Sorry, Halloween Is Kind of Awful

Please stop telling me how much fun Halloween is. It's not fun. It's the most overblown, unnecessary, irritating holiday there is. Every year, I get peer-pressured into going to lame parties, drinking too much, spending way too much money on a costume and eating so much candy that I'm still shitting out chocolate a week later. That's it. If there's some aspect of Halloween I'm missing, please let me know. I'm fairly positive there's nothing else. It's like every other night of my life, except with 100 percent more opportunities to hear “Monster Mash”.

I decided to try something new this Halloween weekend and attend a live multimedia experience at a local Los Angeles movie house, the Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater. The event was advertised as a “late-night audio-visual blowout featuring not just one, but two incredible multimedia mashups of atmospheric dread,” that would feature a “a macabre, erotic hallucination of a live show, complete with incantations, live dancers and claustrophobic compositions” by Ariel Pink.

Sounds great, right? Like every Halloween, it wasn't even close to great. It actually totally sucked.

I arrived at the theater promptly at 8PM, when the venue was supposed to open. As I came in, they were already projecting a bunch of weird b-movies and playing generic dance music. I tried to sit down, but Cinefamily's Executive Director, the corpulant, perpetually frazzled Hadrian Belove, was bumbling through the crowd telling everyone that “the performance doesn't start until 10” and that we should all go outside to the patio for drinks.

Since this was a Halloween party, everything at the bar had to be spooky. Spooky candles, spooky bats on the wall and a bartender who seemed either half-asleep or on way too many downers.

Every Halloween party has at least one guy who actually tries to be scary. People, please stop trying to scare people with your costumes. No one is ever actually freaked out by what you're wearing, but they definitely will do all they can to avoid you during the party. This guy in the clown mask was probably really stoked to freak people out, but the “golden Indian with the black afro and pipe full of hash” was way scarier to me.

Couldn't really suss out who this guy was supposed to be, so I assumed either black Karate Kid or ninja Huell from Breaking Bad. Regardless of what he was dressed as, this fool loved candy.

When I asked to take this woman's picture, she got startled, then blurted out something about her not being blackface. I suppose in this day and age, it's wise to clarify, but if you have to assure people that your costume isn't racist, maybe it's not the best costume.

Of course, there were some DJs, because it's LA and everything has to have DJs. Points to them for not playing “Monster Mash.”

Egyptian Charles Manson was indicative of those people who claim they are wearing a costume, but were probably just wearing normal clothes. If you always look eccentric, Halloween is even more pointless than it already is.

Around 10PM, I thought it would be smart to go back inside to sit down for the first performance. After being asked to vacate my seat two hours earlier, I came back to find that all the seats were now taken. I tried to stand in the aisle, but an usher explained how I would be a fire hazard if I stayed there. So… I went back outside.

I met Lance and his lovely bride. I think they were 70s swingers. Like everyone else, they were very eager to have their pictures taken. Halloween is the one night of the year where a stranger shoving a camera phone in your face doesn't seem very suspicious or creepy. I easily could have been snapping photos for some pervy sex collage. Luckily for them, it was just for a snarky photo blog. Congrats!

Sure, I was having a horrible time, but at least the food was good!

This party was out of this world! Set a course for fun, Mr. Data! Set phasers on excitement!

By 11 PM, people were getting restless, drunk and way too touchy. This woman saw a camera and started licking my friend. This is what Halloween is all about: people doing dumb stuff so that they can get their picture taken. It's not all that different from every other day of our collective existence. Halloween just has way more candy.

I couldn't wait much longer after the licking incident, so I went home without seeing Ariel Pink. Yet another year has gone by without me actually enjoying myself on Halloween. Instead of finding a world of pleasure, I ate a whole pizza and cried myself to sleep while listening to “Monster Mash” on repeat, which is another level of misery I thought wasn't possible.

Dave Schilling's new book, Letters from my Therapist, is the spookiest collection of humour essays ever and would be the perfect Halloween gift if Halloween were more like Christmas. It's not, but buy it anyway on Amazon and iBookstore.

@dave_schilling

More on Halloween:

What Not to Wear This Halloween

Mexico City's Miniature Jackos

What's so Scary About Sluts?