Halloween 1978 - KISS Meets The Coward in the Car

On Saturday, October 28 1978, my Mom took me to a "Haunted" house here in Wilmington. We rode with her friend Dixie, and Dixie's daughter (I can't remember her name). Dixie's daughter was a couple of years older than me. I remember how poised and graceful she was, for such a young girl - my Mom said she was classy. Me? Ha, at nine years of age, I was perhaps best known for staring out the back window of the car and making faces at the drivers behind us on long family trips. One group even followed us into a gas station and asked my folks to make me stop, as I had been doing it for almost an hour while they were trapped behind us on some back roads leading to Greenville NC (and no, I'm not making that up - ask my Mom, she was mortified beyond words, and I wasn't allowed to even turn around the rest of the way there, or on the entire return trip).

So we pulled into this place, and they'd turned the front yard into a cemetery. It looked pretty real to me, although I suppose it was cobbled together from cardboard and styrofoam for the headstones (the undead don't give a crap about chloro-fluorocarbons), paint for the engravings and cracks, and pulled cotton for the black widow webs. There were barrels with fires inside, giving the wooded area a horror movie styled flicker. A gate with skulls (probably fake, but who knows, life was cheap in the Disco era) on each of the two post tops led the way to the front porch, which was illuminated by a single red light bulb. A cloaked figure stood by the door, taking the money (hey, even Charon demanded an obolus). All the windows were boarded up, but you could see snatches of light spilling through here and there.

There were unearthly sounds coming from those windows which made the hair on the back of my nine-year-old unwashed neck stand up. Dixie's daughter remained unaffected.

We started walking from the parking area up to the gate when I heard the screaming. From around the back corner of the house, getting louder and closer. A person ran from that corner, looking behind at something. His shirt was torn and splattered with the realest blood there ever was, no matter that real blood isn't ever that red, in my mind it was real and it was leaking from any number of wounds on that person's body.

Then, the killer. A hulking figure wearing overalls and a mask appeared, stalking the screamer. My memory is clouded, and each time I think back the weapon in his hands changes - an axe, a pitchfork, a sledgehammer, a chainsaw. Halloween the movie wasn't that well-known yet, and Jason Voorhees was still a ways off, so I hadn't been jaded into relating something like this to one of those movie monsters - maybe it was supposed to be a Leatherface. I can't remember the mask or the weapon. Doesn't really matter - what matters is that I really believed I was about to see a person being murdered.

He ran past us and warned "Run for your lives!!!!"

Which is exactly what I did. I didn't so much run as I did fly, my feet never disturbing the gravel on the path back to the car. The doors were unlocked, but before my little ass hit the vinyl on the seat they were all latched securely. The killer and the screamer ran off into the woods, presumably to circle back behind the house for their next performance a few minutes later.

My Mom, Dixie, and her daugher came back around and tried to convince me to go on inside the haunted house, but I'd decided I'd had quite enough Halloween. Dixie's daughter even offered to hold my hand so I wouldn't be so scared (I probably should've married her when I grew up), but I just shook my head and kept the doors locked.

You know, for someone who loves Halloween, I sure have been a pretty big pussy about it over the years.

***

So, once they'd all finished touring the haunted house (less than fifteen minutes, if I remember correctly, and they told me nothing inside was as scary as the screamer on the outside), I ended up at home in front of the TV just in time for KISS Meets That Guy Who Looks Like He Could Be Jack Nicholson's Brother. Which is where I'd wanted to be in the first place.

Words can't even begin to describe how terrible KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park is. And by "terrible," I mean "the greatest made-for-television movie ever made." It was the best Halloween I ever had up to that point, and by the time the opening credits were over I'd forgotten all about my pussyosity earlier in the evening.

I was going to do a long recap and poke a lot of fun at it, but I'd really just be poking fun at myself, because I was all about KISS when I was between the ages of 7 and 9. I was in their Army, at least in spirit. I had a Paul Stanley action figure. I had all the comics. I had most of their albums, which always came with cool shit like posters or booklets or temporary tattoos. I had a T-shirt with their logo in gold glitter, which my Mom accidentally ironed on the shirt upside-down but I wore anyway. I can't poke fun at that. Well, I could, but my jokes will never be as intentionally funny as the movie was unintentionally hilarious.

Besides, thanks to the godliness of Youtube, I'll just let you see for yourself (this isn't a complete version, but it's pretty close, and it's all in order).

Rip, rip, rip and destroy, break it down and seal your fate: