The autumn fog unfurls against the forest floor, sweeping an embrace around the woodsy carcasses laid bare for the year. Every bird has gone silent, every branch de-robed and nothing remains but silence beyond the occasional landing of a leaf or acorn from the tendrils above, the straggling remains of a livelier time. A soundtrack one is likely to find only in a cemetery before the forested expanse has gone to bed for the year. That is, other than the wolves who cry at the full moon, the bats who amble across the nightscape, and any of the other creatures who only come out when all signs of life have left. I walked through the sprawl and out to the grey cityscape, dead to the world, so I could go grab a beer at a haunted tavern on Haight street…

Whoa, sorry, I got a little side-tracked, what were we talking about again? Oh yeah, the movie Bad Candy. It seems to have put me in quite the creepy mood, and for good reason. Bad Candy takes place on Halloween, pockmarked by a DJ named Chilly Billy, who’s recording his radio show in which he shares tales of macabre wonder.

The movie is like a collage of horrors, going from one story to the next, some characters spilling into the yarns of others. It’s not a Tales from the Crypt sort of scenario with a title screen for each story, but a mesh in which one story will flow into the next, most times forwarded by an intro by the cheesy and moderately dislikable Chilly Billy.

I enjoyed this movie because it has all the horrors one hopes to fear encountering on Halloween, from Dracula to Frankenstein’s Monster, to partying teens, to a guy who puts razor blades in his candy, right down to quite possibly the last thing a young woman wants to see alone in the dark, a bro-dude wearing a MAGA hat. Holy shit, talk about terrifying! It does a great job embodying the classic merriment of the most horrific and wonderful time of year; orange leaves scattered through the streets, jack-o-lanterns blazing on darkened stoops, little hellions running around like they just got their yearly Fuck Shit Up Hall Pass.

The special effects are pretty bootsy but thankfully sparing, as the movie focuses more on make-up and costumes, both of which hold a nauseating girth. Some of the monsters featured here are wont to haunt me even more than some of the more disturbing storylines; like an undertaker who tries to bone her latest customer, apparently misunderstanding when told he was a stiff.

This movie holds all the midnight wonders of old-fashioned ghost stories, inspiring my pilgrimage to Trax Bar, a haunted watering hole on Haight street. The folks who were bartending there all had similar reports of a man who kept popping up, be it by turning on the light in a room that nobody was in, tussling the bead curtains, and even coming through the locked front door when a barkeep was counting the money at night.

One year a fire broke out in the bar’s backroom, revealing things hidden in the walls from back in the early and mid-1900s. Like a Winchester Model 54 (which haven’t been manufactured since 1936), an antique timepiece, and a photo of the inside of the bar taken one New Year’s Day. Everyone in the photo is wearing Jazz-era garb and looking like they’re Gonna Party Like it’s 1939. They’re casually posing for the photo, and one man is pointing at the camera, donned with a devilish smirk. This man was recognized by all present as the bar’s resident ghost. They hung it up in the bar’s entrance, maybe as a way to make peace with the spirit. Nonetheless, he’s said to still come back, inspiring stories like the ones seen in Bad Candy. Although with likely less necrophilia.