So, as noted previously, this week’s article is going to be a photo dump of the installed props I’ve been working on since around August.
I am usually exhausted after mounting this project, and this year is no exception. Secondarily, last night was Halloween, Samhain, or Beltane south of the equator, so for all of us with a witchy bent, it’s a super busy time.
In just under a week it will be my birthday, and perhaps I will wax eloquently about the passing of the years or perhaps I will rage against the dying of the light. In either case, I hope you will be satisfied with a handful of pictures. The gremlins, or goblins, or some malefic bunch of pranksters conspired to make this year’s installation exceedingly problematic. I don’t think that I will be doing this next year in the same venue. But my house is probably going to be the creepiest one in the neighborhood…well, on the outside for a change.
Me: “Did I give you my bucket of mold foam? I need to make a tongue.”
My eldest: “And that’s not even the strangest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
October’s here! Octobers here! Let the Halloweening begin!
So many head jokes, so little time. The North Pole has nothing on my workshop when preparations begin for haunted house displays and Halloween setups. Bits and pieces of a lifetime’s worth of being strange are everywhere. Hopefully, by mid-month these will have found some sort of cohesive design. It’s on paper at the moment, but it never ends up being exactly like the sketch. The final outcome is whatever I put together on the night of.
Some of us, of course, have been haunting the stores since the first of the “Code Orange” notices started hitting in early August, because, alas, our supreme holiday is all too quickly submerged by the massive decoration onslaught brought about by the Fat Man and his shopping frenzy. We have but a brief twilight to get our loot and get back to the tower before sunrise, and the mad season of fourth quarter profit-taking begins.
Now before we veer too far afield, I will state here and now for the record that I am a legitimate occultist and practicioner of the arcane arts. I have been since I was about seven years old and got my first deck of Tarot, and I started reading in astrology very soon after that.
But I am also a huge fan of the trappings of the Halloween season (call it Samhain if you prefer) and I don’t think I am alone among my witchy peers. It’s just that for us the season is year round. We like to decorate our homes with skulls and cauldrons and black candles and spell books, because, well, they aren’t decorations.
We are the real deal. We live like this all the time.
But at Halloween, we can A) do it and appear to just be part of the rest of the general public ( for whatever that is worth) and B) this allows us to TURN IT UP TO ELEVEN!!
Clever Kim at Your Average Witch Podcast has frequently posed the interview question: “Do you think someone is born a witch?” or words to that effect. I am personally inclined to think the answer is a qualified ‘yes”.
I don’t mean this in the sense of so-called “hereditary witches” though there certainly are witches born into witch families who, like Jews born into Jewish families and Muslims born into Muslim families, etc. who will have this as the de facto lifestyle at birth.
I’ve been saving this brain for a special occasion. And I managed to snag the last bag of eyeballs at Dollar Tree so I got that goin’ for me. The bones of this particular skele will be transformed into the Mummy of Al Nofal, denizen of the legendary Black Pyramid. He’s the chap I needed to make the tongue for.
Surprisingly this brain, much nicer than the ones I have found at the usual stores, is not a Halloween prop. I’ve had it in my weird stuff collection for ages. It was given out by now defunct Novell Corporation at the turn of the century as a marketing gimmick. It’s getting a repaint and some electrodes, and who knows what else.
The eyeballs are a completely different project.
But I think that those of us who end up following that left-hand path tend toward a certain state of mind. We are ourselves, as the phrase turns, strange and unusual.
We tend to be interested, and from the earliest years, in the macabre, the dark, the bizarre.
We don’t shiver when we pass the graveyard. If the gate is open we are likely to wander in, and spend long hours reading the stones.
Rainy days, and thunderstorms refresh our souls, and thrill our hearts.
Black is our favorite color.
We talk to animals.
We talk to things.
We have piles of strange rocks, feathers, bones, hides, and stuff in jars.
We read Poe and Lovecraft and King and Koontz.
We like horror movies. We like monster movies. We like slasher movies.
We know the words to the Addams Family theme song by heart.
And all of this before ever cracking a spell book or hearing the word coven.
Now, the current mass media market fascination with the bankability of occult subjects has made it more likely that young weirdos will discover and explore witchcraft at an earlier point that I did in my day.
I was certainly an exception in my generation, coming from a generally Christian community, with no real family history of occult practice. At least not in the overt public way that many people now avow their witchiness.
Growing up in rural Appalachia, the existence of witches was a very real and widely accepted thing. Charms and omens and dowsing and herbal medicine were practiced by most folks regardless of their stated religion. These practices came with them from Ireland and Scotland and Wales, and from the Indigenous People their ancestors lived among and intermarried with. What will now be called witchcraft by academic folklorists, publicly self-identified witches, and the media market, have roots in pagan practices going back into dimmest antiquity. They have been carried forward because they still serve some vital purpose in the societies which use them, and even as those societies slip away from “useless superstition” the practices are being reclaimed by newly minted witches.
