This Is Halloween, This Is Halloween

As you all know, I’m writing a book about Halloween. It’s also about occult communities in the San Fernando Valley and pumpkin lattes and basic bitches and ghost hunters and Pinterest crafts and LA seasons and Hot Topic and North Hollywood vampires and the theology of Linus van Pelt and Tim Burton’s weird love-hate obsession with Burbank. But mostly it’s about Halloween, and it’s proving very hard to write because the way I feel about Halloween is almost impossible to put into words.

I did try to articulate it once, in a piece I wrote a few years ago for the excellent film site Bright Wall/Dark Room, “Danse Macabre,” about the 1929 Silly Symphonies short “The Skeleton Dance”:

“[The cartoon] also contains everything I love about Halloween, itself a blend of the goofy, the benign, and the depraved: the candy corn and plastic lawn zombies and softly rotting porch pumpkins; the costumed kids and the costumed coeds; the trashy orange jello shots, cutesy seasonal lattes and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. In its sentiment and sadness and sexiness and silliness and scariness it is the holiday that best typifies the human condition.”

People often talk about Christmas being magical, but Christmas is simply splendid. Halloween is like magic: elemental and intoxicating and transformative.

In 2011, when I was 32 years old, I had a large breast tumor. It took several months of tests and biopsies and surgeries to determine that it was benign. I was optimistic throughout — I have…