Halloween in South Philly

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I bought Tootsie pops and Milky Way bars at Super Fresh yesterday afternoon, in case I was swarmed by dozens of trick-or-treaters, but I only ended up with two rounds of candy-giving. The first was an African-American family; mom and dad and four kids. I can't remember what all of them wore, but one little girl was an angel and I think another had on a Snow White costume (I'm glad that Snow White can be multicultural now). Then the second group was three boys--the oldest was maybe ten and he was dressed as a Heineken bottle. The other kid was a convict, and I believe the littlest one was in his pajamas. That was it. I spent some of the evening watching the Law and Order SVU marathon, but didn't see any really scary movies I wanted to see. The choices included: Prom Night, Sweeney Todd, and Van Helsing (I did watch some of this between commercial breaks. What is this crap about? There were vampires, werewolves, zombies, Igors, Frankensteins, bats, jesters, monks--I couldn't figure out what was going on. Here's what The New Yorker says about it, if you don't believe me).

My co-workers and I were talking this weekend (we all had to work for Homecoming) about scariest movies we had seen. Someone mentioned Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, the Karen Black horror flick that no one should see at the impressionable age of 5---I believe that's when I saw it and the couldn't sleep for fear of little albino trolls in the basement who might want to drag me down with them and make me their Queen. Now, it appears that they remade it and it will be released in January 2011 with Katie Holmes as the star. Here's the trailer:



Other favorite scary movies that came up were The Ring (didn't see it), The Shining, any of the Friday 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, or Halloween movies, The Exorcist (of course), and, for me, the movie Jaws. I saw that about a year or two before we moved to Florida. Or maybe I didn't see it in the movie theaters--maybe I just saw the trailers for it? No, I think we did go see it. I was certain I wouldn't survive to see my seventh birthday.

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