HALLOWEEN IS A time of sweet retreat that conjures warm memories of childhood. Clothesline ghosts and front-porch scarecrows, Creature Features, and The Monkey’s Paw all remind us of a time when we were less cynical, and the suspension of our disbelief was only the turn of a page or a flicker of celluloid away.

In a world now transformed by real terror, the monsters created by writers, filmmakers, and other dreamers are more important than ever. They are a conduit for our excessive fear and a direct route back to a simpler time in most of our lives, when deep evil was not the business of men, but of creatures with names like Dracula and Frankenstein — whose motives could be explained and accepted simply because they were not human. And, of course, because nobody really got hurt.

NEW ENGLANDERS have long been purveyors of fictional fright, a tradition that shows up in everything from the campy confines of Spooky World to the prolific writing of Stephen King. In fact, the two chief architects of the modern horror story hail from Boston and Providence.

Fans of dark literature have no greater ambassador than Edgar Allan Poe, whose poem "The Raven" and short story "The Tell-Tale Heart," found in virtually all the widely available anthologies of his work, represent some of literature’s fastest, hottest descents into madness. Poe was born not far from Boston’s Theater District to traveling actors David and Elizabeth Poe on January 19, 1809. On the back of a small portrait of herself, Elizabeth Poe wrote, "For my little son Edgar, who should ever love Boston, the place of his birth, and where his mother found her best and most sympathetic friends." A Halloween spent reading Poe by candlelight taps the shivery delight of the holiday and, of course, can only be improved by the addition of friends and blood-red wine.

Whereas Poe spent much of his life in Baltimore, Virginia, and Philadelphia, Howard Phillips Lovecraft was something of a recluse who rarely left his Providence home, which still stands at 454 Angell Street. Many of Lovecraft’s stories, originally published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in the 1920s and ’30s, have a local bent. The inscription on his tombstone at Swan Point Cemetery even reads, "I am Providence."

Nonetheless, one of Lovecraft’s most gruesome tales, "Pickman’s Model," is set in the ancient burial grounds of Boston’s North End. References to Salem, the Witch City, abound in his writing, and the fictional town in the novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth, where a demonic ocean-dwelling genetic strain has a deep hold on the residents, is a stand-in for Ipswich/Essex. Poe’s stories detailed the evil in men; Lovecraft’s tales, especially well represented in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics), explore the impact of supernatural evil on men’s lives.

Our contemporary king of scares, Stephen King, has said, "It is beyond doubt that H.P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the 20th century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale." But despite King’s good taste, it’s hard to recommend anything he himself has written since 1983’s Pet Sematary (Doubleday): shortly after that, it seems, a massive accumulation of sales and movie deals convinced him that he no longer needed editing. Nonetheless, if you’re driving through Bangor, Maine, it’s worth passing by King’s castle, a sprawling Victorian creep-show of a home that is no doubt an inspiration for the author. Once something of an unofficial tourist stop, King’s red manse has been taken off the map by the complications of fame. But it can still be found by arriving in the center of Bangor, where the Kenduskeag Stream meets the Penobscot River, and heading uphill. In the tradition of New England’s Industrial Revolution millionaires, King lives atop the highest vista. You’ll recognize the place by the spiked wrought-iron fence adorned with gargoyles. But remember, no stalking.

Equally eccentric was the Cape Cod home of the immeasurably eccentric Edward Gorey. Until his death in April 2000, the illustrator, author, stage designer, and repertory-theater director lived in an old Yarmouthport house adorned with peeling white paint and stacked with books and cats; the floorboards of its porch were cracked, its picket fence rested at angles, and the lawn was a thicket of high weeds. It could have been the setting for any of his illustrated Halloween-appropriate meditations on life, death, and the perverse (especially the perverse): his classic Amphigorey collections (Perigree), his darkly good-natured dispatching of innocents The Gashlycrumb Tinies, or his last published work, 1998’s The Haunted Tea Cosy (both Harcourt Brace). Gorey’s illustrated tales remain perfectly cheery Halloween companions, irreverent and mordant, with tongue in cheek. All that’s missing is a libation of absinthe.

THOSE CRAVING a less literary Halloween can always go to the movies. Each year a spate of scary flicks hit the big screen just in time for the holiday, and From Hell and Joy Ride are this year’s major contenders. But in the spirit of the season, disinter something older. And smarter. There was a time — a long time — when horror films relied on acting, direction, cinematography, literate (if sometimes knowingly clichéd) scripts, implied violence, and mood, rather than on buckets of blood, MTV-style cuts, and thudding metal-rap soundtracks.