But in that community I was branded as “odd” and worse. I was naturally inclined to go beyond the practices that were, while “witchy” perceived as normal for the community, into the more complex and esoteric.
Much of that occurred when I reached college, because I then had the opportunity to access books on the subject, and I was able to encounter others who held similar interests.
The head of the theater costume shop was a witch and astrologer. Copies of astrology texts sat next to her pattern books on the shelf in the shop, and she had a powerful gift for sussing out your essential nature when she knew your birthday. I tended then, as I do now, to work more with the cards than the stars, but she kindled my interest in going deeper. Though I don’t know that she had a Slavic bone in her body, she is always the image I see when someone mentions Baba Yaga.
Theater was my first attempt at find a way of going to work in the movie business. Specifically, I wanted to be a makeup artist, to create those wonderful monsters that flowed from the studios of Jack Pierce, Dick Smith, John Chambers, and Rick Baker, among many others. Where I could afford to attend college at the time, live theater was the nearest option to that career.
When people say “Have a heart” and I reply “I do. I keep it in a jar on my desk” you can see that I am being completely sincere. The little piles of chaos that emerge as I work make for some interesting compositions. Extra points if you spotted the Grateful Dead album under the Jack-O-Lantern. It’s not just mood music for Halloween, it was there on the desk when I started getting things out of their storage bins.
In a few weeks I’ll share how these turned out, though in all honesty, some may not. It’s not a structured process. I have ideas, I gather raw material, pre-made props, and a lot of upcycled paper, cardboard, and styrofoam trash and see what comes out at the end. Duct tape and hot glue bind the universe together, at least for run of show. After that, it becomes parts for next year.
My interest in the monster movies fueled my creativity. I had started making costumes and effects and working with models and animation as a pre-teen. The alchemy of latex and spirit gum and silicone and mask grease and nose putty is similar in ways to a witch’s brew, Through it we transform ourselves into others, beasts and beings, just as surely as a glamour spell.
Glamours as magic are frequently described in conjunction with the use of make-up, which in the lingo of theater tech is called “basic corrective”. That is, when anyone goes out on stage, besides the makeup that would be used for creating or enforcing a character, there’s make-up that just makes you look your best. Maybe it’s to get rid of the bags under your eyes from the celebration on opening night. Maybe it’s to make your nose a little less prominent.
So we learned this from the first. We’d make ourselves up and go about our daily business to see if such effects made any difference in how people reacted, and indeed in how we felt. So this is very much what the glamour spell is selling. I’d take it further, wandering around the campus and going to the local hangouts as John Lennon, and other real people. It was an excuse to indulge the natural interest in costume and disguise that otherwise had to wait for the Halloween holiday.
I am still very much about the movie thing. In the many years that have passed I have self-studied, and worked a number of small personal projects. I continue to write scripts and screenplays, most orbiting the occult sensibilities that I enjoy watching in other works. Production of such is frequently cost-prohibitive, but maybe someday, when I am a bit less involved in the day job (retirement is not something I really think will ever happen) that may change. In the meantime, I seize every opportunity to play in that sandbox.
And Halloween is one that comes around every autumn. So while I certainly do treat this time of year with the reverence for the spiritual nature that its history deserves, I also spend a great deal of time in my workshop banging out new props and scenes for my own enjoyment, and hopefully the enjoyment of a small audience of visitors to both home and the haunted venues I have been lucky enough to work with in the last few years.
If you come to my house from August into November you are likely to find skulls lying about, and possibly a whole fully-dressed skeleton sitting in the library or by the bar. While the majority of the props and pieces are ultimately stored for the rest of the year, my bony companions have a permanent home in my studio, along with the “real” paraphernalia of an occult lifestyle. Depending on where I will set up my Halloween displays, some of those items will get intermixed with the heavily modified store-bought variety. I try not to let the cursed amulet fall into the wrong hands. However amusing that would be for me personally.
Truthfully, the creation of my Halloween props is very much a magical act, and they are certainly endowed with magical power. My art is that way to begin with, and in terms of making something that is supposed to connect with that “spooky vibe” people go seeking around the end of the October is going to be even moreso. Coming from my head and my hands and my heart, charged with my joy and imagination, it can be aught else.
So for the month ahead, expect that I will be showing off some of these creations, and the process whereby I make them, here on the blog. If you feel that this is too much a diversion from the usual oh-so-serious tone applied to discussions of magic and the occult, particularly around the time of year most often associated with it, I invite you to take a break and tend to your own cauldron. I assure you as my birthday approaches and we delve into the Deep Water of the Winter Dark there will be more than enough seriousness to go around.
In the meantime, turn on your favorite version of the Addams Family (they all have a unique flavor and I enjoy them all), get out the pumpkin carving kit, and shake the moths out of that old witch costume you used to wear just for parties.
