Almost ten years ago I found myself freshly unemployed and, due to a new baby and Alex’s health, unable to leave the house for any extended length of time. I had a computer, the right software and a few years of professional design work under my belt, so I put out feelers in the horror, Halloween and, especially, the haunted attraction industries via email, message boards, whatever I could think of.

One of the emails I sent was to a company (that I won’t name here) that, at the time, was pretty much the only one specializing in graphic/web design specifically for dark attractions. I inquired as to whether or not they might be hiring or, at the very least, sub-contracting a freelancer. I never received a response. Today Sinister Visions is one of their competitors.

I just received an email from somebody who’s effectively in the exact position I was in then and found myself about to delete the email without answering it (after all, there’s no reason for anybody to think Sinister Visions is hiring) – then I caught myself and realized I was about to do the same thing that somebody at That Other Company did all those years ago.

So I’ll answer the email (even if it won’t be what this person wants to hear) if only for the modicum of closure it will provide. It’s weird to be on the other side of the equation.

We have a trash can in our kitchen with an electronic flip-top and a motion/light sensor. You lean in to throw something away and the trash can, in theory, “sees” you coming and opens it’s trash can mouth to eat your trash.

Problem is, it doesn’t always register that I’m there, so I have to move my hand over the sensor a couple of times to get it to open. If I’m holding something particularly gross, or dripping, or doing other icky things that trash tends to do, this can be a pain.

More to the point, though, I realized I spend several minutes every day convincing a trash can that I exist.

Weird.

I was surfing on the web
When I found this killer site
And I wanted them to work for me.
They said “I’ve never seen a page
With code so filled with blight,
Could you use a better company?

If you can pay the right price
Your website will be nice,
And you can go and send it on its way.”
I said “You’re such a swell designer
Why you do this to yourself?”
They looked at me and this is what they said:

“Oh, there ain’t no rest for the Freelance,
Money don’t grow on trees.
I got bills to pay,
I got mouths to feed,
There ain’t nothing in this world for free.
I know I can’t slow down,
I can’t hold back,
Though you know, I wish I could.
No there ain’t no rest for the Freelance,
Until we close our eyes for good”.

It occurred to me recently that I’ve been doing illustration work off and on for over 20 years, and that I have stacks of artwork  published once, often in extremely obscure publications, that’s been sitting in a drawer ever since. As a regular user of royalty-free stock image sites, I thought to myself “Self, here’s a great way to earn some passive income for those lean months right after Halloween. You even have most of that stuff scanned into your computer!”

So I set about doing research to find out what’s involved in selling one’s backlog of illustrations online, and as it turns out, the internet isn’t as evolved as we often like to credit it. Oh sure, if you’re a photographer, Flash animator, icon or theme developer, no problem. If you create all your artwork on the computer, you can start selling tomorrow. But if you create traditional illustrations (that is to say, using ink or paint), there’s this weird attitude involved and you find yourself on sites talking about their “exclusive” list of “top notch” illustrators, complete with bullshit application processes and unreasonable licensing/exclusivity terms. There’s no middle ground between the two (at least, none that I’ve been able to find yet).

And honestly, I don’t get it. How are these sell-your-own-creatives stock sites ignoring an entire class of illustration work? And what’s with the attitude on the illustration-only stock sites? What, because it’s “art”? Shouldn’t the creators get to determine how their work is classified? I’ve never stood on ceremony about my own work and have always considered myself an illustrator first, and all the commercial/mercenary implications that go with that title (as opposed to “artist”). If I want to sell old images on the cheap to somebody that could use them, well, I don’t mind saying that I’m a bit miffed to find that I can’t. Or, at least, I can’t without jumping through some serious hoops that my fellow visual designers don’t have to jump through.

Stock sites – get with the program. Some of us draw and paint, and know how to scan at high resolution. Some of us would like to sell a 15-year-old drawing of a vampire to a kid for $20 to use on his college newsletter. Some of us would be happy to give you a percentage of that…

…and hey, got a bead on a stock art site that does what I’m talking about? Leave it in the comments!

