The world by and large has forgotten the origins of Halloween, probably the oldest of all holidays save Passover, older than Christmas. So tonight I am going to pay tribute to this wonderful (and sometimes not so wonderful) holiday that is so popular that it has long since become the biggest party night of the year, and talk about where it came from and how it personally affects me.
Halloween has always brought strange and unique experiences to me, not always pleasant ones. I was supposed to be a New Year’s Eve baby and Mom had intended to name me Christopher. For whatever reason that she’s never been able to explain to me, she never communicated this to our father because Dad didn’t have a clue. My name, my birth, in fact my very existence were all accidents of fate. From a certain perspective, my entire life has been a big accident of fate.
Yes, I was supposed to be born New Year’s Eve. So when I came in two months premature at under three pounds, I was so tiny and frail that they didn’t think I was going to make it. Dad said he was able to hold me in the palm of his hand. Our uncle, Fr. Joe, was in the waiting room with Dad when Mom gave birth to me. The doctors came out to fetch him. "Father, if you wish to baptize the baby, you’d better do it now because we don’t think he has much time." So Fr. Joe rushed in and began the sacrament. But when he came to the part of the ritual, "I baptize you [insert name]
This holiday bears a particular sensitivity for someone with a Halloween birthday. I do feel there’s something quite special about having been born on this specific day, particularly since in my case I wasn’t supposed to. By some miracle, I survived. If I ever write my autobiography, the title will be "On Borrowed Time." But I was so premature that the optic nerve hadn’t yet fully developed so I was blind for the first few months of my life. As an infant, nobody really notices that you cannot see, so it took some time for people to suspect this. It was one of the visiting nurses during those first few months when they were trying to keep me alive that brought to Mom’s attention her suspicion. Then they tried many tests and it was obvious I could not see. Mom made an appointment with a pediatric eye specialist and in the days leading up to it, prayed a special novena over me every night hoping for a miracle. To this day, Mom swears to me that when she concluded the novena the night before the appointment, she could see my eyes suddenly start darting about. She knew that I had at that moment acquired my sight. Of course, the doctor confirmed this the next day. I had only been in this world a short time and had already been the recipient of two miracles. And I was, by a fluke of fate, named for St. Michael the Archangel, the head of all the angels and the Protector of all righteous souls. Or perhaps my name was the result of even a third miracle.
I’ve always considered myself quite blessed to have been born at all, but more blessed to have been christened Michael, and even moreso that all this happened on the very unique day of All Hallowed’s Eve. But to also receive the incredible added bonus of my sight, this has always boggled my imagination. I’ve always believed that it must have been God’s plan for me – to be a filmmaker, to make great films, and to do great things with those films. Think about it! This is film! It’s one of the very few paths in life that is really quite impossible without your sight. I cannot think of any other rational explanation that would account for the fact that I’ve had this intense passion to make movies and tell stories ever since I saw "Snow White" at the age of five. I started dreaming about this before I even started school. I started writing my first scripts when I was only seven. I started photography when I was ten and began making my first 8mm films when I was twelve. And I have been professionally involved in the industry ever since I entered film school in Boston at 19. This can’t be just a coincidence. I only regret that I haven’t been able to make it happen sooner than this. At 56 (in a few hours, 57! I was born around 8 a.m.), I’m still struggling to make films professionally. Not that I haven’t had results. I have a degree in film, 13 years of working in the industry in Los Angeles, and now twenty years of making films here in Detroit, one of which was a full-length feature. And I haven’t even mentioned the plethora of videos I’ve written and produced.
But I still struggle. I’m sure that comes with the territory in this intensely competitive business. When I read the memoirs of the great directors, it seems their struggles just kept growing with their accomplisments. So I don’t really consider this to be a failure. There is no such thing as failure as long as you keep getting up every morning and getting back into the swim. And it’s not like I haven’t had substantial obstacles. I’ve actually had two very substantial obstacles: they’re called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and sleep apnea. But they’re getting under control now after a twenty year battle, really 40 years when you consider I’ve been fighting this since my teen years, just never knew it until recently. So I enter my 57th year with nothing but hope ahead. I still believe I have great films in my future. (I’m hoping Ash Wednesday will be one of them.) At 57, I suppose there are a lot of people who will consider this an idiotic statement. People my age aren’t supposed to be this idealistic. But I’ve always been this way and I expect that I always will be.
The point is I do believe that this has always been part of a much bigger plan and it just can’t be simple luck that I just happened to survive birth, given the name of Michael, born on such a unique day as Halloween, given the miracle of my sight, and had these seeds of passion for telling stories and making films planted in me, all so early in my life, and have never lost any of it my entire life. It also can’t be a coincidence that I’ve also from a very early age had the additional twin passions of business and finance, the very tools that may well prove to be the instruments that deliver my first passion. Only time will tell of course. I will never give it up. I will stay in the fight until I drop. But does anybody really think that this is all just a great big coincidence?
