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. One while the pasta was in the oven, and the next while we were eating.

With our bellies full with pumpkin delight, we crashed in the couch to watch Annabelle Comes Home. As I expected, it was great, I’ve always been a fan of the movies inspired by Ed & Lorraine Warrens’ case files. I always wondered while watching The Conjuring, what would happen if some one would break into their room full of cursed and haunted objects. Well, it may not have been a burglary, but I think that I got my question answered.

While babysitting the daughter of Ed and Lorraine Warren, a teenager and her friend unknowingly awaken an evil spirit trapped in a doll – IMDb

Anyway, after the movie, both my husband and I noticed that the lights in our haunted houses display all went out simultaneously. You have to know that they all are on batteries and aren’t linked in any way. I know that there probably is a logical explanation, but it just added to the spooky factor.

We were kind of tired after all that, but couldn’t resist watching the season finale of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. This must be one of my favourite tv-shows ever created. It’s eye-candy, the casting is fantastic (Miranda Otto, Michelle Gomez,…), they don’t hesitate to go dark where it’s supposed to be, and it’s about witches. I love witch themed movies (actually, everything), especially when they’re not afraid to go evil. The only thing that got me a little bit baffled was that weird singing scene at the end, but other than that the show was wicked!

This Halloween was one of the best celebrations we had so far, I absolutely loved it! Somehow I’m sad it’s over, but still 12 days of holidays left for me so, I’m leaving the deco up until then. Halloween isn’t over until I say it’s over, muahahahaha.