Halloween

At Cabrini College, students put together a haunted house complete with jack-o'-lanterns that opened Friday at Xavier Hall, a dormitory.

Further evidence - if any were needed - that Hollywood is more interested in making money than sense is offered by the arrival of Halloween 5. It is a predictably tedious serving of tripe that opened Friday - the 13th. Friday the 13th Part VIII - Jason Takes Manhattan, of course, opened on Friday, July 29. Halloween 5 goes into release more than two weeks before Halloween. Go figure. I raise the issue of the dating game in the vain hope of finding some point worth discussing about either of these long-running horror series that have turned into lucrative franchises for their makers.

Fran Mayville (left) wears his wickedest sneer as he mixes a potion of dried blood and entrails designed to turn little kids into snails and puppy dog tails. His partner in witchcraft, the Quasimodo-like Michelle Fleming, offers the vile concoction to visitors at a Halloween haunted house in West Philadelphia. This bewitching bit of drama, sponsored by Alpha Phi Omega, took place last night at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science, whose members should know a thing or two about potions, good and bad.

Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble. - The three witches in Macbeth. Ah, Halloween, that bewitching holiday celebrating the occult. Most people know it as the night children dress up like demonic spirits or cartoon characters clutching bags to hold their candy. But the real origin just might surprise you. Though the day is named for the evening before a traditional Catholic holiday, the celebration itself originated from ancient pagan rites.

A Woodstown, N.J., art teacher has been suspended after parents accused her of preaching that Halloween is a satanic holiday and that children should fear God's wrath if they went trick-or-treating. Parents of several second-grade students in the Salem County borough complained that the teacher, Ann Shelton, frightened their children by telling them Halloween was evil. They also said the teacher instructed the students not to reveal who told them so. Shelton, a tenured teacher of 14 years, called the accusations lies.

Just when did Halloween - formerly the province of egg-hurling hooligans and kids in dime-store costumes - become a national holiday? When I was a kid, not only did we walk 15 miles barefoot through the fields to school, leaving blood on the snow in the process; we also celebrated Halloween for the 24-hour candyfest it was meant to be and left it at that. There may have been a haunted hayride or two when I was a tyke, but they were not advertised in glaring expressway billboards starting in late August.

Halloween festivities will include video entertainment this year at Springfield High School. Under the direction of video artist Julius Vatali, 10 students in the school's video production class created a 5-minute Halloween video to be shown on the district's education station - Channel 2 - on the Suburban Cable Television network. Vatali worked with the students for 10 days, through a grant the school received from the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts. His assignment ended Friday.

Four recent films - an Australian comedy, a satirical look at the movie business, an Argentine thriller and yet another Halloween outing - aren't the only interesting new things at the video store this week: There's a passel of classic films and music videos for every taste as well. YOUNG EINSTEIN (1989) (Warner) $89.95. 91 minutes. Yahoo Serious, Odile Le Clezio, John Howard, Pee Wee Wilson. If you're jaded by the cookie- cutter comedies churned out by Hollywood, head for this upbeat farce from down under.

This is to all of us who seek to destroy one of those things that as young people, we used to anticipate celebrating - Halloween. I wonder why the press consistently place fear in the hearts and minds of today's children with the reporting and programming of all of the violence they can find to report or dramatize. I am all for an informed public, but when you take things beyond information to creating general hysteria, it is time to speak out. When I was a child, Halloween represented fantasy and a wealth of treats.

The fourth annual alternative Halloween party will be held from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Sunday at Upper Merion Baptist Church, 585 General Steuben Rd., King of Prussia. Hayrides, games, food, contests and a fun house are part of the evening's festivities. According to the Rev. Richard T. Purchase, the wearing of scary Halloween costumes dates back to the pagan celebration of Sanheim, when evil spirits roamed free. Children wore fierce and scary costumes to ward them off. Halloween is also the eve of All Saints Day, a Christian holy day set aside in the eighth century as a time to remember the lesser saints who did not command a separate holiday in their memory.

It used to be that Christmas was the only holiday big enough to be stolen, ruined, or saved. But like some kind of zombie army, Halloween has grown almost as imposing. So when "Frankenstorm" Sandy made landfall in New Jersey just two days before Halloween, something had to be done. Gov. Christie's solution took a characteristically expansive view of his powers, but it was brilliant in its simplicity: He rescheduled Halloween. The governor issued an executive order citing storm-related risks to the safety of trick-or-treating children and concluding: "I, Chris Christie, governor of the state of New Jersey, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the constitution and by the statutes of this state, do hereby order and direct: Celebrations of Halloween scheduled for October 31, 2012, in all parts of New Jersey shall be held on Monday, November 5, 2012.

