How Halloween festivities inject life into a city

Seven years ago, when Brad Leith and Gideon Flitt moved into their house on Dunbar Street in Vancouver’s Southlands neighbourhood, they did what you might typically do on Halloween. They asked their neighbours how many trick-or-treaters they could expect. The answer was, “Not many.” Five children showed up that year.

By the time they wrap things up on Sunday night, roughly 20,000 visitors will have passed through their yard this Halloween season.

For the record, this is not some random scary-stuff haunted house with a few jack-o-lanterns and an animatronic skeleton. This is a production-designed, movie-set-like creation that takes months of planning (they start in July).

For the second year running, the theme is “horrors through history.” Brad, who teaches art and philosophy at Vancouver Film School, says the idea came from Hegel’s oft-referenced “slaughterboard of history.”

The Haunt, now in its sixth year, has grown year after year, the displays and effects becoming more elaborate and the lineups getting longer each year. They do it, Brad says, “as a community service. Silly, out-of-control, how-the-hell-did-this-happen, it-just-grew-out-of-nothing community service.”

What it also does is help animate the neighbourhood, and by extension our city.

I’m not a sentimental guy. But there is something about people going out of their way to inject a little life into our city with no ulterior motive that makes me just a little verklempt. To me, it’s one of the highlights of the urban experience.

We see it at Christmas time in the two blocks of Triumph Street that are so done up they are visible from space.

I saw it in the moments after Canada won gold in hockey at the Vancouver Olympics, when a van pulled up to Commercial Drive, a guy tossed out a dozen hockey sticks, and a spontaneous game of ball hockey broke out.

We see it randomly in yarn bombing, guerrilla gardens and front-yard sculpture. Not that I’m advocating any of those things.

But Halloween is particularly good at getting people to make the city feel more animated, more alive and more interesting. It reframes what we think we know about our city. It drags us out of the ordinary. Neighbours we thought we had a bead on suddenly, inexplicably, cover their houses in spider webs, and transform their front windows into pairs of menacing, jaundiced eyes. It’s unsanctioned, unsponsored and unaffiliated. It’s not limited to ticket-holders. They do it just because.

Three nights ago, I stepped out the front door to hear dance music coming from the park across the street. Two dozen people stood in formation, in the dark, practising Michael Jackson’s Thriller dance. I’m guessing it has something to do with what will happen Saturday night in East Vancouver.

Like other events conceived and executed by the Public Dreams Society, the Parade of Lost Souls was a victim of its own success and a victim of limited funding. Last year the event was cancelled altogether.

But this year, instead of tens of thousands of people parading down a Commercial Drive closed to traffic, the society is getting back to its roots. It’s mounting a quieter affair called the Secret Souls Walk. Organizers are counting on the same collaborative spirit that drives Brad Leith and Gideon Flitt to spend four months haunting their own house. I know this because they’ve come by my house and leafleted me repeatedly to ensure my participation.

And yes, there are workshops in shrine building, group choreography, mask making and something called vocal jamming. And yes, all of that sounds more than a little hemp-seed and gluten-free flax-ball flaky.

And while you won’t find me at any of the workshops any time soon, I am on board for the walk.

Compared to Brad and Gideon, I’m an amateur. Discount store-bought cobwebs, stretched around the pumpkins on the fence. Rubber bats and rats and snakes.

And sure, two years ago I pulled my old motorcycle on to the front lawn and wrapped my leather jacket and jeans around a wooden skeleton made out of two-by-fours and deck screws with a plastic skull lit from the inside to make it look all Ghost Rider, while blaring a loop of Rob Zombie’s Dragula. The strobe light helped.

And this year there will be tombstones featuring famous dead artists. And way better lighting.

And now that people are going to be walking up the back lane, I better finish that mockup of the Dexter kill room I’ve been working on in the garage.

Just because.

Stephen Quinn is the host of On the Coast on CBC Radio One in Vancouver. 88.1 FM and 690 AM.

View the original article here