The main reason that they are relevant here is the entire image that they and that long forgotten band of theirs projected. If you ever see a copy of this release, you'd see that the cover artwork is a drawing of some dude in a black executioner's hood wielding a chainmail. Evil stuff, to be sure. This is exactly the type of imagery that you used to associate with Halloween. Evil souls doing evil things. I had literally dozens of album and song titles that I could have used in this column to make the same point in my collection. All of them chock full of Satan, Hell, Evil, Blasphemies, Sin, Wickedness, etc. This was the stuff of which Halloweens were made. It was not a real holiday after all, but the night before a Christian Feast day when pagans and their ilk had their own rituals and shit. It was something that was decried in many places in America. Preachers and Holy Men across the land all warned against the evils associated with taking on this sort of imagery. It never stopped anything completely, but there was always a segment that was not into the Halloween thing at all, usually for moral and religious reasons. This was not too hard to understand. Many other people took it no farther than the trick or treat thing for the kiddie crowd. If they had youngsters in the family, they took them out for trick or treat. Or else they got some kind of candy or something to give to the moppets that showed up at their door. Except if they were cheap ass motherfuckers of course. Then they yelled at the kids for bugging them, and they usually ended up cleaning some poultry products off of some part of their house or another. Unfortunately, the nuts of America used this day to do some of their evil deeds. There were always these sick fucks that put shit like pins and needles and razor blades into the candy that they gave out, so that someone would get hurt badly if they tried to eat it. As if candy isn't bad enough for you as it is. Every year you heard something about that somewhere, usually a lot of different somewheres. Even that didn't stop the trick ot treat scene. It took something more to slow that down. In a previous column, I made mention of the Tylenol killer. The case where some fucker put cyanide into capsules of Tylenol while they were still on the store shelves and people took them and died. This story got as big as the anthrax thing is now, even bigger. It became far more widespread than the anthrax thing has. Every day after this story got big, you heard of someone finding a product that had been tampered with. Either they noticed it while it was still in the store, or, most often, they noticed it when they tried to use the product and something happened. There was all sorts of shit dumped into liquid products, like detergent and insecticide. Pins, needles, glass, you name it , if I was sharp it was found stuck in something during that time. Candies, meats, cheeses, milk, whatever, you had to triple check everything that you saw in the store and do it again after you brought it home before you even dared to use it. Every fuckhead in America wanted a piece of this action. This started like at the beginning of fall that year. As the weeks went on, it got more and more widespread. By Halloween time, it was way the fuck out of control. As a result, many parents did not let their kids go trick or treating that year at all. There were all sorts of alternative activities like parties and shit set up by various schools and churches and parks specifically to keep the kids off of the streets and get their candy there from them. This went on for several Halloween periods. Trick or Treating became a lost art there for a few years. So, Mr. Businessman saw this and decided that he was going to change the emphasis of the day away from kiddies trick or treats to adults and their monies.
Halloween became something altogether different. It became this "holiday" of sorts. Not a kiddie holiday either. Suddenly you were seeing adults all dressed up in costumes going around on Halloween. They weren't going door to door to trick or treat, but out to some sort of "supervised" adult parties and activities. Maybe some of those places did give out candy, but most just sold libations, since they were bars. It was now just plain old "party time" like it was New Year's Eve or Christmas or July 4th or something. Since this day had now become a "holiday" , many people started to put on the dog big time for it. Whereas you had some houses in the past that had some stupid fuckin' cardboard skeleton ( no not Skellator) or pumpkin or some such shit in the window, now you had all sorts of places decorating like it was Christmas. Entire yards were transformed into scenes. Not Santa and the elves like at Christmas, but you had graveyard scenes, hanging corpses, Satan, witches, warlocks, monsters, etc. All over the fuckin' place. All of this replete with strings of lights that would rival any Christmas ones, except that they were orange and black or whatever. Suddenly, you had lots of people springing for big bucks to outdo the others with this shit. Bigger, brighter, scarier displays and bigger, wilder, scarier parties were the norm. The kiddies were coming back once again for the trick or treat, but they were merely part of the dressings of this new "holiday." You had greeting cards come out for Halloween, TV networks., themeing entire nights of programming around it, stores doing the same, the whole shot. It was now officially just another holiday on the calendar.
