Your October HORRORSCOPES
Aries (March 21-April 19)
October will be a social month for Aries. Look forward to making lots of new friends, many of whom already live within the walls of your own house.
Taurus (April 20-May 20)
Careful, Taurus! The call is coming from inside Venus’ Twelfth House, so make sure to change all the locks and keep your kitchen knives sharpened. An inauspicious month to take on any new babysitting clients.
Gemini (May 21-June 20)
The movement of the planets into the houses of family this October makes this an ideal time to revisit your birth records, old family albums, or call your creepy Aunt Agnes to catch up and reflect on the past. Probably the circumstances of your birth and childhood were all normal and regular and average, and you almost certainly don’t have an evil twin.
Cancer (June 21-July 22)
There is nothing spooky about crabs. Enjoy a relaxing month!
Leo (July 23-August 22)
This month is the perfect time for bonding with a loved one you’ve been neglecting. Take your totally normal son out for a pleasant outing to church or the zoo, so he can meet God and all His creations and be warmly welcomed by them, like the regular human boy he definitely is.
Virgo (August 23-September 22)
If you’ve been thinking about taking it to the next level in a relationship, there could not be a better time to postpone it! Speaking of postponing, maybe wait on the road trip to the cabin/lake house/remote B&B that you and your promiscuous friends have been planning. In the meantime, focus your energies on knitting, homework, rescuing animals, and anything else that establishes you to the audience as a model citizen.
Libra (September 23-October 22)
A transformative month. You may be struggling to keep two sides of yourself in balance, whether it’s work and family, patience and ambition, good and evil, or human and wolfbeast. It’s a good time for self-reflection, a bad time to experiment with taking a new medication. Maybe try a fun new hairstyle.
Scorpio (October 23-November 21)
You will be covered in scorpions, ugh, so gross. Take your vitamins, and avoid making any major financial decisions.
Sagittarius (November 22-December 21)
A past mistake will come back to haunt you. Beware of anyone you may have stabbed in the back, literally or metaphorically, because the wheel is about to turn. Plan a vacation around the 14th.
Capricorn (December 22-January 19)
It’s been a tough year for you, Capricorn, but don’t worry—October will provide plenty of opportunities for you to turn your luck around, provided you are willing to take initiative and make the necessary sacrifices. *wink* Talk to that eccentric, old couple who live down the hall from you in your pre-war apartment building about how! No need to keep your spouse informed. Hail Satan.
Aquarius (January 20-February 18)
Who knows what lurks in the depths of…your imagination! That’s right, Aquarius, October is a month for you to spread your creative wings. The 25th is a spiritually advantageous day for experimentation, whether with a bold new look, a redesigned kitchen, or a scientific discovery that has the potential to challenge THE FORCES OF NATURE ITSELF, LAUGHING MANIACALLY IN THE FACE OF GOD. You’ll have to iron out a miscommunication with a loved one around the 12th. Be the bigger person, and take full responsibility.
Pisces (February 19-March 20)
You’ll be full of energy this month, so do something that challenges you, like exploring an Antarctic ice mountain or a black lagoon or a mysterious cave or your city’s very own sewer system, or really anywhere you might find monsters or other horrifying mutants adventure! Take a flashlight!
Here is a Halloween anecdote
I’m not too good at Halloween. In theory it should be my favorite holiday because I love outfits and spooky things and hell, even candy corn. But the fun Halloweens with great costumes and fun parties kind of have eluded me since I hit puberty, so I’ve more or less given up on the holiday.
A couple years back I made an exception, because the stars had aligned such that I had a party to go to and no school/work/rehearsal obligations that night. I figured I’d know most everyone at the party, and since they were largely college theater types, figured I could get away with a silly, unsexy, and esoteric costume, so I went as Little Edie. I’m going to go ahead and brag about how good this costume was, because it was damn flawless.
When I arrived at the party, I realized that I knew maybe three people there and that there were already not one, but two sexy fairies present. I had made a huge mistake.
The two most common guesses I received about my costume were:
“Are you supposed to be a babushka?”
And the infinitely more offensive:
“Are you supposed to be an Orthodox Jew?”
Yeah. I know. I KNOW.
After I had tried to explain who Little Edie Bouvier-Beale was for the thousandth time, only to be met with the thousandth awkward smile and the word “Oh,” I threw in the towel. I took off the head scarf and put my short shorts on outside my pantyhose. So at this point I was wearing a brown turtleneck, tiny shorts, and a faux fur coat. And you know what? Nobody (NOBODY) asked what I was supposed to be (which, to me, says fucking everything about why Halloween is kind of garbage).
But it doesn’t end there. With my semi-attractiveness restored, I set about salvaging my night. I met a cute guy, and we chatted and flirted, and things were going pretty well. We both had separate places to go, but he added me on Facebook and we talked about tentative plans for future hangouts.
I came home hours later feeling pretty good about myself. Against all odds, I’d had a good Halloween. My roommates were downstairs watching Night of the Living Dead, and I went up to my room to change. I hopped on the computer to accept said cute guy’s friend request, and lo and behold, when I saw his profile, he was listed as In a Relationship, and not only that, with [redacted lady whose name I can’t remember anyway, actually I can’t remember the guy’s name either, come to think of it, but that’s beside the point].
I went back downstairs with a stormcloud over my head and caught the end of Night of the Living Dead. Do you know how that movie ends? Let me tell you. It ends with one survivor, the guy who has managed to withstand and obliterate the zombie horde, outliving all his compatriots. And then he gets shot by the rescue party.
And did I over-identify with that ending and make it all about me? You’re damn right I did. Happy Halloween, chumps.
Some horror films and the best circumstances under which to view them
- Psycho: You are sixteen. You are in a room full of other sixteen-year-olds, many of whom are reluctant to watch the movie. There is at least one person in the room besides you who develops a guilty crush on Anthony Perkins over the course of the film. In the end, all the jaded teenagers are won over, but everyone remains confused about what a “fruit cellar” is.
- A Nightmare on Elm Street (original): You are with your kid sister. You are wearing a crop top sweatshirt, much like the one Johnny Depp wears in the film. At a crucial and terrifying moment, the bed you are sitting on seems to break (you hear a bang and it jolts down a few inches), but upon examination, NOTHING IS WRONG WITH THE BED.
- Suspiria: You and your best friend from college are hanging out, drinking martinis. You are terrified. You keep texting the guy you are seeing about how scary this movie is. You have a horrible nightmare that night, and when, later that week, you go into a Forever 21 on a rainy day only to hear a song playing that samples the score from the movie, you bolt out without buying any cheap, trendy clothing at all, thereby making the film a good financial decision.
- Rosemary’s Baby: Whenevs.
- The Shining: Your best friend since childhood has come to visit you. Your roommate and his boyfriend suggest watching the movie after you all have finished watching Sunday School Musical, which you were all worried would be too bad to even be enjoyable in a terrible way but which was in fact hilarious, in no small part because it was clearly poorly dubbed in its entirety. The friend is wary, since she is even more easily scared than you, but she is eventually persuaded, and a good time is had by all.
- Killer Klowns from Outer Space: You are at your friend’s house, and both of you are recovering from radical disturbances of your respective sleep schedules. You have taken said friend up on an offer to hang out that you are reasonably sure was meant to be an empty offer, so you kind of feel like you invited yourself over. He makes pasta for the both of you, and you sit in the dark, watching the movie and joking around. The sexual tension is overwhelming and will remain unbroken until approximately one year in the future. Later, when he is your boyfriend, you will both struggle to come up with a good reason why you didn’t make out that night. There were a few, but they will seem flimsy in retrospect.
- The Ring: You are fourteen. Your friends are fourteen. There are approximately eight of you, since fourteen-year-olds never seem to roll less than six-deep. You are all at the Sherman Oaks Galleria. After it is over, your snobbish assertion that it wasn’t even a good movie will add a layer of guilt and embarrassment to the terror that keeps you awake all night.
From the archives! A post I wrote on my old Tumblr around this time last year. Seasonally appropriate once again.
