Thoughts on spooky and fun stuff in the Autumn

I really like Halloween, even though it isn't celebrated officially in my neck of the woods. There is something delightfully macabre and surreal about turning supposedly nightmarish things into happy fun-time for the whole family, which is a surprisingly ancient tradition. I suppose the ancients realized that humour is a good weapon to use against the scariness of the vast uncaring universe. This is partly why I get such a kick from old-fashioned horror by Universal, Hammer and Roger Corman, as well as the multitude of child-friendly parodies made later on. It is mostly scary in a fun way and overall quite harmless.

These are the types of horror-films I'd want to make myself and so far I've made a few short films that fall somewhere between macabre Gothic horror and horror comedies, mostly connected to the works of H.P. Lovecraft. I've also made two vlogs (in Swedish) about horror films, in a segment my friend suggested we call "Halloween Havoc". We'd like to have our production already now stable enough to make the same vlog-series every year, such as something about Halloween and Christmas-themed movies. But unfortunately real life has a tendency to always get in the way of such plans.

This Autumn has been very stressful with my studies, partly because my university of applied sciences moved to a new building and everything is still a bit chaotic. I also have my third workplace training coming up soon, but before that I have a total of six courses to get through within a month and a half. The workload has been big and I still have two deadlines to go through, but the end is so near that I can handle it without breaking apart from the stress. It's just such a pity that I've had so much work to do in September and October that I haven't been able to do any film-related stuff and I'll have to skip the "Halloween Havoc" this year. It also doesn't help that my closest partner in crime had to move away and we are now forced to co-operate with everything on distance. I also have a few half-finished horror-comedy projects which would have been really nice to get finished for the most appropriate time of the year, but these will have to wait yet a little while. But for next year I intend to time-manage better, so that I can fix seasonally oriented projects a bit earlier. Perhaps I'll attempt to film the next Halloween-vlog already in the summer?

Considering all the responsibilities we have deal with, such as work, family and studies, it is still quite impressive that we've managed to crank out as much as we have over the three years we have been making sketches and short films. Hopefully once I'm done with my own studies and have settled into a larger home I can start to gradually make more advanced and ambitious projects. The more macabre stuff appropriate for this season, that we've made so far, can be seen here on this playlist:
www.youtube.com/playlist?list=…