I sat in Thursday’s team meeting, and my manager started the icebreaker by wanting us to share our favorite Halloween movies. Did she mean horror movies or movies specifically about Halloween? All sorts of different movies came to mind, and a lot of them were obscure. But I didn’t want to mention them to the rest of the team. Lucky for me, someone else went first. My manager picked her after she said her favorite was Hocus Pocus. Maybe it was another movie, but I immediately recalled one starring Bette Middler, where she played a witch. But I didn’t think it could’ve been the same movie. It didn’t seem too popular. The person she chose piggybacked off what my manager said and agreed that Hocus Pocus was her favorite Halloween movie. And the person after her agreed. What the hell movie were they talking about?
I came up with a movie to share by then. But it wasn’t Halloween III, the first one that came to mind. Halloween III was one of the strangest horror movies I’d ever seen because it didn’t even have Michael Myers and never came close to any of the other sequels in the Halloween franchise. An evil mask manufacturer made masks that pulled children into a trance and killed them. I wasn’t sure if it was a John Carpenter film. It couldn’t have been. The movie was too low-budget, and the soundtrack was just a couple of notes from a synthesizer. But I watched it a lot as a kid when it was on HBO. For some reason, I loved bad horror movies. It might’ve been what screwed me up for good: all that childhood trauma after watching one bad horror film to the next.
It wasn’t Cannibal Holocaust either, which was the most despicable horror film I’d ever watched. My friend in West Hollywood at the time invited me to his apartment after a Cypress Hill concert at the now-defunct House of Blues and didn’t tell me anything about the movie except that it was notorious. By the sound of the title, I wasn’t enthusiastic to watch it. Cannibals were never at the top of my list. The film was made around 1980 and took place in a country in South America–maybe Brazil. While we were watching the movie, my friend told me the cast and production crew had to sit in front of a jury because it was believed that there were actual murders in the film. The film was shot with a real cannibal tribe in whatever country. That was a fact. They also slayed a turtle in the film from what I could remember. I missed the scene because I was drunk and had to puke in the toilet.
In the living room, my friend said, “Oh, that’s just horrible.”
I flushed the toilet and came back out. “What did I miss?”
“Yo, they just decapitated a turtle.”
I didn’t tell him to rewind it.
It had been banned in over forty countries. My friend could only get it on VHS because it wasn’t even available on DVD. Mind you, this was circa 2007. I’d never seen a gorier film. When we were watching it, my friend had nothing else to eat in his apartment than fried fish sticks. I was so hungry that I would’ve eaten anything. He microwaved them and served them with ketchup. There was more than enough blood in the film. I couldn’t stomach the soggy fish after they’d been nuked or bear to look at the ketchup for too long because after watching the cannibals do their thing, I started looking at the fish sticks like they were human fingers. Me being high at the time didn’t help the situation either. Somehow, I made it through the film, but I haven’t been the same person since then. The soundtrack continued looping in my head. There would be no second viewing of it for me. But my friend admitted to watching it again when I wasn’t there.
Needless to say, I didn’t bring up Cannibal Holocaust at my team meeting but instead lied and said my favorite Halloween movie was the Charlie Brown cartoon, whatever the name was.
“My favorite Halloween movie is Charlie Brown’s A Very Pumpkin Christmas.”
Someone in the group corrected me and said it was called It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. So then the team thought I was wholesome, which I wasn’t. But imagine if I’d brought up Cannibal Holocaust. There was no way.