Alfred Hitchcock and Halloween

Hello and welcome to another weekend at the New Jersey shore.
The tourists are gone and the roads are once again passable. The snow birds have fled to Florida and we have the beaches to ourselves once again.  Some years it is warm enough even into October. But not this year. It is cold out already  and the blustery storms of autumn are upon us.
So, pull up a chair, have some coffee and some Belgian pastry and enjoy another weekend with me as we await the arrival of another  Nor'Easter!

We are participating in another Saturday 9 today. I hope you will join in as well because these are a great way to get to know other bloggers and open up a whole new world in some cases.

Saturday 9: "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" Theme

This week's song was chosen because this is the last Saturday 9 before Halloween. Are you unfamiliar with this week's tune? Hear it here.


1) The Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, was born in England. Name another pop culture contribution England has made.
 The Beatles and the Mersey beat music and a lot of the silly fashions of the 70's. The ugly mop top hair styles and the pin straight hair and super short Twiggy styles.
I only liked the Beatles music when I heard it played by others. I believe that England also started the punk and rave culture, the bad boy stuff. None of it very good contributions.

2) This week's song is recognized as the theme to Hitchcock's long-running TV show, but "Funeral March for a Marionette" is a classic piece written for piano in the late 1870s by Charles Gounod. Do you often listen to classical music?
Yes, I do.  I like classical music quite a lot. Cable TV has a classical station I enjoy. 

 By the way, Charles Gounod is most famous for his Ave Maria, one of the most beloved songs of all time.  Here is Sarah Brightman singing it....


3) Janet Leigh's shower scene in  Hitchcock's Psycho is considered one of the scariest sequences ever filmed. What's the most frightening movie you've ever seen?

I have not seen many scary movies because I don't like them at all. I did see Psycho. It was awful. I don't see a need to do movies like that at all.
There was one I found kind of scary called Village of the Damned. It was awful. I went with my friend from Belgium, Vivian  and we were about 13 years old.
We were good friends in those days. She was a transplant to our junior school from the local Catholic School which only went from kindergarten to 6th grade.  Her mother was from Belgian, her dad from Britain and he ate his hamburger with a knife and fork.
 She spoke Flemish fluently and French haltingly and, as  I spoke some French, and we both spoke English, we got along famously in all those languages. 

Her family lived in a second floor apartment .. really the top half  of a  two family Victorian house. The kitchen was built into a sun porch that over looked the back garden and had windows on three sides! It was so amazing.All that light and the view! 
 My grandparents had an apartment like that over my father's business. They were huge, house sized places, not little at all. Really they were huge Victorians where the bottom floor served as a business and the  upstairs was for the family.
My grandparents sun porch,however, was used as a sun porch complete with sofa, chairs and all manner of plants that loved the big expanse of windows. There is something very special about second floor enclosed porches like that. They are the kind that are warm all year round.
Vivian and I listened to French singers and watched French movies without subtitles. Those were good days.  We spoke a good deal of French together. She wanted to be a translator for the UN, but, never saw that dream come true.
Village of the Damned was shown as a re-run movie  late on an autumn Sunday afternoon.
 All the children in the movie looked like Julian Assange with white hair and crystal blue eyes.
We exited that theatre to a foggy, chilly, dark early evening that fed our imagination  with all manner of terrors.
Bad,scary movie.. avoid it like the plague.
Vivian passed away a couple of years ago, way,way too soon. We had lost touch over the years but I think of her very often.

4) Hitchcock admitted that he "never trusted birds," and he took that fear and turned it into the movie, The Birds. Is there a member of the animal kingdom that just gives you "the creeps?"
  Not really, no.  I am not fond of some animals like I am of others but, no creeps really.
By the way, birds never trusted Hitchcock either.

 5) Halloween will soon be upon us. Will you carve a Jack O'lantern this year?
Probably not but I would like to.  Some of them are so artistic and beautiful.


6) What candy will trick or treaters get at your house?
Individual bags of chips that the supermarket sells.  I will buy 2 great big packages of them and maybe some candy as well.   

7)  When you went trick or treating, did you prefer fantasy costumes (like a storybook character) or scary ones (like a monster)?
I have dressed up as  Queen Esther from the book of Esther in the Bible, Martha Washington  and a cowgirl.

8)  Which candy was your favorite? Which one were you disappointed to find in your trick or treat bag?

Get real seniors!

My favorite candy is always Snickers, though chocolate gives me migraines.  
My least favorite are cheap candies most older people give out.
 Or.. the absolute worst are homemade cookies made with whole wheat flour and carob and all natural ingredients! They are like eating door stops or paper mache. 
 Gag, yuk...They are horrible.
Please, please stop making "healthy" treats to give to people. Those older ladies who gave them out were sadists.
 Oh and then you have the people who give out apples and carrots.  Seriously? Really?This is how you want to be remembered by neighborhood kids after you're gone?
Senior citizens... Hear me.. save your reputation and give out calorie filled chocolate and chips!! Kids will build memorials to your memory.

9) Which do you find scarier -- cemeteries or haunted houses?
Hands down it is a haunted house!
One house in my neighborhood had an old Victorian double door on the front.All homes in my neighborhood were old Victorians.
The house was surrounded by a black wrought iron fence and the yard was planted with ancient  thorny roses and, in summer, tall beds of hollyhocks . 
But now, that autumn, piles of colorful leaves covered the lawn all around and the hollyhocks were wilted from the cold.
Once you mounted the steps to the porch, you could look into that big double front door and see a  diffused faint light coming from the end of the long center hallway that separated the living room on the right from the stairs to the left. In most of these Victorians on my block, that hallway went to the winter kitchen. All our homes had summer kitchens and winter kitchens separated by a little butler's pantry.

That lone light barely illuminated the hallway that seemed to go on forever.
It sent  chills down our spines to think that someone might actually answer the door this time. Would anyone open that door at the end of that long hall and walk towards us? What would we do if they did?
We both longed for it and dreaded it.
The bell was original to the house. You had to twist a key-like doo-hickey that made the bell ring with a brrrinnng.. brrrringgg.. sound.
We would twist it, like winding up a clock and wait. And wait. And wait some more.
We waited because we were curious as to who lived there. None of us kids  ever saw anyone and we never asked our parents who lived in that house.Why? I don't know why we didn't, but we didn't.  
After what seemed like forever, we walked back down the steps, through the creaking wrought iron gate and back onto the slate sidewalk and went on our way.   Nothing was ever said but we all knew what everyone was thinking!   It had to be a witch that lived in that house.  A witch who would not show her face to us! We didn't believe in witches.. but like all kids.. we really did in our heart of hearts!
One year,  as we were leaving, I saw the upstairs drapes part slightly and a face look out to see us as we went.  It was a malevolent face without kindness, without warmth. It chilled me to see it.  "Look!" I said to my friends. "A face in that window up there." They looked but only saw the drapes swinging shut.
We never went to that house again.








 Here is the Brrrring..brrrinng doorbell of yore: