Halloween Movie Monsters: A Guide to Self-Defense

Editor's note: Just a little humor in honor of Oct. 31, folks. Our comments section would appreciate it if you didn't take things too seriously. Happy Halloween!

I love Halloween as much as the next guy; it’s a festive night, rife with legend and magic. However, all the Junior Supermen and Spidermen, all the princesses and witches, with their plastic jack-o’-lanterns brimming with half-size chocolate bars and lame bags of stale popcorn are all fun and games, until Halloween gets real. Yup, once you’ve tucked the little demons and sorceresses into bed and figure it’s time to raid the kid’s candy bucket, you hear it. It sounds like a shuffle of feet on your porch, maybe it’s just one last round of degenerate trick-or-treaters, or the classic ‘flaming-bag-of-poo’ routine; your instinct tells you to open the door and start yelling at the miscreants, but you pause, and slide the curtain to see who’s there. That’s when it gets real: Zombies.

Not one or two, but dozens. And not the Dawn of the Dead style zombies, nor the ones that just look like the mother-in-law without makeup, these are fresh from the grave, with rotting flesh and an unending drive to eat your brain. Sounds far-fetched? Not at all; this is Halloween, and you, dear reader need to be prepared.

Just as you wouldn’t allow deer season to approach without having the proper ammo, you can’t let All Hallows’ Eve approach without having things properly sorted. But, there are many Halloween monsters, so you’ll need a bit of diversity.

Zombies on the porch? Front door creaking and starting to move? You need firepower, amigo. We all know that a head shot will properly stop a zombie, but they come in huge numbers, so a high-capacity AR-15 is an excellent choice. Think about frangible bullets, like hollowpoint match stuff, to open a zombie’s coconut. You may want a good red dot sight, as accuracy and ammo conservation is much more important than the ‘spray-and-pray’ mentality.

Now what about vampires? Yup, Nosferatu. Damned vampire. Serious vampire too, not one of those sparkly, confused, guilt-ridden sissies, but a scheming, calculating, driven death machine. If you can find his coffin, fine, but we’re talking about self-defense here, not going on the offensive. I suggest putting the concept of a holly stake through the heart into modern technology, using custom holly arrows, capable of standing up to the speeds generated by a compound bow. Fire-hardening will help add some rigidity, and I’d feel more comfortable with a fixed blade broadhead, like a good Thunderhead or a Muzzy chisel point. Once you’ve stuck him like a pin cushion, drag him into the sunlight, before he turns into mist; you don’t want him getting away.

Mummies are also quite an issue on Halloween; you would think that with modern technology we’d have a means of preventing them from resurrecting, but, no. Every damned Halloween, mummies. Mummies here, Mummies there; it’s exhausting. Fire works best on a reanimated corpse from a previous millennium. I’m thinking Dragon’s Breath shotgun shells. Yeah, the former Pharaoh may have been an all-powerful god-man, with protective spells for the afterlife, but he is no match for a 12-gauge shell full of burning magnesium. 2,500-year old linen is all sorts of flammable.

Werewolves are extremely active during the Halloween season, but are guaranteed to be out and about on Halloween night. Lycanthropy is no joke, and it requires special weapons to combat it. Silver bullets to the heart will most definitely end a werewolf’s career, and while silver bullets are becoming more and more difficult to come by, Winchester has your six. The original Silvertip line was designed to penetrate deep, and though Winchester marketed it as a hunting bullet, its true purpose was for hunting werewolves. The modern Ballistic Silvertip line was developed for longer range werewolf hunting, and they work just fine. I recommend a .270 Winchester or larger, as you want to guarantee penetration. I don’t know if taxidermy is a good idea though…

Witches are a different ball of wax altogether. They can leave their bodies, transform their appearance, even transmogrify, if you believe the tales. When a witch is out of her skin (usually at night), if you salt her hide, or prevent her from finding it, she will die. A heavy duty cooler, like a good, lockable YETI, will make an excellent storage facility for a witch skin. Just make sure she is really a witch, as women who are not witches do not appreciate being stuffed in a cooler. Not that I would know.

Ghosts are difficult to deal with. The Halloween poster-child is transparent and immaterial, so conventional weapons are pretty much useless against them, although a Crimson Trace laser sight will help to pick them up if they're in the room with you. Usually a ghost is the spirit of a person or animal that has been wronged in their corporeal existence, and just won’t leave this life. The only true way to send them to the afterlife is to right the wrong that has been committed, and more often than not for us hunters, it is the ghost of a big buck that died of old age, while we were at work. Go forth, and right that wrong; tomorrow is November and deer season is upon us.