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welcome to my halloween page :))
As someone who loves halloween, I wanted to make a page fully dedicated to it, though there have been a few setbacks along the way (mainly imgur pulling out of the UK completely...). I hope you enjoy your stay :).
films
A list of my favourite horror/thriller/spooky films.
books
As a lifelong spooky story lover, I wanted to write about some of my favourite spooky books. I hope you like my recommendations!
Rest Stop - Nat Cassidy
So horrifying, and yet so fun? I love how the situation continually devolved. I really loved the constant 0 to 100 throughout, and honestly I love the vibes throughout.
Bunny - Mona Awad
I think I might have read this 3 times already? I love Mona Awad's writing style, and especially how she created this general sense of something being wrong under the surface throughout this whole book.
Edgar Allen Poe poems
The go-to spooky poet. I remember after reading Nevermore, my thoughts did this weird self-repeaty thing that you see in his poems...
The Stranger Times (series) - C. K. McDonnell
This is more supernatural as opposed to purely spooky, but I think it still counts. This series is honestly one of the funniest I've read in a while, and I'm really excited for the next one (which is ironically christmas themed)
Silver Nitrate - Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Not the scariest horror story, but it does have a spooky vibe (and is a love letter to horror films throughout the decades)
Ring - Koji Suzuki
The first time I read this, I remember feeling so tense because of the suspense. It might be one of my favourite thriller novels, just because of how nervous and stressed I felt while reading it.
Hannibal Lecter (series) - Thomas Harris
Though most well-known for the novel behind the film 'Silence of the Lambs', it may surprise you to find out that there are actually 4 books in this series. The first two (Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs) are, in my opinion, the best, but the other two are still interesting nonetheless.
The Shining - Stephen King
My favourite horror book of all time. Family horror is usually what gets me (as evidenced by my love of Hereditary), and this one ticks all my boxes. A must-read, in my opinion.
music
I'll be real, this past October, all I've been listening to is Beach House, so despite my aspirations for giving you guys a cute halloween themed music playlist, I haven't actually been listening to any spooky music I fear. An honourable mention is Bloom - Beach House, for being my October soundtrack.
food
A page to document all the autumnal food I've made in the past few weeks. If anyone wants actually detailed recipes, please let me know!! I tend to make my food by the vibes, so I can't promise any accurate measurements, but if you still want a recipe, then just ask!!
The Fabled Pumpkin Pie
This halloween I REALLY wanted to make a pumpkin pie. I've said it every year, but this year I was finally able to. Unfortunately I wasn't able to take any photos of it for the site because I was too busy eating it. To make this one, I used this recipe by Inspired Taste, except I realised that as I was making it I didn't own any ground ginger, or ground cloves, and the only spice I actually had that I could use were two suspiciously labelled bottles of cinnamon. One of them, to its credit, did actually smell like cinnamon, but the other one smelled slightly clove-ish at first. Either way, I added about 2-ish and a bit tsp to it, and it ended up tasting really darn good, so that's my tip for this recipe. Everything else I kept the same. Definitely a recipe I'd recommend!!
Pumpkin Halwa
Not all the pumpkin pie filling I made fit into my pie case, so I made some pumpkin halwa with the remainder. The recipe I used was the exact same as the above, except I added some barfi and pistachios as well. To make the halwa, I basically poured the remaining filling into a pan and added some ghee and the barfi, and just stirred until it started to resemble slightly hard dough.
Pumpkin Pasta
After a failed attempt to make petha gosht, I added it to pasta, and separately added rosemary, olive oil, oregano, and heavy cream to a pan on low heat. After five minutes, I mixed them together to make some really good pasta.
fragrance
Just a log of some of the fragrances I've smelled this autumn. If you're a fragrance enthusiast, please don't read this because my disgustingly low knowledge of olfactory commidities will only cause you immense and unbearable pain.
Autumn Vibes Replica
It's in the name. Not my favourite thing I've ever smelled, it ironically doesn't evoke 'autumn' for me. It just smells kind of like dead leaves in the least romanticisable way possible.
Jazz Club & Coffee Break Replica
The reason I included these is because I felt like they were better examples of an autumn fragrance from REPLICA than Autumn vibes. Jazz Club smells really cigarette-y, but overall reminds me of the 'ber' months too much for me to ignore. Idk, maybe I'm reminded too much of those cold days as a child where I happened to be walking behind some guy smoking a cigarette and that memory of his secondhand smoke pluming into my face is just permanently associated with winter now. I included Coffee Break because it kind of reminds me of that feeling when its rainy and windy and like 5 degrees out and you duck into the nearest coffee shop for refuge.
That one trendy YSL fragrance (you know the one)
This reminds me of halloween in the sense that I could really see a chic vampire wearing this before going on a blind date.
Magnolia Issey Miyake
Okay, okay, I know that this is kind of a 'spring' scent, and I get it. But there's this woodiness underneath it all which evokes this sense of 13 degree weather on October 3rd, yk? Maybe I'm biased since this is one of the two that I actually own on this list.
Father Figure Phlur
There is some strange spring-autumn equivalence going on in my mind because even though objectively I know this is giving spring (I'm pretty sure I saw the Easter Bunny when I smelled it for the first time), but also I can so see someone wearing this in autumn and giving 'the last green leaf on the tree'.
Sugar Pumpkin Spice Body Shop
Not a perfume, but a body spray. This is one I bought on a whim because I found the packaging so cute and, yeah, it smells like pumpkins.
monsters
vampires
It's thought that the first mention of a vampire (or something similar to it) is in an Old Russian text from 1047, and was referred to as an 'upir'. The term 'vampire' (or 'vampyre', at the time) was popularised during a 18th century moral panic regarding vampires, and many were accused of vampirism during this time (both alive and posthumously, in which case a stake was driven through their corpse). Most of our modern vampire conventions come from Bram Stoker's Dracula, published in 1897, chronicling the story of Count Dracula through a series of letters, documents, and news articles as the story unfolds. Despite changes in the general fears and worries of the public, vampires have still managed to remain incredibly relevant in horror media. Throughout the 20th century, they took on a more traditional 'monster' role, appealing to the fears of viewers (although it's undeniable that vampires have been symbols of lust throughout this era as well), but as the genre has developed, we've seen more romantic portrayals of the vampire (see Twilight, The Vampire Diaries), as well as more comedic portrayals (Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, Renfield, What We Do In The Shadows). This isn't to say that we've completely left vampires behind when it comes to fear. Just last year we saw Robert Egger's Nosferatu portraying a vampire in a more traditional, eerie sense. It's clear that vampires have captured, and will continue to capture, the imaginations of their audiences since they were first introduced to the horror landscape. It's going to be interesting to see how filmmakers adapt the vampire to the story they want to tell (see Sinners) in the coming decades.