Courtesy Rykoff Collection/CORBIS

Dear Friends,

Happy Halloween!

As a kid Halloween was about decorating our house and pretending it was haunted. Other than character-based costumes there were no decorations to buy. We used ingenuity to create our sets and ways to scare trick-or-treaters.

Charlie Brown reveals the secrets behind the new Peanuts movie. Photo credit: Blue Sky Animation

Today it has become the second biggest retail holiday of the year with elaborate props sold in practically every kind of business in addition to Halloween superstores. Of course horror films play in theaters and all over TV, cable and the internet. Last week during “Food Day / Film Day” the streets in The Mission were filled with zombies, a week early. If it was not a Zombie Pub Crawl, someone should start such an event as a charity fundraiser.

Thank you to all of you who were able to attend “Food Day / Film Day” —it was a success with enthusiastic audiences seeing terrific movies and enjoying the many wonderful foods and wines we offered before the screenings. We are most interested in comments and they can be sent to ideas@eatdrinkfilms.com.

There’s nothing spooky about Jenny Hammerton’s Eat Like the Stars review of Mary and Vincent Price’s A Treasury of Great Recipes.

Robert Bloomberg created a highly entertaining reel of classic food and drink scenes from movies for our preshow and Alexander Bailey created a mix tape of appropriate songs both well-known and obscure from Animal Crackers in My Soup to I’m Always Drunk in San Francisco. See the list here.

This week we have a full issue of articles for you. We hope that you will explore them.

We are taking the month of November off to do some advance planning and web site fine-tuning. EatDrinkFilms will be live and it is a good time to catch up on articles you might have missed. We will send some suggestions and a few current events we think you’d like to know about.

Sincerely,

Gary