At some point in the summer of 1981, I spent a couple of weeks visiting a former grade-school pal named Sean, whose family had decamped from the Upper East Side of Manhattan for the proverbial Big Sky Country of Bozeman, Montana. Beyond the usual amount of city-mouse-visits-country-mouse shenanigans (tear-assing around irresponsibly on so-called “all-terrain vehicles,” some rudimentary horseback-riding and almost losing my left eye during a star-crossed session of ill-considered fly-fishing), we would occasionally repair to the proper center of Bozeman for the nearest approximation of a “town” experience. During one such afternoon, we happened upon a video store that was going out of business. They were parting with all their stock, including all their wall-decor, which consisted of hundreds of movie posters. We were invited to help ourselves to whatever of that stuff was left. I zeroed in on one particular poster and was told I could have it for free, so I happily took it.
That was the poster below.
The poster in question lived in my drawer for the next couple of years until it was time for me to pack up my shit and head to college. Along with painstakingly dividing up my unwieldy record collection (leaving behind most of the more slack-jawed heavy metal selections, as detailed here), I also brought along a clutch of posters for the purposes of decorating my freshman-year dorm room. In addition to a slew of large-sized posters of predictable bands like The Clash, Black Flag, my beloved Killing Joke and ...er... Marillion (don't ask), I threw in my “Halloween” poster. Why not, right?
Once ensconced in my room —which I shared with a happy-go-lucky football player from Cleveland named Darren who didn’t share my affinity for all things angry and macabre but gamely never complained about it — I immediately started decorating. My main wall over my rarely-made bed ended up looking like this…
Were that not complicated enough, however, I hung the “Halloween” poster right over my bureau, which became pretty much the first thing anyone saw upon entering our room.
We lived in a co-ed hall of a co-ed dorm and, given Darren’s admittedly striking physique and tirelessly convivial nature, the girls on our hall were frequently in and out of our room, and often without knocking (that’s almost another post in itself). Suffice to say, when coupled with my cynical, jittery, needlessly defensive and pointedly, well, weird demeanor, the “Halloween” poster did me absolutely zero favors. In due course, I accrued the nickname “Axe” (short for “axe murderer,” despite the fact that at no point during the film in question does Michael "The Shape" Myers brandish an axe), which proved a tenacious new moniker (to this day, certain former classmates still refer to me as such). Suffice to say, while I never renounced my love for the movie in question, the “Halloween” poster did not grace the walls of any room of mine from that point forward.
Cut to 2022 and horror films, by and large, have become way more embedded into the mainstream, and expressing a fandom for same doesn’t really brand one a freaky, antisocial weirdo in the slightest. In the same way Punk Rock no longer scares, shocks or genuinely offends anyone, appreciation for horror has been largely defanged and subsumed by popular culture.
Earlier this week, a young colleague of mine named Chris revealed that he was very excited to catch the impending final chapter (the thirteenth installment, if I’m not mistaken) of the “Halloween” saga (notice how I didn’t say “franchise”? Let’s retire that fucking term if we’re talking about cinema, goddammit). He then explained that he considered himself a massive horror fan, with the “Halloween” series being, to his mind, the pinnacle of the genre. This evening, I went spelunking in my closet and dug out my old poster, which is now as fragile as the Shroud of Turin.
Tomorrow, I’m passing it onto Chris, and given his fervor for the subject, I have little doubt that it will serve him better than it did me.
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