Earlier this evening I was blindsided by a random memory from my childhood. In the 3rd grade, our teacher asked us to create a poem in which the letters of our names were the first letters of each line of the poem. Somehow, I remember my poem, verbatim*. This freaks me out a little, as my memory is typically… well, awful. Here’s the poem I wrote about CHAD SAVAGE:

Chad is my name
Halloween is my day
A bunch of spooks tied up in a knot
Do you know if they’re real or not?

Spiders and goblins, jack o’ lanterns*
A bunch of bats up in a steeple
Vampires, bogles (Scottish for “ghost”)**
And my dad (dressed up) always scaring people***
Going along the river’s coast
Ed (my uncle) dresses up like a ghost****

*I’m fudging this line – it’s the only one that, for whatever reason, just won’t come back to me…

**In the 3rd grade, I only ever checked out books of ghost stories from the school library. I had just learned what a “bogle” was.

***My father would put on a ghost costume when he took us trick ‘r’ treating – long, gauzy sheet, two eyeholes, and he’d wear sunglasses underneath to make sure the eyes were black. He would stand in the street, motionless, and let the wind flap his sheet as we rang each doorbell. In retrospect, I can only imagine how creepy that looked to people answering the door for me and my sister!

****My Uncle Ed had a huge plot of land on the Arkansas River, where I spent a lot of (happy) time as a kid. I don’t know that he ever actually dressed up as a ghost, but hey, I needed lines for my poem.

Since I was a kid, certain songs or pieces of music have come along that have a profound emotional effect on me – out of all proportion, in theory, to anything that sounds should be able to evoke in a human being.

As far back as I can remember, A Night on Bald Mountain, The Danse Macabre and Tchaikovsky’s “Arabian Dance” from “The Nutcracker” have stirred me at my core; “Arabian Dance” in particular has given me goosebumps for as long as I can remember. Even today.

Other songs have come along since I was a kid and I’ve built mix tapes, then mix CDs, and now MP3-based playlists – songs that share a common emotional response for me personally, and have nothing else in common. I’ve been listening to some mixes I made 10+ years ago, and they have been having just as powerful an effect on me as they did when I put them together.

What I have to question is: Why? How can a certain collection of sounds and notes have such an electric effect on a person? How can a song I’ve never heard before, and have no conscious frame of reference for, practically move me to tears?

More to the point, how can a song I’ve never heard remind me of, or make me think about times and places I’ve never been? *

I won’t call myself a skeptic; skeptics refuse to believe something unless you can prove it. I’m not that demanding. I’m not sure how to qualify my experience of the world – I don’t perceive the supernatural, for sure. I’ve never seen anything remotely out of the ordinary. But that doesn’t make me disbelieve in the things I don’t/can’t see – I’ve never seen a million dollars. Perfectly reasonable people see ghosts every day, for instance – who am I to say they’re wrong?

Point being, whereas I don’t seem to be wired to see supernatural/preternatural things, I am, on the other hand, pretty damned logical. And logic dictates that, if a piece of music can completely alter the fabric of my being on every conscious level, there must be something more at work, here, than just sounds hitting the eardrums.

For one thing, I think it lends credence to the idea of reincarnation – past lives. If, as eternal souls, we absorb certain base-level ideas and experiences, surely a core understanding and preference in music would be included. It would explain why only a certain type of music can provoke such a dynamic response.

Food for thought.

* I swear I’ve heard music in the past that has instantly (mentally) taken me to times and places other than my own. I can’t account for it.

ADDENDUM: Here’s a perfect example. In the mid-90′s I saw a movie on the Sci Fi Channel called “Sleepstalker”. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t great. However, there were flashbacks to the killer’s origin involving an old 1950′s 45 record player playing a lullaby that absolutely chilled me to the bone, to the point that I haven’ t forgotten it in over 10 years. A quick web search has turned up a snippet of it – if you can listen to this and not get goosebumps, you’re made of colder stuff than me: http://perseverancerecords.com/manzie2.3.mp3

I’ve been a fan of Lesley Bannatyne‘s work for a number of years now (she writes about Halloween, historically, socially and culturally) and had the opportunity to not only meet her at HAuNTcon earlier this year, but whisk her away for a night of fun and frolic with The Zombie Army. We’ve kept in touch since and she asked me a couple of questions for a new book she’s writing. I’m posting my responses below for posterity, as I very much doubt most of this will actually be quoted in the book, if any of it is at all.

