TRICK OR TREAT?
TRICK
I'm pretty desensitised these days to Jason, Freddy and Scream masks, given their ubiquity around Halloween. But when I idly wondered over coffee earlier what might actually scare me if I saw it appear at my front door, it would undoubtedly be Roger the Dog Man and Horace Derwent from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980). Both appear for only a few seconds in the film, yet have remained imprinted on my imagination ever since I first watched the movie.
If ever there were an example of “less is more” in the horror genre, surely it’s this disturbing flash cut of randomness that hints at another layer to an already multi-layered supernatural tale. Kubrick was a master who knew precisely what to keep and what to discard from Stephen King's original novel. And though this is only a fleeting reference to some of the book’s deeper themes, it somehow carries more power than many of King’s expository pages about the Overlook’s history, precisely because of its brevity on screen.
Beyond the overt sexual decadence implied between these two, there’s also the fact that they’re ghosts from a debauched party long past in that mountain resort where the rich and powerful once went to play. Horace Derwent was the former owner of the Overlook during the Roaring Twenties, and Roger the Dog Man his lover.
God only knows what other perverted madness went on back then.
It does makes me laugh that you can have all the blood and gore in the world, and yet nothing — I repeat, nothing — comes close to Roger and Horace looking up from their, shall we say, oral activities or furry fellatio in whatever hotel room they’re in. I’m assuming not 237, but it just might be.
Cue Danny Torrance–style silent screams.
TREAT
On a lighter note, I can remember my first sense of Halloween from watching E.T. at the cinema as a young boy. The scene where Elliott dresses up his pet alien as a ghost, using the Halloween disguise as a decoy to get to the woods and send a signal to his home planet, is beautifully evocative of a certain time in America, when California seemed like a kind of utopia to us and every national holiday they celebrated appeared more fun and colourful than anything we dimly tried to replicate back here in rain-soaked Britain.
Halloween for us was more about sparklers being snuffed out by cold, miserable rain, underpowered Silver Fountain rockets that barely left the ground, damp-squib Mount Vesuvius cones, and briefly fizzing Catherine wheels that spluttered through a few arthrtic rotations of sparks before returning us to darkness and leaving us with a sense of “is that it?”—though still half-afraid that one might blow up in our faces despite its soggy disappointment.
Of course, as Elliott and his brother sneak E.T. past their unsuspecting mother, who believes the alien to be her daughter, Gertie, they encounter all sorts of costumed trick-or-treaters (including one dressed as Yoda) out and about in the dusk-lit streets of their 'San Fernando' neighbourhood. There’s just something about this sequence that feels so magical and builds to the most iconic moment in the film, when Elliott and E.T. fly past the moon on a BMX, creating a kind of childhood transcendence for us all to aspire to.
We may never have gotten off the ground literally, but our hearts soared every time we watched that scene, accompanied by John Williams’s iconic theme, which stirred our emotions far better than any firework in our back garden.