From the Editor's Desk: My Most Memorable Movie-Related Halloween

As Scott informed you yesterday morning, Cinematical is stacking the month with tons of Halloween-related content. Every day, for the next 30 days, we'll be shoveling out all kinds of scary goodies -- including a daily Cinematical Seven and Retro Cinema, as well as a very cool contest (which we'll announce later today) and a bunch of other stuff. For those of you too old to go Trick-or-Treating, you'll want to stop by Cinematical every day this month for more scary movie-related snacks than you know what to do with. Trust me, if you're not a big horror fan, by the end of this month you'll walk away with a new appreciation for the genre Hollywood wants to hide under a PG-13 rating. That said, all this October talk brought back memories of my favorite movie-related Halloween growing up.

I was about 17-years-old, and the kind of guy girls wanted to be just friends with. I was stuck at that in-between stage -- where you're too old to go Trick-or-Treating, and too lame to attend a major Halloween house party. Mom was making cupcakes, and I was in charge of giving out miniature candy bars to the three kids who came knocking on our door throughout the night. To make matters even worse, right after tending to the first trick-or-treater, I noticed that my car -- the vehicle I had just obtained a few months earlier -- was covered in eggs. Nice.

Immediately afterwards, I received a phone call from my high school crush (and best friend, of course) -- she said she was sorry about my car, and that she told Craig not to do it. First he tries to date my high school crush, and then he eggs my car. Craig! That bastard! I was stuck inside one of those cheesy 80's teen flicks, and there was no escaping. Craig and his buddy were currently hanging with my crush and her friends in the schoolyard near my house, and I was outside, on my knees, cleaning the egg off my car with paper towels that prominently featured witches and pumpkins. "Erik, it's another trick-or-treater -- can you grab the candy bars please!" Mom yelled. The kid was dressed as a Princess. I tossed a candy into her bag -- she looked up, smiled and said, "Thanks ... sucks about your car."

I was in hell.

I needed to do something, anything -- because Craig and his buddies would forever abuse me if they knew I was weak, lame and an easy target. Which I totally was, don't get me wrong, but there comes a time in every male teenager's life when he has to take a stand; when he has to confront those who've done him wrong and win back the woman he loves (even if she's just his friend and doesn't have those same "tingly feelings" as he does). But what could I do -- I was a skinny idiot with a dirty Nissan Sentra and enough orange cupcakes to feed an army. Wait a second ... that was it! I needed an army. Maybe not an army, but kids to come to my defense. And if I had more than one friend, that wouldn't have been a problem.

But the reality was I only had one male friend at the time: Scott. He was a tiny Jewish kid whose mother wouldn't let him out of the house past 8PM (a curfew I think was changed to 10PM when he reached 21, but I could be wrong). However, like in any memorable teen adventure, our hero always had another group of teens to turn to. Some call them a "ragtag group of misfits" -- I called them "the kids I played basketball with." So I ventured out alone, down my block and across two others, to where I knew these kids liked to hang out. There were about eight of them, their ages ranged between 12 and 16, and they were exactly what you'd expect to find on a neighborhood block in a New York City suburb. Coupla Jews, coupla Italians, coupla Middle Easterners -- it were as if I stepped into the We Are the World music video, if it featured random kids who wore their hats sideways and spat instead of sang.

I never knew what these kids did when they weren't playing basketball, but now I knew -- nothing. They stood around, playing pranks on one another, and when I walked up the shortest one cried out: "Hey Davis, whatcha doin' here -- we ain't playin' ball?" I made it short: "This kid egged my car. He's hanging out at the schoolyard with the girl I'm supposed to marry. He has a white Camaro, and he loves it more than life itself." Less than three minutes later, we were on our way. These kids -- this "ragtag group of misfits" -- were more than happy to bring down a world of hurt on a kid they never knew existed. As they packed into my car, holding four cartons of eggs and at least eight bottles of shaving cream, I was afraid I had gotten in over my head. I wasn't like this. I wasn't cool. I was Daniel Larusso. I was a complete wimp who was about to use one move -- a move that wasn't even mine -- to defeat my enemy. But hey, it was better than nothing.

When we arrived at the schoolyard, kids piled out of my car and jumped off their bikes. Craig was lounging on a coupla swings in the playground, surrounded by one male friend and three females (one of which was supposed to be the future mother of my children). There was a brief stare down -- like the kind you'd find in a great Western, only we had shaving cream and Craig was a good 200 feet from his car, which, incidentally, had its sunroof open. Someone shouted, "Whatcha gonna do now Craig!" -- and with that, more eggs than a kid outside his house after 8PM should ever possess went soaring toward Craig's white Camaro. Someone drew a smiley face out of shaving cream on his front hood; his lights looked like giant cupcakes with white frosting and the inside of his car reminded me of a scene out of National Lampoon's Halloween Vacation (if such a movie ever existed). Craig stood up, walked over to the fence and didn't move a muscle. Smart guy. After another kid used some sort of pin to suck the air out of the Camaro's tires, we called it a night and took off.

I drove directly back to my house because my future self wanted to establish an alibi ... even though the witness list was longer than the list of chores my mother would've given me if she knew what I had just done. The phone wasn't ringing; my mother was ecstatic that I had friends over -- as if I had just won the friend lottery (if such a thing ever existed) -- and she ran downstairs with a slew of cupcakes. As we scarfed them down like men who had been out to battle without food for weeks, my mother proposed that us kids watch a movie. So I walked over to my VCR, hit eject and out popped a movie I had planned on watching, but never got around to: Gremlins. It was the perfect movie for a bunch of kids who had just wreaked havoc on a bully and his car, though at the time I viewed it as "the movie we were watching because it was in the VCR."

So we watched Gremlins, and we ate our cupcakes, and I never heard from Craig that night. In fact, I never heard from Craig again. A week later, the girl I planned to grow old with started dating another guy; a guy who was older and didn't associate himself with other males younger than him. Which was me. But I had acquired a new group of friends; kids who weren't afraid to fight to protect their own. And as the years went by, our long nights together turned into occasional friendly exchanges. But you could go up to any one of those kids today and ask them what their most memorable Halloween was. And with a sly smirk they'd look back at you and reply, "Gremlins Night ... by far."

True story.