By Maiya Tomlin
As senior class president, Mason Bosworth said in the morning meeting this Tuesday, it’s Halloweek! Naturally, The Lovett OnLion sent out a Google Form to all Upper School students and faculty with our most pressing questions about Halloween, and we were overwhelmed by the more than 150 responses. (We could see the numbers going up like the infected in a zombie movie.)
We started by asking a series of “Would you rather…” questions. After all, the spooky season, in real life and in movies, often involves very difficult choices.
The first one asked survey takers to consider how they would want things to play out if they were living through a real-life slasher movie. 38.8% of respondents said they’d rather “get picked off right away and be done with it,” while the remaining 61.2% said they’d prefer to have to “run from the killer (watching all your friends get picked off) with a slim chance of survival.” As someone who used to giggle while hiding during hide-and-seek in lower school (and always got caught), I don’t think I’d have much of a choice but to be done with it.
Another scary scenario: “Which nightmare future would you prefer to live in?” 58.6% responded with “Dystopia (eg, everyone’s alive, and staying that way means doing and believing things you hate)” while 41.4% replied with “Post-apocalypse (eg, nearly everyone is dead, and you have to evade zombies to survive.” Clearly, the Lovett community leans more toward 1984 than 28 Days Later.
Setting the future aside, what scares people now? When asked which creepy decoration they’d prefer to have in their room, 75.7% responded that they would rather have an eight-foot model of a spider, while only 24.3% chose an eight-foot model of a demonic clown. Pennywise from It and the clown under the bed in Poltergeist (if you’re an eighties film fan) clearly left their mark.
Grace Schmidt (11) told me she easily chose the clown, primarily due to her arachnophobia (phobia of spiders). She said she developed this phobia as a kid, after her parents showed her the movie called Arachnophobia. She told me there is a scene where a spider “is like inside of a lamp, and you can’t see it-” I could tell this image in Grace’s head was making her queasy. “There are just so many spiders. It has always scared me since then,” she finished.
As for my choice, my older sister made me watch The Clown Statue, a 10-minute short film on YouTube when I was just a third grader, and wow. Let’s just say that the short film is the reason why I stay far away from horror movies. As I write this, I’m pretty sure I can officially self-diagnose myself with coulrophobia: the fear of clowns.
Our final “Would you rather…” was perhaps the most controversial. Only chocolate for the rest of your life, or only gummy/hard candies? Chocolate eked out the win at 61 percent. That’s good news for Sour Patch Kids looking to avoid being devoured.
After these horrific hypotheticals, we asked survey takers to reflect on past Halloween experiences and some favorites when it comes to things like candy and costumes.
Speaking of costumes, many survey takers wrote about Indiana Jones, Spider-Man, and a more peculiar answer, a sheep. On the grosser end of the spectrum, one person said they dressed as a bloody Bo Peep from Toy Story. On the other end: a “Biblically accurate angel.” Then there are the more conceptual costumes, like “a social butterfly” (butterfly costume with social media apps taped to the wings). One time, I went as “rock, paper, scissors” along with Cate Turner and Ann Reed Taylor. (We didn’t fight each other.)
I chatted with Zarin Sapra (11), who took me back to her glory days, when, at the impressive age of one, she actually won a costume contest. “I think it was a salmon avocado roll,” Zarin informed me, and I admit, I could not tell if she was being serious. “But we had this Halloween contest in my neighborhood at the time, and I got first place. I’m actually not even joking,” she added on. Turns out she was being serious.
“No, I actually was a really cute two-piece sushi roll,” Zarin insisted. She even claims to still have photographic evidence from her big win, so if you’ve ever wondered what a one-year-old Zarin dressed as a salmon avocado roll looks like, the proof exists.
After getting dressed up, we head out to the streets to trick or treat (or at least we used to). When it comes to favorite trick-or-treat memories, some survey takers probably shouldn’t have confessed their sins to the OnLion, such as “ding-dong ditching” and “stealing entire bowls of candy.” We even received the answer: “gambling for candy,” whatever that entails. However, there were some more wholesome answers, such as “being in my childhood neighborhood.” There you go. That’s some proper nostalgia.
While many of us may no longer go trick-or-treating, we do often watch scary movies. The most popular response we received was Scream, although nobody specified which one out of the seven that currently exist. Coraline and Cabin in the Woods were popular picks, too. More current picks include Five Nights at Freddy’s and Black Phone. Perhaps the most bizarre choice was Peppa Pig. Perhaps they saw the never-aired episode where Peppa gets turned into bacon.
Peter Casey (11) told me easily that his favorite was Hereditary, released in 2018. “It’s not just scary, it’s emotionally disturbing,” he explained. Without too many spoilers for people who haven’t seen the movie, Peter said there is a scene at the end where you, the watcher, “know that something’s gonna happen, but the main character doesn’t know yet,” he said.
I also asked one of my best friends, and, importantly, a certified Letterboxd user, Evvie Bresnahan (11), for her picks. For those unfamiliar, Letterboxd is an app where people rate and discuss the movies they watch, so I figured she’d be the most credible source for this question. When I brought it up to Evvie, she immediately claimed, “This is my niche.”
Evvie told me her favorite horror movie is The Silence of the Lambs, partially because it was one of the first she ever watched, and also because “it has one of the scariest plotlines, and I think it’s very well executed.” She also mentioned Killer Klowns From Outer Space, which I had never heard of. “I wouldn’t say it’s like a scary horror movie, it’s really not, but it’s the best one from the eighties in my opinion,” she said.
Interestingly, the most common answer to any single question on the survey came in response to the best trick-or-treating memories. It was getting “King-Sized Candy Bars.” They’re certainly the most useful if we do end up in a post-apocalyptic situation. They are packed with extra calories for running away from zombies.
