Something VERY Scary this Halloween: Franken-Hitler!

There’s a terrific family at my son’s elementary school who hosted our PTA board meeting dinner a couple of weeks ago. My husband and I arrived at their home around 6 p.m. and were greeted by an amazing array of outdoor Halloween decorations – gravestones, cobwebs, ghouls, and the crème de la crème – a 10-foot tall inflatable Frankenstein (technically Frankenstein is the doctor, and the guy with the stitched head and bolts in his neck is The Monster, but everyone thinks you’re a pompous ass if you point it out).

The dad proudly noted that he bought this air-filled monstrosity for the low-low price of only $10.

“Ten dollars?” we asked. How did he get such a bargain?

He just chuckled. “You’ll see on your way out.”

Later that evening we were heading to our car. It was dark, and The Monster was glowing. Well… most of it was glowing.

During the day, the Monster looked like any ordinary inflatable decoration you’d see in someone’s yard at Halloween (… or more likely at a car lot. Do these things really bring in customers? Fodder for another blog). But at night The Monster became much more sinister. Apparently the stitching on the upper lip cast a shadow, making it look like a mustache. Another shadow hit above the eyes. And suddenly, instead of a friendly monster who clumsily stumbles and grunts, The Monster was transformed into:

FRANKEN-HITLER!

Although he had two flapping arms in the air, one dangled a little to the side, so the right arm looked like it was giving the neighborhood a proud “Heil Hitler!”

Our friends’ monster/dictator gave me an idea. Wouldn’t it be great to have a whole yard full of scary Halloween dictators?

I don’t have the time or the talent to create illustrations for this blog post, but if I did, here would be some of my suggestions:

• A giant flapping dismembered tongue for China’s dictator Mao Tse-Tung
• Exchange Transylvania for Yugoslavia to create Vampire Slobodan Milosevic
• Libya’s Gaddafi Ghost
• Iraq’s Sadist Hussein
• Use Cambodia’s Pol Pot as the boiling caldron
• Malnourished Africans can be real-life skeletons provided by Uganda’s Idi Amin
• Italy’s Mussolini Mummy
• The Adams Family’s dismembered hand called Thing can be renamed as USSR’s Crawlin’ Stalin

Any of these dictators would also be quite convincing as the Grim Reaper or the Devil.

Unfortunately we won’t have any witches since as far as I’m aware, there are no female dictators.

Which is probably why the nighttime hobgoblin that makes my 5-year old beg to sleep in our room is called the Bogeyman – not the Bogeywoman.