Halloween might have come and gone yesterday, but for folks in Mexico, it was just the beginning of their three-day festival known around the world as Dia de los Muertos: the Day of the Dead!
Beyond the costumes and the skeletons and the candy, it’s a time for families to remember loved ones lost over the years. Let me just borrow this quote posted on Wikipedia, taken from Frances A. Day’s Latina and Latino Voices in Literature, to explain the holiday:
“On October 31, All Hallows Eve, the children make a children’s altar to invite the angelitos (spirits of dead children) to come back for a visit. November 1 is All Saints Day, and the adult spirits will come to visit. November 2 is All Souls Day, when families go to the cemetery to decorate the graves and tombs of their relatives. The three-day fiesta is filled with marigolds, the flowers of the dead; muertos (the bread of the dead); sugar skulls; cardboard skeletons; tissue paper decorations; fruit and nuts; incense, and other traditional foods and decorations.”
If you’re in the mood for a fun, spooky movie that celebrates the…er, spirit (sorry) of this holiday, check out The Book of Life, a 2014 animated film produced by director Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pacific Rim) that features the voices of Diego Luna, Zoe Saldana, Channing Tatum, Ice Cube, and Ron Perlman. It’s sort of like a Mexican take on The Nightmare Before Christmas—at least animation-wise—about a bullfighter’s adventures and romances in the afterlife.
And if you’re looking for some StarWarp Concepts treats, how about some free digital comics? Check out this Halloween post from yesterday and see how you can download your own copies of The Saga of Pandora Zwieback #0, the horror adventure Heartstopper: The Legend of La Bella Tenebrosa #1–3, and the superheroine-themed Heroines and Heroes.
Have a safe and happy Day of the Dead!
Happy Halloween! If you’re a horror fan like me (and Pan, of course), then All Hallows’ Eve is probably your favorite time of year, so in keeping with the fine tradition of handing out free treats to boils and ghouls everywhere, the folks at Pan’s publisher, StarWarp Concepts, and I have some digital-comic offerings for you!
Heartstopper: The Legend of La Bella Tenebrosa #1–3

Wrapping up our overview of U.S. cable-TV Halloween programming, this time we focus the spotlight on the mother lode of classic horror flicks: the schedule for TCM,
Starting at 8:00 p.m. (ET) on October 30, it’s Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Teri Garr, Cloris Leachman, Madeline Kahn, and Peter Boyle in the Mel Brooks–directed 1974 comedy Young Frankenstein, followed by another horror-comedy classic, with Bud Abbott and Lou Costello on the run from Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Lon Chaney’s Wolfman, and Glenn Strange’s Frankenstein monster in 1941’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (one of my all-time-favorite movies).
Then Vincent Price stalks the halls of 1953’s House of Wax. Boris Karloff introduces the three tales of director Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath, from 1963. It’s followed by another anthology: 1945’s Dead of Night. Vincent Price returns in 1958’s House on Haunted Hill, produced by B-movie-gimmick king William Castle. The Haunting is director Robert Wise’s 1963 adaptation of author Shirley Jackson’s acclaimed novel The Haunting of Hill House. Then it’s a Christopher Lee triple feature, with 1968’s The Devil’s Bride (aka The Devil Rides Out), 1959’s The Mummy—with Lee as the title character and his longtime friend (and Dracula film series nemesis) Peter Cushing as the hero—and the 1959 adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, with Cushing as Holmes and Lee as Sir Henry Baskerville.
For the
Movies! continues its programming with 1967’s Berserk!, starring Joan Crawford; 1965’s Die! Die! My Darling!, with Tallulah Bankhead and Stephanie Powers; 1971’s The Mephisto Waltz, with Alan Alda and Jacqueline Bisset; the 1988 remake of The Blob, with Shawnee Smith and Kevin Dillon; John Carpenter’s 1980 thriller The Fog, with Jamie Lee Curtis (Halloween) and Adrienne Barbeau (Escape From New York); Wes Craven’s 1982 adaptation of DC Comics’ Swamp Thing, starring Louis Jordan, Ray Wise, Adrienne Barbeau, and Dick Durock as the walking, talking swamp critter; and 1975’s Bug—about killer cockroaches—starring Bradford Dillman and Joanna Miles. Wrapping up the marathon with 1967’s The Deadly Bees, with Suzanna Leigh and Frank Finlay.
Then comes 1944’s The Return of the Vampire, starring Dracula himself, Bela Lugosi, as he tries to put the bite on Nina Foch and Frieda Inescourt. After a break for a Western (1954’s Jesse James vs. The Daltons—what the hell?), horror returns for a trilogy of documentaries: Bela Lugosi: Hollywood’s Dark Prince; Boris Karloff: The Gentle Monster; and Peter Lorre: The Master of Menace. Then another break, with episodes of the TV series Nanny and the Professor and Ensign O’Toole, before a final, minor supernatural-themed show: an episode of the ghost-comedy series The Ghost & Mrs. Muir, starring Edward Mulhare and Hope Lange as the eponymous characters.



Over at Chiller’s sister network,
Teen Read Week 2016 is happening right now, October 9–15. What is it? Well, to quote the event’s website:
And speaking of books for teens that can be fun to read, are you familiar with my young adult, dark-urban-fantasy series 
Got a favorite book? Well, odds are good there’s someone out there in the United States who’d liked to see it censored. And that’s where Banned Books Week comes in—an annual celebration of literacy in which the spotlight is shone on the problem of censorship in U.S. libraries and bookstores. To quote the Banned Books Week website:
