It is 8 October. There are 23 days until Halloween.

I grew up in Halloween Town.

At least that’s the way it felt to me as kid. So many of the stories, TV shows, and movies that I encountered in the run-up to Halloween seemed to be reflected in my surroundings, which made the world – the real one and its cathode ray cousin – that extra bit spookier, creepier, and more unsettling.

I’m from a small town in western Pennsylvania some 20 miles north of Pittsburgh. “Town” is being generous. There was no crossroads, no town center, no Main Street filled with shops, though there was a Municipal Building where the police department and softball fields were located. We didn’t rate a zip code or a phone exchange. We shared those with neighboring towns.

What we did have were rolling hills, farms, a few housing plans, a couple of schools (an elementary and junior high), and woods.

Lots of woods.

The kind of woods in Friday the 13th and any number of other low budget slasher horror movies made in the 1980s. My friends and spent much of out childhoods in the woods. I never really thought of them as dangerous until I saw Day of the Triffids on TV one Saturday afternoon. After that, those tall trees and weeds took on a very different, sinister look.

Buying vegetables from the roadside seller at the bottom of the hill was a must during the summer. You couldn’t have a cookout without fresh corn. It was always sweet and delicious. But thanks to watching Children of the Corn when it hit HBO, those empty fields forever after looked to be hiding something…perhaps He Who Walks Behind the Rows? And that scarecrow…I don’t remember seeing that a moment ago. Maybe Bubba from Dark Night of the Scarecrow (the scariest made-for-TV movie EVER!) got bored playing with Marylee and was looking for a new friend to make flower necklaces with.

Thanks to George Romero, everything in western Pennsylvania gained a creepy mirror image on the big screen. Evans City is close by to my hometown. It’s nice little town. Too bad zombies took it over in Night of the Living Dead. Wanna go get some shopping done? Hope the zombies from Dawn of the Dead are done with the Monroeville Mall. Higher education is a good thing, and Carnegie Mellon University is one of the nation’s top schools. It’s also home to a bunch of egghead scientists in Creepshow who brought something back from their 1834 Artic expedition. Something kept in a crate under the stairs. Something with teeth.

Even the steel mills and the economic depression they left in their wake when they closed were made scarier by George Romero. In Martin, filmed on location in Braddock, PA, the rust belt never looked grimmer. Braddock lost 90 percent of its population thanks to the collapse of the steel industry. What remained looked like a ghost town, the perfect place for Romero’s vampire tale. No set decorator necessary!

Even when the mills were up and running, the skies were often turned orange by the Bessemer process, in which air is forcibly blown through the iron to remove impurities from the steel.

The mills were closed by the time Night of the Comet hit theaters in 1984, but seeing the reddish skies caused by the passing comet made those childhood memories come back to life. The comet caused everyone who saw it to burn up into dust or turn into a zombie. This Bessemer process turned the snow black in parts of the Beaver Valley, and the closed mills left behind swarms of the living dead who were sure it was only a matter of time before the mills reopened.

Can you get any Halloweenier?