We know what we’re celebrating when we celebrate the 4th of July or Arbor Day. But Halloween today doesn’t celebrate a person, event or even ethnicity. What are we celebrating when we celebrate Halloween? Why (based on your own experience) do you think Halloween attracts so many adults today?

More than any other holiday, I think Halloween is personal; each person celebrating it is, in many ways, doing so differently than everybody else, based on their own history with the holiday, its imagery, its icons and archetypes, etc. I think it means something specific to each and every person who celebrates it.

Now granted, for an overwhelming majority of Americans, it’s little more than an excuse to put on a costume and have a party, and that’s fine – most people only get to play dress-up once a year (which is a shame). For many, it’s also about one-upmanship; who can have the most lavish or outrageous costume, who can throw the biggest party. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to transform the Playboy Mansion, Universal Studios Theme Park, Knott’s Berry Farm, Six Flaggs, etc. Similar to Mardi Gras, for a lot of people it’s simply an opportunity to slip out of the daily grind and go a little wild.

Halloween is the one time of year where it’s acceptable for us as a society to publicly express ourselves in a dark and spooky way. We get to playfully (and not-so-playfully) deal with things that scare us, out in the open and with our friends and family. It’s cultural catharsis. Death, monsters, the dark, the forbidden, the unknown – they all come out to play for Halloween, and we can safely dance with them, have a drink or three and then put them away on November first.

For a growing number of people, however, Halloween is something more. Many of my generation were lucky enough to be kids at the right time in America when Halloween was the way it’s still depicted in the movies and in fiction, before it became so horror-oriented and paranoid. Back when it was about Trick or Treats, ghosts, goblins and witches, It’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown and so forth. I was doubly lucky to have parents who actively encouraged us to have fun and helped us celebrate Halloween; some of my fondest childhood memories are of Halloween nights in my youth.

For us, Halloween was (is) magic. Dark, spooky magic. The decorations, the dark, the sense of adventure a kid gets Trick or Treating, the sense of community created when everybody in a neighborhood gets into it, decorates, and comes out to give candy to the tots; these things weave magic. It’s palpable; you can feel it in the crisp Autumn air and feel it in your chest. I think it’s the spooky part that really sets it all apart from other holidays, the thrill, the low-level fun edgey feeling that maybe, just maybe, there really is something with fangs and claws out there in the dark, hungry and waiting. You just don’t get that rush at Christmas!

As a result, us Halloween kids have grown up loving the holiday, and now we’re making it our own. We’re reclaiming it from the corporations and companies that somehow turned it into a blood-and-guts holiday in the ’80′s and ’90′s, and bringing it back around to the fun side in an attempt to give our kids the experiences we had, and instill in them the same sense of spooky magic and dark wonder that we enjoyed. We’re celebrating our collective youth when we celebrate Halloween. We’re celebrating our children, and giving them something to remember fondly when they’re older. In some ways we’re celebrating one of the last vestiges of magic and mystery in the world, however you choose to define those words.

And if you’re like me, you’re outwardly celebrating how you live all year.

Since you started designing/marketing/networking, have you seen any sorts of changes – e.g., a huge jump in people using social networks to talk about Halloween, or a greater (or lesser) number of companies using different communications tools to get the word out?

I first discovered Halloween on the internet (so to speak) via AOL in 1994, when they’d do a whole section of downloads, games and articles for the holiday. I was in heaven and for a couple of years they did a really great job with it, but then they handed that aspect over to an external site and it just wasn’t the same. Over the years there were a few websites that popped up, but they were mostly repository sites – history, recipes, etc. There was no community or interaction to speak of (that I knew of).

Then in the late ’90′s I discovered a couple of email discussion groups. Once again, I was in Heaven – people were actively talking about Halloween and haunted houses all year! Shortly after this discovery Sinister Visions became my full-time job and, since then, Halloween’s 24/7/365 presence on the web has grown exponentially: Websites, message boards, discussion lists, community sites, podcasts, video channels, you name it.

Perhaps because of the age demographic, the Halloween and haunted house industry was a little slow on the uptake with social media, but they’re starting to get it. The savvy companies have been there from the start, but (literally) every day we see haunted houses, prop companies, special effects services, Halloween vendors and enthusiasts, musicians, artists, designers and more surfacing on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and other services. It has literally never been easier to find other Halloween enthusiasts than it has been right now, as you read this, and if you read it again tomorrow, it’ll be true then, too!