This shit sure didn't make much sense. People that would get apoplectic about bands like Hallow's Eve, Slayer, Venom, Marduk, Mercyful Fate, because they felt that they were evil and had bad messages now thought nothing of turning their front yard into a cemetery complete with graves and corpses in the form of dummies hanging from the tree. Folks that said that they were good church going people that were repulsed by Lucifer and his minions now spent the better part of a week dressed up as them in order to "get into the spirit of things." I feel that all of this is traceable back to Mr. Businessman. He is the one that sold these people on this "holiday" by airing cute commercials showing Dracula having some Budweisers at some watering hole. Big fuckin' deal. Vlad Tepes, the dude that the Dracula legend was based on, drank plenty of alcohol. He was not the type of guy that you anted to party with in the first place. Not at all like the commercial. Mr. Businessman has used Frankenstein's monster to sell shit to the people at this time of the year just like he has used Santa Claus at Christmastime. So he's turned a grotesque product of man's tampering with things into an equal of the jolly old elf that gives us al presents. Same with ghouls and goblins and those types selling whatever. But this because the undead are telling you to I guess. Those scampy undead ones, they'll get you every time. They sure got a lot of people in the name of Mr. Businessman. So much so that we now have a new holiday on the docket every year.
A holiday that is still the same day that is supposed to deal with shit like the conjuring up of the undead and the unleashing of all sorts of spirits and ghosts. What is the difference between what we see now in America on Halloween and the pagan shit that was the original emphasis for this day? Some dude going off to the local bar dressed as a zombie is just a manifestation of what the pagans were trying to do way back when, bring forth the undead. Who the fuck wants to hang out with the undead anyway? They smell like shit for starters. So much of what you see at halloween nowadays is straight out of the pagan scene. Everyone says that America is the greatest, most sophisticated country ever. Why then are these ancient pagan things being brought out? To make Mr. Businessman money, that's why. He worships money just as much now as he did back in antiquity when the pagans were around. I am sure that he had his fingers in all of the conjurations and various rituals that were performed on Halloween in those days. He worships money so much that he cares not what he does to get it. If he has to bring back ancient shit and make total hypocrites out of the masses, so be it. If you say anything about al of this these days, you are told that you are a party pooper and a wet blanket or a prude or whatever. I don't think that I qualify as a prude by anyone's definition of the word. If so, I just hope that they never write a dictionary, for they shall just confuse people.
To call Halloween a holiday is ridiculous. It never was a real holiday of any type at all. The Church tried very hard to stamp it out, for the felt that it detracted greatly from the Feast day that they celebrated the next day. What we have here in America is solely a creation of Mr. Businessman, just like Sweetest Day and Valentine's Day are. He zeroed in on these obscure Christian festival days on his calendar, and turned then into modern day capitalist money maker days for himself. It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't so hypocritical. America goes on and on about how it's a good christian country, and you now have this period every year where things that any Christian church worth its salt would not approve of are everywhere. Even people that are not Christians are part of this. Most Americans, no matter what their affiliation may be would say that they were against all these evil things for they are offended and sickened by them, etc. Most Americans, whatever their affiliation, are participating in this Halloween shit every year now. For a few weeks, Satan and dracula and al that shit become campy comedy acts. Well then, why aren't they considered that the rest of the time? This just shows that far too many American listen to the likes of Mr. Businessman and whatever he tells them to do. If he can sell it to them as cute fun, they'll go for it without even thinking about what it really is. It is very dangerous to listen to someone totally like that. Not because the Halloween imagery is necessarily evil, but because those that sell whatever to you obviously have no conscience about it, and they will use that power over you to get you to do whatever they want you to, and they will not have your best interests in mind at all, only their profit margins. Short sighted thinking like that is one of the big reasons that we are in this current state of crisis in America, and in order to get out of it, this needs to change, and I think that this Halloween shit could be a good place to start to get some common sense taking the place of this type of thinking.