Non-Utopian Halloween

•Unlike various other things touched upon in this blog’s “Month of Utopia,” there’s nothing utopian about Halloween. It’s an anarchic core surrounded by a framework of traditionalist rituals, too crazy for planners, too diabolical for hardcore religious folk. As if dinner with former Ron Paul campaign people last night weren’t scary enough, today I plan to see Boondock Saints 2, Antichrist, and the Village Halloween Parade and probably party with communists (they’ll be less festive when next month’s twentieth anniversary of Communism’s collapse hits, presumably).

•Speaking of politics, in mentioning my old homeland of New England yesterday, I should have said that one thing that makes me excited about the Tea Party protests is that they tap into New England patriotic imagery, which I’ve long thought might be just the thing to snap the Northeast out of its statism.

•On a note that combines regionalism and Halloweenish horror, though, I was intrigued by the very Long Island-centric ads (stressing that officials there don’t want you to see this, etc.) for the Long Island-set, urban-legend-based horror film Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet.

•Back in the political realm, Will Wilson reacts in amusing fashion on First Things’ PostmodernConservative blog to the news that there’s a Republican running for office in Queens who’s a practicing, Odin-worshipping pagan. There’s also a Republican running for office in New Jersey right now who owns a sex toy business — and, more noticeably, a Republican, Chris Christie, running a tight race for governor who is fighting back against ads noting he’s a fat guy.

•In other horror news, I just watched a super-low-budget but very artfully, lovingly, and faithfully done forty-seven-minute version of Call of Cthulhu from 2005 (produced by the “H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society”) — which even does the “non-Euclidean geometry” of dread Cthulhu’s tomb quite nicely. I’d forgotten that the elderly professor who begins the investigation into Cthulhu is from Brown (Lovecraft himself having lived in Providence).

•Another adept in the dark arts has just joined Brown as a freshman member of the Class of ’13, incidentally, hopefully not one who believes that a class year can be an unlucky number: young actress Emma Watson, a.k.a. Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter movies.

•In further Lovecraft news, a comic book writer I’ve met (through Ali Kokmen) named Fred Van Lente has penned a Lovecraft comic parodying Jack Chick’s Christian fundamentalist comics.

•Finally, Gerard Perry and Karol Sheinin note a costume option if you’re still trying to think of something: You could join the festivities of the Zombies for Obama.