It's so tempting, I know. Costumes, masks, pranks, pop-culture sight gags, strange people coming to the door, eating jokes - Halloween just seems like an occasion designed for sitcoms. The episodes practically write themselves, don't they? Well, no. Halloween is actually like a theme-park tar pit for TV comedies. Every year, ignoring the danger, half the herd charges into the same trap - with the same tragic results. This year was the saddest in memory. The better half of Ben and Kate rigged up a costume that was part judicial robe/part baseball uniform to go as Babe Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

ALANSDALE man was charged with murder after he walked into the police station Halloween morning and told a dispatcher he had killed his elderly mother, Montgomery County authorities announced Thursday. Police immediately went to Warren Pennick's home on Salford Avenue near Whites Road and found his mother, Lorraine, 79, in a pool of blood at the bottom of the basement stairs, District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman and Lansdale Police Chief Robert B. McDyre announced. Pennick, 54, was charged with murder and possession of an instrument of crime.

Zombies are not frightening. Too messy, lumbering, careless, and undiscriminating. They're the toddlers of the underworld. Vampires never did it for me. Pale, haughty aesthetes, and, even with all that neck-nuzzling, savagely undernourished. Know what's really scary? Trees. Really, really scary. Basements, too. Even without Sandy, our basement is a little workshop of horrors. Also, the presidential polls. Craving insomnia? I suggest you consult any political website, like Realclearpolitics.com, conveying what a cloudy mess this election may turn out to be. That knowledge will keep you up, storm or no storm, for nights on end. In a rare mash-up of wretched weather and an exhausting, infuriating, mind-bogglingly endless political campaign, this Halloween is hands down the most anxiety-producing one on record.

A Montgomery County man allegedly stabbed his elderly mother to death on Halloween morning, changed out of his bloody clothes and then walked to a police station to confessed the crime. Warren H. Pennick, 54, of Lansdale, was charged with murder in the death of Lorraine Pennick, 79. Mother and son lived in the same house. According to police, Pennick told a dispatcher he just stabbed his mother. When police arrived at the residence in the 600 block of Salford Avenue, they found Lorraine Pennick lying at the bottom of the basement stairs with a seven-inch knife on her torso.

As if flooding, power failures, and fallen trees weren't enough, Hurricane Sandy has left one more nasty trick on the region's doorstep: Many spooked communities have canceled Halloween. The fear is that costumed trick-or-treaters might otherwise be traveling through virtual minefields of debris and downed trees. Instead, towns, many in storm-battered New Jersey, are rescheduling parades and advising children to stay home Wednesday night. The issue in New Jersey is so acute that Gov. Christie said Tuesday that "Halloween is not going to happen tomorrow in New Jersey, unfortunately . . .. but I don't want kids to be disappointed, so tomorrow we will reset Halloween by executive order.

HALLOWEEN IN South Jersey was pretty much a bust, thanks to Gov. Christie's decree postponing trick-or-treating in the Garden State until Monday because of Hurricane Sandy. Streets throughout Camden and Burlington counties were eerily quiet Wednesday night, as most South Jersey families apparently heeded the governor's order to keep kids inside. In signing his executive order Wednesday postponing the holiday, Christie said he sought "to minimize additional risks to lives and the public safety as we begin the process of rebuilding and recovering from Hurricane Sandy.

There's an old political saying that "Signs don't vote," meaning that it doesn't matter how many placards adorn lawns and windows come Election Day. But the folks at Spirit Halloween believe that mask sales can foreshadow the vote, and they've correctly predicted the winner of presidential races since 1996 on that factor alone. This year's front-runner? President Obama. And like the actual election, it's a close race. "So far, Obama's in the lead . . . . It's still too early to tell who's going to be the next president based on our sales," said Lisa Barr, the company's senior director of marketing, in a mid-October interview.

WHADDYA gonna be this Halloween? You mean you haven't decided yet? No worries. We've got you covered. Of course, you've gotta be current - Harry Potter might still be popular, but he is sooo four years ago - and it wouldn't hurt if you were at least a little bit something else. Like hilarious. (Andy Reid's mustache!) Or hot. (Melissa Gorga in gold lame!) Could be scary. (Zombies!) Or sassy. (Blue Ivy Carter!) Maybe a little bit controversial. (Who woulda thought, but Big Bird, Bert or Ernie!