Mouthpiece: How to repel guisers this Halloween
Halloween is lurking around the corner, bringing with it a litany of unwanted social interactions. Our resident columnist Kevin Fullerton hatches a plan to ward off those pesky guisers
During my first time guising, I popped out with my sister and her friends to chap on doors and beg for sweets while dressed as Dracula. Our final destination arrived earlier than planned. On the third floor of a rundown tenement, a red light slowly illuminated the transom and a deathly scream rang from the flat. A large adult hand reached through the letterbox, and I let out a prepubescent shriek before running for the exit. While I hyperventilated tears, my sister and her pals had to explain to me that Satan wasn’t living three blocks from our home.
Maybe it was this trauma that made me allergic to making an effort during Halloween in later years. Case in point: the costume I’m proudest of was that of John Merrick, everyone’s favourite Victorian elephant man. I collected a potato sack from my local fruit and veg shop, a black sheet from Primark and a large stick from a local park. An indisputably effective ten-minute job. Others at the Halloween party had clearly laboured at their costumes for days, or else had spent hundreds of pounds on a black suit to resemble James Bond in a vain attempt at copping off (there were at least four 007s at the party). Mine was assembled like a rapid-fire foraging mission.
I bring this up because my partner and I find ourselves, for the first time in our adult lives, living in a ground floor flat with a front door facing a main road, leaving us an inevitable target for trick or treaters; the etiquette has become a mystery to me. How fancy-dressed do these fancy dressers have to be? If a teenager shows up with a balaclava and an e-scooter claiming to be a dadaist reinterpretation of Darth Vader, do I believe them? What is an acceptable treat? Will a cashew from my Tesco bag of mixed nuts do?
I may well copy the people who traumatised me when I was six, but obviously I’d have to put a more aggressive spin on it to avoid these chancers darkening my door again. When a guiser reaches our stoop and presses the doorbell, flames will erupt from the garden and a disembodied voice will yell: ‘You have reached the house of Satan. Shall you choose trick or treat?’ The children, presumably shaking in fear by now, will yelp their preference. For a trick, they will be forced to make a blood pledge to Beelzebub using a small picnic knife under the doormat. For a treat, they’ll do the same but will have to freeze the blood and suckle it like a delicious bonbon. As a result, I will inevitably be branded the ‘psychopath house’ by every child in the local area. Think of it as paying forward my own Halloween hell.
Picture: Stephen Grant.