The Bite #132

Halloween With The Prices, Freddy In The Makeup Chair, CURSED FILMS Vinyl, And More!

October 27, 2020

In this Issue:

Horror History: Halloween With The Prices
Image of the Week: He’s Ready For His Closeup
Tiny Bites – This Week’s Best Horror Headlines
Things We Love: Cursed Music
Hey, That’s Us! – Shudder in the News

HORROR HISTORY

Halloween With The Prices

By Victoria Price

Celebrating Halloween at our house when I was a kid meant costumes and pumpkin carving and candy. And, although my dad was the King of Horror, I often think about my mom around this time of year. Now, of course, Halloween is as big as Christmas with fabulous front yard decorations, costume contests, fun houses, corn mazes, and horror conventions. But when I was a kid back in the 1960s, it was just starting to become popular.

My mother loved Halloween. She was a well-known Broadway and Hollywood costume designer who became an architectural designer. We lived in a 9,000-square-foot Spanish mansion built in the 1920s, and I can only imagine how my mother would have gone to town with the kinds of decorations people have today. 580 North Beverly Glen would have been unravelled in its seasonal Halloween glory. She would have had so much fun!

Lead #132 - Halloween With The Prices by Victoria Price - The Bite

Back then, her seasonal creativity was limited to my costumes and carving pumpkins. Unfortunately, however, her only child — me — wasn’t always very appreciative of her costumes. You see, my mom designed huge Broadway musicals, so if I said I wanted to be a cowgirl or a dog, well, what fun was that? She wanted to make me into a showstopper! But I didn’t want a fabulous costume. I really just wanted to BE a cowgirl or a dog. I did not want to be a creepy orange clown wearing an Elizabethan ruff or a Bob Fosse black cat. I didn’t even like cats.

My poor mother! Saddled with a kid who never appreciated her custom-made costumes — as good as anything in any movie or musical.

Mercifully for us both, I did love her pumpkin carving. There were girl pumpkins and boy pumpkins. The girl pumpkins were the ones with the stems. They wore bows and had long hairdo tops. The boy pumpkins had no stems and short hair. My mother, who, like me, did not like scary stuff, felt that all pumpkins should be as welcoming as possible. So our pumpkins had the biggest smiles on the planet. To this day, I carve mine just like my mom. The Price pumpkins are happy pumpkins.

My dad’s friend Boris Karloff used to call Halloween his “busy season”. It was my father’s, too. So sometimes my dad wasn’t home for Halloween. But when he was, we had so much fun throwing a Halloween party where all my friends came over in costume and we had clowns and candy and my dad!

Of course, all my friends wanted to spend Halloween with Vincent Price!

But the best was when my dad and mom took us trick or treating.

My parents were really strict about sweets, so Halloween was the only time of the year I could eat lots of candy. My friends and I would figure out the streets in Beverly Hills where we could go to the most houses with the best candy, and my parents would park our RV at the top of the street. My mom would lay out Halloween snacks while my dad took us from house to house. We’d run up to get our candy while sometimes he would hide behind the bushes and then jump out and scare the owners. We got our treats while they got tricked.

My dad was a big kid. He loved having fun. He loved hanging out with my friends. And how my friends loved him!

Orange clown or not, every Halloween I feel grateful to have been raised by parents who loved me so much. Now, every time I carve a pumpkin or dress my dog, Allie, up in a costume she doesn’t particularly like, every Halloween that I spend with horror fans remembering my dad, I realize just how fortunate I was to grow up, not with famous parents, but with parents who loved me and who I loved so very much.

Victoria Price is an author and inspirational speaker. Although she is not a fan of horror movies, she is a HUGE fan of horror fans. She loves horror conventions, where she shares her father’s legacy of love and joy and all things spooky. Victoria hosts regular Virtual Vincent events at followspot.live and also leads tours all over the world inspired by Vincent Price’s cultural and culinary legacy. Learn more about her books and talks and tours at victoriaprice.com.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

He’s Ready For His Closeup

FANGORIA shared some images from their vault of treasures including this gem of Robert Englund on the set of A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984) in the makeup chair.

TINY BITES

HORROR LITERATURE, TONY TODD AND MORE

The Sanderson Sisters (Bette Midler, Kathy Najimi, and Sarah Jessica Parker) are coming back this Friday, October 30th, for a very special Hocus Pocus reunion and fundraiser hosted by Elvira. Here’s everything you need to know.

The New York Times spoke with Tony Todd about socially-conscious horror, the fight for inclusion in and beyond the arts world, and his legacy in the genre in this powerful interview.

Jeffrey Combs’ one-man show Nevermore: An Evening With Edgar Allan Poeis now available to listen to via Audible.

Reflect back on 30 years of The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horrors (and question the meaning of time) with this retrospective.

This Halloween, you can spend the night in American Horror Story’s Murder House, as the owners open its doors to the public for the first time.

Add these 10 films to your Halloween watch list if you’re looking for something a little less familiar.

Or maybe consider Letterboxd’s list of the 50 highest-rated horror movies directed by women.

Variety’s Actors On Actors video series took a spooky turn as Scream Queens Jamie Lee Curtis and Neve Campbell sat down for a one-on-one chat, Final Girl to Final Girl.

Pepper your Halloween music list with these 10 songs inspired by (or made for) iconic horror movies. A little Dokken, anyone?

Love horror but hate gore? These 10 movies should fit the bill while scaring you senseless.

Add a little Jewish folklore to your Halloween watchlist with these four horror films with Jewish origins.

Rotten Tomatoes reflects on the history of the Goosebumps TV show for its 25th anniversary — with R.L. Stine.

There are so many horror literature recommendations this week, as O Magazine explored 29 of the best Gothic horror novels ever written…

… BookBub shared 12 of their best reader-recommended horror novels of the year thus far…

… the AARP put together a list of what they consider the 20 scariest books you’ll ever read…

… and The New York Times collaborated on a list of 50 of the scariest novels set in every state.

THINGS WE LOVE

Cursed Music

We don’t normally showcase our own stuff in this section, but we love the music from Cursed Films and now it’s available to take home on vinyl from Ship To Shore PhonoCo. It’s just too pretty not to share.