It might surprise some to learn I was raised on musicals. My parents loved the classics from the 50′s through the 70′s – The Sound of Music, The Music Man, Oliver!, Fiddler on the Roof, Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, and so forth. I grew up listening to all that stuff.

So while on the one hand I’m Mister Industrial Crunchy Scary Music and have always had a predilection for scary, aggressive tunes*, I’m also a sucker for well-done musicals, evidenced by the fact that I just bought, on a whim, the soundtracks for Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, REPO! The Genetic Opera and Young Frankenstein the Musical. Granted, these ain’t my parents’ musicals and they have a clear bent towards my horror aesthetics, but still. I’m thankful to The Folks for teaching me to love a cinematic/musical style that so many people seem to hate; when it’s done well, it’s something else. In REPO’s case, the music was better than the movie!

*I still have a mix tape I made when I was 16 comprised of the scariest, most transgressive music I could find as a young Southern Baptist in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1984. Needless to say, it ain’t too scary or transgressive – it’d be another 2 years before I went to art school in LA and found out about Ralph Records, Wax Trax and Nettwork. Skinny Puppy, Severed Heads, The Residents, Tangerine Dream, Jean Michel Jarre and Gary Numan changed my life in the fall of 1986.

So it’s about 2:00 am and I’m sitting here working on a haunted house’s marketing materials for the upcoming season, while watching Buffy Season 2 on Hulu.com, after a long speakerphone conversation on my Blackberry with one of the haunted house industry’s most well-known personalities.

This is after a lovely dinner in my back yard with my family, watching the sun set and looking at our newly-installed lighting system, which is gorgeous.

I am so damned lucky I can barely comprehend it.

Not just the obvious stuff – my health, my family, owning a house, owning a business that I love. Did I mention the part about watching Buffy on Hulu? Of all the things I just mentioned, that’s probably the most likely to get dismissed or taken for granted, yet it’s also the most remarkable.

I’m working off a reasonably powerful laptop that has an output for a secondary monitor – I work on the big monitor while watching Hulu on the laptop’s built-in monitor. That I can watch a show that I absolutely love, for free, while I work in my office? That’s pretty amazing, and it was only a couple of years ago that it wasn’t possible without a significant cash investment.

Beyond that, if I want to, I can log into Twitter or Facebook and find out what’s happening to friends and family all over the world. We take that for granted, when we should be thunderstruck that we can do it. As much as I jokingly gripe about The Stupids on Facebook, I also have to say that it’s a small-scale miracle in my life – I’ve reconnected with people I haven’t talked to in decades because of it. I can’t dismiss or mitigate that.

My point: Appreciate what you have. Appreciate how easy the internet is making certain simple pleasures. Appreciate how easy the internet makes it to stay in touch with people you genuinely care about. Appreciate your family. Appreciate whatever is going on in your life that doesn’t make you say “ouch”.

You’re lucky to have it. ANY of it.

So here’s what I learned from the epic (and genuinely horrifying) zombie holocaust dream I had last night:

1. Whenever it’s possible, run. Staying and fighting gives more zombies a chance to show up.
2. Secure the bodies of the people that just got killed by zombies, even if you’re still dealing with those zombies, ’cause if you don’t, in a minute, there’ll be a couple more zombies.
3. Everything is a weapon if you hit the zombie hard enough with it. In the face. Repeatedly. I killed one with an old metal 3-hole paper puncher.
4. Basement or upstairs? Upstairs. You can destroy a staircase and find a way down later; you can’t get out of a basement. Ben had that right in NOTLD.
5. Zombies that have been dead for awhile come apart easier than you’d think; even their jaws. Grab a piece and yank. Repeat until the zombie is… ineffective.
6. Don’t let your child out of your sight EVEN. FOR. A. SECOND.
7. If new people show up, let them in if you can. They might be able to help.
8. If new people show up surrounded by zombies only a few feet away… too bad for them. Better them than you.
9. When the guys in lab coats and biohazard suits show up, things might have just gotten worse.
10. If you see a dinosaur in the distance, relax. You’re just dreaming.