I cannot. This is why I’ve always harbored a genuine respect for the traditions behind this holiday. Our culture has always been so wrapped up in the partying aspect of Halloween, I don’t think many people are aware of where it came from. It started as a pagan tradition, the Celts doing their great annual harvest feast around this date. The Celts believed that on this date, the barrier between our world and hell became very thin. It was the one day that they were most vulnerable to evil spirits invading their realm and abducting unsuspecting souls into hell. To protect themselves against this, they would dress in elaborate ghoulish costumes in the hopes of warding off the spirits. Over the centuries, the tradition spread to Scotland where the element of giving out treats to honor the dead and assure their passage to heaven was added to the mix. When the Roman Empire collapsed and Europe was plunged into the centuries of poverty, disease, political chaos and despair that we now call the Dark Ages, the Catholic Church instituted November 1st as All Saint’s Day and soon the Christian communities in Europe adopted the practice. (Is it possible the Catholic Church purposely chose November 1st to follow the Celtic "Day of the Dead"?) The tradition goes that if November 1st is the day that the saints all come marching in and take deserving souls to heaven, then the devil must know that the eve of All Saints is his last chance to take souls away from God. So European Christians too began the practice of dressing up like ghouls to ward off the devil, and giving out treats to honor their departed ones for their trip to heaven the next day.
By the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it had become a formal institution. All Halloweds Eve became a night when the communities of Christian faithful all over Europe would dress up in elaborate ghoulish costumes and display jack-o-lanterns at their domiciles, all traditional Satanic devices meant to deceive the devil into believing that your soul was already damned and he no longer had any need of business with you. Thus the devil would pass you over. Thus you would be safe when the angels came November 1st. It was during the Renaissance that the Scottish word for the holiday, All Halloweds Even, first entered the lexicon as Halloween. This has continued through the centuries and is believed to have still been a religious practice into the 19th century.
But since the early 20th century, it has become completely secularized. The Church no longer practices it as a serious ritual for warding off the devil. In fact, fundamentalist Christians, uninformed about the origins, now consider Halloween to be a form of devil worship and refuse to participate in it. In modern times, its origins have been forgotten or ignored and it is no longer a time for wearing ghoulish outfits to ward off spirits but now a time for fun where any kind of outfit is acceptable, be it ghoulish or saintly or anything else. Now it’s all about play acting and partying and getting treats. I’m sure most people don’t even realize why we so enjoy watching scary movies on Halloween (or for that matter throughout the whole month of October), but this does harken back to the original tradition that All Halloweds Even is the night when the barrier between our earth and hell is at its most vulnerable and we are reminding ourselves just how culpable we all are to the evil and sinister forces that surround us.
So last night, as my way of honoring the tradition, I shared the list of what I consider to be the greatest horror movies of all time. In the day that has since passed, I’ve realized that I neglected three other directors who contributed much to the genre. I think the first film I ever saw that scared the bejeebers out of me was king of B-movies Sam Arkoff’s 1958 production, "Terror From Year 5,000," about a team of scientists who invent a time machine that inadvertantly transports a mutant creature from the year 5000 into 1958. Naturally the creature terrorizes the area and kills people left and right. It’s only a one-star movie, but when the creature was finally revealed at the end - Wow! That was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. I had nightmares for weeks and that image has stuck with me all my life. If any movie ever deserved an Oscar for Best Costume, whoever made that creature’s mask sure deserved it.
One of the most penetrating portraits of perversion and evil I’ve ever seen is "M," made by ace German director Fritz Lang in 1931. It’s the story of a pedophile and child killer, played so piercingly by Peter Lorre, who so thoroughly terrorizes Berlin that the German mafia has to be recruited by the authorities to hunt him down as all civilized methods have failed. Besides, he’s vermin; he does not deserve due process. When they finally catch up with him, they do not find a monster, just a very sick frightened mouse of a man who is afflicted with a perversion he cannot control. Lang’s message is that evil is not always black-and-white. In fact, most of the time it’s just plain gray. Lorre is killed, but we pity him, not hate him. Lang’s portrait of pedophilia and society’s reaction to it is so dead-on that it remains timely to this day. So timely, so accurate, that the script, with the exception of a few changes to the vernacular, could be remade today line by line and no one would suspect it was written in 1931.
And my final tribute goes to the modern master of weird, the one, the only David Lynch and what I consider his best film, 2001’s "Mulholland Drive," in which Naomi Watts plays a Hollywood actress undergoing a journey through her own hell. After an auto accident on the famous Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills, she finds herself mired in a mystery so thoroughly irrational that it soon becomes impossible to distinguish dreams from reality. Who’s after her? Why? How does she fight them? By the end we realize what’s really going on. There is no mystery and there is no hell. What we have been seeing is a tortured mind and what is perhaps the most compelling portrait of a descent into insanity ever filmed. We are seeing how this woman’s treacherous life has finally caught up with her and how her guilty conscience has now destroyed her. Since Lynch tells the whole story through her eyes, we never know until the end that it’s all an illusion. Typical David Lynch, the modern master of the surreal and bizarre.
And one more thing before I conclude. I received my first comment on the blog last night complimenting me on my list. It was an anonymous comment in which the sender wanted to add Val Lewton’s "The Curse of the Cat People" to my list. This was the sequel to ace horror director Jacques Tourneur’s 1942, "Cat People" about a woman carrying the ancient curse of a panther inside her. I’ve seen them both, they’re both classics, both very chilling and atmospheric, excellent studies in dark and shadow, and I’m glad to honor the sender’s request and add them as Honorable Mentions.
Thus concludes this year’s tribute to Halloween. Happy Birthday to me! Dad, there's only one day left of all this "horror nonsense" that you hated so much. Then you can rest easy again.
I rmemeber Robb Rucker telling me that his favorite scary film was Jacques Tourneurs 1958 film "Curse of the Demon", in which a man investigates a mysterious "devil cult" in southern England. And it is scary.
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