What makes a horror movie a Halloween Movie? Some may just say that any horror movie will do, but I don’t agree. Alien, The Thing, The Trollenberg Terror, and many others are good horror movies, but they aren’t what I don’t consider ideal picks for setting a Halloween tone.

I will now present a list of nine boxes that a movie can check. The more of these statements are true about the movie, the more PDR Halloween Approved the movie is.

1. The film is “spooky”. It’s about the atmosphere. The film is going for a gothic feel or trying to instill dread in some way. I feel like this is the easiest check on the list and honestly you probably wouldn’t be analyzing a movie to these criteria if it didn’t have this one for sure.
2. The film is set somewhere that Halloween happens. This means that the movie takes place in a country or time period where and when the characters would celebrate Halloween, even if they do not within the movie. If the setting is a big city, we’re at least focused on an apartment or residences of some kind. If the setting is the wilderness, there are some vestiges of civilization such as a campground. We’re not too far in the future or too far in the past that the period nature of the thing overtakes the Halloweenness.
3. The film is Autumnal. If Halloween is depicted within the film, this box is an automatic check, but even if it is not, the signifiers of the Fall are good too. Pumpkins. Colourful/falling leaves. Crisp evenings with the sun setting earlier.
4. The film features children or teenagers in prominent roles. They don’t need to be protagonists, but they need to be there. They need to be actual characters who can affect the plot and potentially be affected by the threat.
5. The film prominently features darkness. There are large sections of the film set after sunset or in dark attics and shadowy basements. It doesn’t have to be darkness that makes it hard for the viewer to see what’s going on in the movie. The effect of the darkness on the characters is what is important. The events of the movie are occurring in the dark, even if the movie is not itself dark.
6. The film does not heavily feature elements from other holidays. Pretty self explanatory, but I feel like there will be pushback to this one. There’s a strong tradition of horror movies and slashers that are about other holidays, but if you’re trying to create a Halloween mood, you don’t want some Easter Bunny-themed murderer or whatever drawing attention to other times of year.
7. Someone in the film wears some kind of costume or mask. Dressing up is one of the key things about Halloween, so its inclusion here basically gives a bonus point to any movie that actually depicts the holiday in action. And it nicely also gives a point to most slashers as well.
8. Someone in the film is dead. It can be someone who is killed by a monster or slasher within the film, but it is also acceptable to have the dead person be a ghost or skeleton or something that appears.
9. There are supernatural elements to the film that fit into “Halloween” archetypes of monsters. This is easily the most subjective item on the list, to the point where I could see it being argued as much as my main point. But it’s only a single item of the nine, so that’s fine. Ghosts, werewolves, Draculas, demons. Basically anything you’d find in a Monster Mash is a good fit for a Halloween movie. Robots and aliens can work, but when they do it’s moreso because of the spooky atmosphere than inherent in the monsters themselves, and that atmosphere was a whole different item on this list.. Similarly, things like minotaurs or dragons aren’t quite right. You know it when you see it and really only people being wilfully contrarian would fight too hard.

A movie doesn’t need to rate a full nine points to be good for Halloween. Four or five points seems like enough, really, and I bet anything six or higher would be more than adequate for the job.

I can only reiterate that this isn’t about the quality of the movie. I can say with authority that a lot of movies that check every box on this list will be crap. But they’re crap that can get one into the Halloween spirit. So now someone please go rank all horror movies by these criteria so that I may know in advance what to pick to get the Halloween feeling I crave.

But I do have to ask why I even bother? I mentioned years ago that caution tape is not a good Halloween decoration and I still see people using it as such. You’re all heathens ruining this, they Hallowest of Eens.

Heathcliff is a comic strip about an orange cat who terrifies his neighbourhood. In recent years, the strip has gotten especially strange in a way that makes it worth checking out from time to time.

But recently the weirdness has not been the only thing to draw my attention:

August 31st: “Hey! Heathcliff is in a beekeeping outfit! And hanging out with Beekeepers! I bet I could get a review out of that!”

September 13th: “Wait, Heathcliff is in love with a Beekeeper! Is it one of the Beekeepers from the previous strip?”

October 7th: “Now he’s wearing bees and walking past some different Beekeepers? Is he trying to impress them? Is he in love with one of these two? Is he trying to pick one up after being rejected by one of the others? Or is he just walking through the Beekeeping part of town to get to his friends from the previous strip?”

The fact is, I can’t answer this stuff. I’d have to go through all of the Heathcliff comic strips and comic books and television shows and whatnot to see if there are any clues I’m missing. Often when I am coming across a Beekeeper to review in a piece of media that has existed for some time I can find some corner of the Internet devoted to that media that will catalogue the appearances I need to look out for. The venerable Heathcliff Wiki lists both “Bee” and “Bee Suit” as running gags, but with precious little other information. And, indeed, image searching for “Heathcliff beekeeper” gives a lot of results. Multiple strips where Heathcliff plays music for bees. A strip where Heathcliff avoids the police by being surrounded by a swarm of bees. It goes on like this.

