Halloween in factorytown

If memory serves me right, celebrating Halloween only became mainstream in the past 10 years. I theorize that this has got to do with inflexible holiday breaks in multinational companies, and since the people who used to have longer vacations around the weekend of Nov. 1 no longer enjoy this, some sort of revelry seems to be in order. Along comes fortified American pop culture, and before we know it, you’re as likely to bump into a stack of jack-o’-lanterns in a mall in Manila as you would the mothership.

I work in a manufacturing office in Laguna (let’s call it Factorytown, for brevity’s sake) and for the past two years, Factorytown has dedicated an afternoon off for kids to go trick-or-treating at work.  Employees go all-out: people come in costumes and cubicles are transformed into imagined spaces. 

In Factorytown, one would think this is as big as Christmas for some of the engineers. A couple of years back, a small group of technicians worked together to create a full claustrophobic horror house out of a corner office, complete with robot ghouls and smoke machines made out of recycled hydraulic equipment and manufacturing scrap. 

The rest of the population, who are not as skilled technically but are just as prone to using black garbage bags for drama, go all-out and push the limits of ketchup or poster paint gore and cheap scares. One time, I was told, in another company right beside Factorytown, someone actually attempted to bring in a coffin. 

Murder and mayhem in recycled plastics: Factorytown nut job goes all-out crazy and murders his nurse right at the isolation room.

While I’m not normally not big on American pop culture, what fascinates me about these local celebrations of Halloween in Factorytown is how well they demonstrate various perceptions of horror. Probably because it’s an event that didn’t really evolve out of anything over time, a Halloween celebration in the context of the corporati becomes a carnival of mixed stimuli it brings together the cute and the absurd, and successfully combines the cartoonish and the morbid.   

Cosplay in multinationals usually involves portable costumes: stuff that you can easily change into in a tight toilet cube. Unless, of course, the stakes are higher. 

In my previous workplace, a call center in Makati, the prizes for best costume were usually large enough to buy a small appliance. People took that seriously. One time the prizes included 10 or so iPods (when they were still high-value gadgets), and someone actually came to work in full Stormtrooper get-up. That guy won, along with another buffoon from another floor who dressed up as Darth Vader. Darth Vader didn’t forget his breathing apparatus, and just for fun, some of the managers allowed him to use it during a call. 

The prizes for costumes are not announced in Factorytown, so people usually resort to the aforementioned portable wear. Over the past two years, I’ve noticed that insanity as a character has become quite a popular option. Black plastic bags cut out to fit seem to be the camouflage of choice, and lipstick and charcoal are used for blood and soot. Whatever the makeup doesn’t achieve, acting nuts makes up for with the help, of course, of a knife or axe to threaten the kids.

Those who can afford them buy ready-to-wear costumes, typically of popular television, movie or fairy-tale characters. There’s princess after princess after princess at every couple of cubicles, and also nymphs, both the mythical kind and those of a drunk-after-a-rave variety. Shrek will of course appear at a corner or two, as this is the a person-of-size’s character of choice, and if he’s lucky he might just convince a woman similarly of-size to dress up as Fiona. This year, I expect to see the entire roster of monsters from Plants vs. Zombies in Factorytown, to the great amusement of kids and geeks alike.

Last year, I dressed up as a Catholic nun. There was a couple of women who came as nurses, properly bloodied from bludgeons to their heads. A guy from another department came as a dead farmer, and his seatmate came in as a decapitated corpse wearing a barong tagalog. I was recently looking at random photos from that Halloween with all of us in it, and I imagined that we unintentionally lived up to the theme “casualties of war.”

When I’m drunk I find nuns funny (the politically incorrect penguin reference), but in normal circumstances I’ve always found them quite frightening, especially those in black habit. Perhaps it’s the monochrome of the outfit, which makes their actual sweet smiling faces look like masks.

I remember an experience in high school, when we went to an exclusive Catholic school for girls to compete in an oratorical contest. I needed to use a men’s room, and the only one was on the top floor, where the classrooms were closed during a storm some years back and had not been used since. 

It was a long walk across an almost empty corridor. When I was about to reach the toilet, a door near me opened, and out came an aged nun with a walking stick. I froze where I was, holding an encyclopedia volume that was to be used as a prop for my outfit. The nun moved very slowly, and because of the length of her skirt one would think she levitated instead of walked.

“I was about to whack her with the book, but someone arrived and greeted the poor woman. It’s good I wasn’t able to make my move,” I told a kid who asked why I was scared of nuns. He was dressed as Spider-Man. 

It turns out that the nun was still alive, was not ghost and was, in fact, the school counselor. “But still, you must be very careful,” I warned Spider-Man.  “There are a lot of dead nuns running around.”

So I guess I’m indeed right in thinking it’s the contradictions that are ultimately interesting about Factorytown’s pseudo-Halloween party. On the one hand, the pedestrian and the commonplace are mangled to be scary. On the other, the most gruesome and disturbing (insanity, murder, old age, cannibalism, suicide, among others) are used for fun to frighten away kids.

And then one remembers that these yuppies this 20- and 30-something generation scaring their kids are actually part of that age group that grew up largely without a Halloween. For them or us, as I’m part of this generation anyway in contrast to the solemnity of remembering the dead, horror involved real fear, not the type bought from a department store and worn to work. 

In the ‘90s, the benchmark of terror during the All Soul’s holiday was the pre-Halloween episode of Magandang Gabi Bayan, that weekly documentary show hosted by Noli de Castro. It was an annual ritual many a kid and teenager waited for. While the format largely kept the investigative reporting feel to it, the dramatizations were superbly cinematic like a real movie, highly suspenseful and with punches on cue. 

We’d watch the show at home with lights closed, the same way you would a horror movie on VHS. (Some people would actually end up doing this, with the mood already looming.) There was genuine fear there, I would argue.  It was real life presumably at least, played out with sound effects. 

This year my department’s theme is the murder of Santa Claus. A very merry, bloody premise-Christmas indeed.