Thursday, November 15, 2012

What Halloween Means To Me Special Features: R.S. "Corpsy" Rhine



Next up on the What Halloween Means To Me: Special Features list is Corpsy, aka R.S.  Rhine.  There isn’t a whole lot he hasn’t done in the world of horror publishing.  He’s an award winning fiction writer and the creator and writer of a popular series of comics, but I know him best as the dead-itor in chief of Girls and Corpses magazine.  You can check it out HERE.  It’s a great magazine filled with humor, interviews with industry notables like Sid Haig and Laurence Harvey, great art and reviews, and best of all…beautiful women posing with rotten corpses!  Does it get any better than that?  Mr. Rhine also, by the way, has fantastic taste in jewelry.  So what do you say we pick Corpsy’s brain and find out what Halloween Means To Him.  Actually, just for the hell of it, I think I’m gonna bust out a little Cryptkeeper on this one…”Corpsy is going to turn hack the pages of his die-ary and share some of his macabre memories with you boils and ghouls.  It’s a rotten retrospective of Samhain sentiment he likes to call Halloween Hell Night…

“I always remember Halloween as a time to get into trouble. It was a night of mayhem and vandalism that included egging, toilet papering trees and shaving cream shootouts. Yes, shaving cream. My merry band of neighborhood mischief-makers would steal the aerosol nozzles off of our dad's workbench spray-paint cans and stick them on top of shaving cream cans so you could squirt them with a creamy vengeance, as far as ten yards.  We would all meet in the middle of the street like high noon at midnight and shoot it out. I had even made a makeshift holster so I could have two cans of shaving cream at the ready. The other tradition I would do each year with my buddies was to set up a Halloween crash site.  We would make a dummy by stuffing newspapers into a pair of jeans, t-shirt and tennis shoes and then take a bicycle (back then my Schwinn Stingray) and lay it on its side next to a storm drain.  We would make it look like some hapless kid had been killed in a head-on with a car which had driven away -- leaving the victim's body in the gutter. I guess it was my early fascination with corpses. We always got a laugh as a driver would spot the crash site, their car skidding to a stop as they leaped out to investigate -- and the expression on their faces when they realized they had been pranked.  I guess we didn't realize that we were creating drivers who might someday drive past our real body in the street, letting us slowly bleed to death. I grew up back in the early 70's when it was still safe to roam house-to-house and neighbors had not yet figured out how to put razor blades in apples and needles in candy bars. The days of the pathetic mall Halloween was over a decade in the future. And our neighbors really put out all the goodies too! You could fill up several grocery bags with candy and open your own store. It was a great time to be a kid... or a corpse.”

348 days ‘til Halloween, Halloween, Halloween.  348 days ‘til Halloween.  Silver Shamrock.


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