Is Heathcliff himself a Beekeeper? He’s certainly enjoyed some of the perks, but apart from playing music for bees, we’ve never seen him doing the work. And even when he’s doing that we’re shown actual Beekeepers doing the actual job. But those Beekeepers are not characters. They don’t even look the same every time, so I have to assume it’s a host of different ones.

I need more information before I can review anything here, but to maintain my credibility as the world’s foremost reviewer of fictional beekeepers I had to make it know that I’m aware something is going on.

A few years back I did a couple years of “Alien Sundays” where I would introduce ideas for alien species. Eventually those posts had to wind down, but just because I haven’t posted about them in a long time doesn’t mean that I’ve stopped thinking about my aliens. I do an awful lot of worldbuilding that I don’t tend to put on my site because I hope to use it in stories, but then I never get around to writing those stories.

Over the past few months Youtube has been suggesting an increasing number of speculative biology videos to me. I love that sort of thing, so the algorithm is correct to suggest them to me, but more importantly, it occurs to me that if there are so many videos on the topic, there may be some audience out there who may have a hunger for the kinds of ideas I’ve been working on. The problem is that those videos are done by smart people who have done actual scientifically valid calculations and thoughts of how their imagined lifeforms would evolve. I didn’t do that.

For example, my Strondovarians: I had the species name in some notes for a story idea. I also had a sketch of an alien with weird legs and four arms that I doodled once. When I felt like working on it, I decided that that alien sketch could be a Strondovarian. It was only then I started fleshing out their world. I did it utterly backwards compared to the speculative biology folks I enjoy so much. But y’know what? That’s fine. My universe is already one in which magic and monsters exist, so it was never scientifically accurate. I can just have my fun.

So I’ve decided I’m going to first go public with my notes relating to the planet Gurx, home of the aforementioned Strondovarians (Strondos for short). I figure I have enough in my notes to do a weekly post for a year, so it’ll be just like old times, only moreso!

The Strondovarian Body Plan

This is Nibnassin, a fairly typical Strondovarian. In the hopes of making it into medical history books, Nibnassin has volunteered to be scanned by various medical devices for the benefit of students. Thankfully this means I can teach you some of the basics of the Strondovarian body plan (bearing in mind that PDR’s drawing style is oversimplified and cartoony).

Here we have Nibnassin without their clothing and tattoo. Don’t feel embarrassed for our volunteer Strondo, though, because the Gurxian monoculture holds no taboos about nudity. This allows us to see the main bits of a Strondo. Two eyes and a mouth in a layout that humans would be familiar with, and an orifice between the legs involved in reproduction, again in a place that humans would recognize. Light fuzz on the top and back that can occasionally grow long. It is, of course, worth noticing that the Strondos have four arms in addition to their two legs.

Here we have Nibnassin from behind. On his head there is his breathhole. The Strondo mouth is not connected to the respiratory system, all oxygen is taken in through this orifice. Down in what humans would call the butt region we have what looks like a little tail, but is actually a tube with a hole that is the end of the Strondo digestive system. They expel their waste through there.

Well, I’d hoped I could be getting into the inside parts of a Strondo in this post, but it’s already much too long, so we can do that next week.

I have no desire to try to make sense of the whole video for the song Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden, it’s an intentionally oblique and surreal piece of work, but I am dutybound to note that it includes a Beekeeper. Said Beekeeper appears for a couple seconds, seemingly dead. How much can I mine from that? Well, let’s see.

It seems like there is an apocalypse happening. The world is messed up and the band has either caused the sun to wipe out humanity, or is just happy about it. Certainly the lyrics “Black Hole Sun, won’t you come, and wash away the rain” make it sound like they’re fed up with the state of the world and instead of actually putting any work into trying to make things better, they just petulantly want it all to be over. Well, no matter the cause, it’s happening. Things are getting strange and the world is dying.

Amidst the chaos we see a Beekeeper, laying still on the ground while a child dances nearby. Relationship between the child and the Beekeeper? Unknown. We’re simply not given that information. It could be inferred that our Ex-Apiarist was killed by his own bees, and I can’t disprove it, but I don’t think so. While the bees are crawling over the lens of the camera, none seem to be on the corpse. We do see non-bee insects attacking others within the video, most notably a couple of kids who were torturing bugs with tweezers and magnifying glasses, but those insects don’t kill anyone. The insect-bothering children are among those sucked up into the Black Hole Sun.

As far as I can discern, the Beekeeper is the only person shown to be dead from a cause prior to getting apocalypsed. If I wanted to, I could even claim perhaps the apocalypse could only happen because the Beekeeper was killed. After all, what do Beekeepers do? They hold together a society. They protect a group of lifeforms so that everyone can benefit. It’s the polar opposite of thinking everything should just die because it sucks. When not burdened by Beekeeper Rage, Beekeepers are intent on actually improving the world instead of letting it die. Perhaps the band, or whatever force caused this Black Hole Sun, needed the Beekeeper out of the picture to make the end come. I don’t know if they murdered the Beekeeper or if they just took advantage after a natural death, but I feel like if that Beekeeper were still alive, he’d be standing between the planet and the end of times.

But none of that’s in the video, so I can’t let that factor into my rating.

2 Honeycombs out of Five.