So why not curl up in the shadows of a jack-o’-lantern’s light with a vampish male or female friend and watch one of the theatrical gems made by Universal Studios in the 1930s? This is where talkie monster movies began, and Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Invisible Man, and The Mummy (all on Universal Studios Home Video/DVD) remain the genre’s unholy grail. These black-and-white masterpieces were shot with an eye for atmosphere and pacing, and made household names of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. They also feature great character actors like Dwight Frye, Claude Rains, and Edward Van Sloan. Many of the directors and cinematographers involved in these movies were European survivors of World War I, so the films reflect a battle-scarred post-apocalyptic vision in their stark landscapes and crumbling buildings.

In the 1940s, Universal monster movies replaced their fear-riddled sensibility with camp and matinee pandering in flicks like House of Frankenstein (Universal Studios Home Video/DVD). But England’s Hammer Films and Roger Corman’s American International Pictures picked up the mantle in the ’50s and ’60s. Hammer’s 1958 Horror of Dracula (Warner Home Video/DVD) set the pattern for the studio, which recycled Universal’s stark European look and terrific casting, but raised the ante with sex and ferocity. Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing became the new Lugosi and Karloff. Vincent Price was the star of director Corman’s extravagant outings, the finest of which drew on the work of Poe and Lovecraft. Most of the films, like 1963’s Lovecraft-based The Haunted Palace (MGM Home Video), go straight for the jugular. But Corman also had flashes of artiness that resulted in low-budget visual poetry. His 1964 Poe-inspired Masque of the Red Death (Orion Home Video/DVD) is shameless faux Fellini with a twist of Hieronymous Bosch.

IT’S THE painters Bosch (1453-1516) and Francisco Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828), better known simply as Goya, who remain the champions of Halloween’s visual poetry. In books like the new Hieronymous Bosch: The Complete Paintings and Drawing (Harry N. Abrams) and Goya: Truth and Fantasy: The Small Paintings, a catalogue for the Goya exhibition that appeared in Madrid, Chicago, and London in the mid ’90s (available via Amazon.com), one encounters delightful mandalas of horror, packed with enough grisly detail to reward hours of contemplation. How Bosch escaped the fiery stake seems a mystery when one stares at his florid reproductions of devils and monsters, especially his most notorious work, the hellscape triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. Goya exhibits a similar unbridled fascination for witches and monsters. One of his most infamous works is the overpowering Satan Devouring His Son.

For the strong-hearted, the perfect complement to such art is a soundtrack. And I don’t mean kids’ stuff like "Monster Mash." For chills, beauty, depth, and darkness, J.S. Bach’s organ works, including the familiar Toccata and Fugue in D minor (well performed by E. Power Biggs on the excellent Bach: Great Organ Works on RCA Victrola), and Tchaikovsky’s main theme from his 1885 ballet Swan Lake (conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich with the Berlin Philharmonic on Deutsche Grammophon’s Tchaikovsky: Ballet Suites) rule the classical realm. In fact, Universal Studios used Swan Lake to introduce its ’30s horror films.

If your tastes run to the more contemporary, virtually every Cramps album is a collection of love songs for teenage zombies. And the spectrum of Gothic rock is covered by Bauhaus’s 1979-’83 Vol. 1 (Beggar’s Banquet), with the classics "Bela Lugosi’s Dead" and "Stigmata Martyr," and Dead Can Dance’s atmospheric The Serpent’s Egg (4AD). TV addicts can bask in the eerie synthesizer, strings, and theremin of the music from Dark Shadows (Rhino). But for those not easily shaken, here are two especially unnerving recommendations: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads (Mute/Reprise) and Diamanda Galas’s The Singer (Mute). Cave’s disc is a gut-tightening update of the tales of killing and horrible retribution that are part of the American blues and folk tradition. Galas’s selection covers the distance between traditionalism and bold experimentation. On The Singer, she applies her dizzying three-and-a-half-octave voice to old gospel and blues tunes, but her tone — at once beautiful and full of withering fear and contempt — is that of a sorceress working ancient magic. Magic that, at least for a few hours this Halloween, can open the doors to the fog-shrouded castles of our imagination.

Ted Drozdowski can be reached at TdrozLHoff@aol.com

Issue Date: October 25 - November 1, 2001