Well, here we are nostalgic nuggets! Another year and another nostalgic Halloween giveaway is upon us, However, this one is a little special to me because NN is celebrating five years old on the giant interwebs!
This calls for some bony booty slappin’.
Back in 2014, a friend of mine pitched the idea of me writing for a horror website that was looking for writers, and it wasn’t a tiny website either. It had a rather well-established following and although that was a little intimidating; I said fuck it, why not? Who cares that I had ZERO experience writing a blog or for any website. I was knowledgeable, passionate and said fuck a lot. That’s pretty much all you need to write about horror movies, right? My first piece was of course, about the “Scary Stories To Tell In the Dark” books and the owner loved it so much he took me on as a regular writer, and later one of the three head editors for the site, which had grown from 300,000 followers when I joined, to over 4 million to when I departed.
Why leave a good thing, you may ask? Well, I had already dipped my toes into other horror websites, very well-known ones, written for a couple horror magazines, and staying where I was would just leave me stagnant and unfulfilled. I wasn’t freely able to express myself and rant about the things I wanted to scream and with the toxic environment that is the internet, I wanted to build an escape mechanism for people like me to walk down memory lane, and get those nostalgic fuzzies about the first time they walked the aisles of their Mom and Pop Video Store. Or perhaps the first time they ever watched THE FUNHOUSE. Or hell, that time you actually tried out some of Maurice’s pranks from LITTLE MONSTERS on your parents. These are the little things that we remember that make life a little less shitty, and the community we’ve built here together into an army of nostalgic nuggets makes my pet monster heart melt. So, in return, I’ve gathered up a pretty cool giveaway to readers that have followed me for a decade, and those just discovering this snake pit of utter nostalgic madness!
For a little context, I wanted to make this easy and just post a picture on Facebook, but the Zuck is cracking down on those types of posts and flagging them as spam. But honestly, this kinda works out, so I could write an essay on the gratitude that I have for all of you.
Anyway, let’s get to it! Here’s the haul that is a perfect nostalgic Halloween treat for some lucky person! Rules are posted at the bottom of the page!
First up is a Frankenstein mash-up of a 1993 McDonald’s Halloween Pail with a Carl’s JR handle from their line of Halloween buckets from the same year! It’s one-of-a-kind, and I can almost guarantee probably no one else has sitting in their bedroom right now.
A Jason Voorhees coffee mug since there’s a Friday the 13th in October and a plushy handpicked by me because nothing wakes you up faster than a Leatherface in your cup.
MONSTER CRUNCH! THE BREAKFAST BATTLE GAME featuring our Monster Cereal heroes! If you’re not into board games, the pieces included in the box itself are worth just staring at for hours.
Something old and something new! Next up, we have the Unofficial Horror Movie Coloring Book that is filled with AMAZING pages of drawn art from our favorite horror movies for you to color in! Also, is a copy of a Universal Monsters Frightening Facts Movie Book from 1992! If this doesn’t ring a bell, also how dare you, this is a quiz book essentially where you take the marker, choose a question and pick an answer, and color over it and see if you got it right! Plus it’s got some sick cut-outs of all the Universal Monsters!
And finally, some handpicked NN favorites from my own collection because it ain’t Halloween without some slasher movies! Blu-ray of HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH, a first pressing copy DVD of HALLOWEEN 666: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS, and the killer cut Blu-ray of 2009’s FRIDAY THE 13TH!
The Rules:
Obviously, I wanted to keep this open to as many people as possible so all you have to do to enter is to do one, or all of the following- if you do all four that means you get four entries!
- Comment on this blog post your favorite Halloween memory!
- Share this post on Facebook from the original post on NN’s facebook page! (must be public for me to see)
- Share the NN’s giveaway post on Instagram! Look for my post regarding the giveaway @nightmarenostalgia
- Tweet this out on Twitter. Or X. Or whatever the fuck it’s being called today.
Must be a US resident and the contest will run from Friday, October 13th, 2023 until Monday, October 16th. Good luck nuggets and thanks for sticking around to hear me rant about Halloween 4 500 times!
Nightmare Nostalgia 
I remember getting a witch’s mask recipe from the back of a box of cocoa crispies. It was basically a mud mask my mom applied on me that then had breakfast cereal sprinkled all over it. I looked like a pox riddled beauty store disaster and it itched like a sumbitch, but I was thrilled with it. Next to my little sister who went as a clown, I was pretty fuckin terrifying.
Love your blog and appreciate all you do for us nostalgia nuggets! -Jon
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ha, I remember that same thing
LikeLike
I’ve had this Halloween candy bag since I was a toddler. I’m pretty sure my Aunt purchased from Old Navy. The bag has these lines to mark different levels of Halloween candy collected. Every year I would keep an eye on the candy to see how high and to which line I could get my candy!
LikeLiked by 1 person
🎃🎃🎃
Halloween III: Season of the Witch is my goto favorite SpOoKy time movie. Followed by The Thing in 2nd. For 3rd I will go with the Evil Dead trilogy. I know you asked for my FAVORITE Halloween movie and I gave you a 1st, 2nd, & 3rd. We’ll Hell I actually named 5 movies since third place was a trilogy. Consider it the Trick part of Trick or Treat. 👻
LikeLike
I grew up in a very rural area. We didn’t walk door to door, to trick or treat, because we didn’t have neighbors lol! I remember how excited I was when I moved to a city for the first time (I was 19) & kids were out everywhere on Halloween! It was a surreal moment for me, because I had never seen that before. I thought it was something that only took place in tv shows and in movies. I had no idea that groups of kids going around trick or treating was a real thing!😂
LikeLike
My favorite memory is our made up costumes because we couldn’t afford store bought. When my brother was 9 or 19, he went as Dolly Parton. I was a punk rocker with a Mohawk and crazy makeup.
LikeLike
Not sure that I actually have one favorite Halloween memory as I had the BEST time taking my kids trick or treating when they were young. Just the pure joy on their faces as they made their way around the neighborhood made me happy and left me with amazing memories!
Happy Friday the 13th and thank you SO much for the chance to win this fun prize package!
LikeLike
I always think back to my mom sewing me a handmade Teen Wolf costume. She bought some of the brown furry fabric from the store and made elbow length fingerless gloves, I painted my nails black, mad little ankle cuffs to be furry around my high tops under my jeans, and made me a complete over head cowl/mask with eye holes and a bigger space for my mouth and nose. Painted my nose brown and put little whisker dots and details on my upper lip and face and around my eyes. I wish I had pics, but I felt like the coolest little dude in sixth grade.
LikeLike
Favorite Halloween memory – taking my four boys for hours in the Chicago snow and they wouldn’t give up!
LikeLike
My favorite Halloween memory is going trick or treating with my cousins when we were kids.
LikeLike
My favorite memory was just walking for what seemed miles and many streets over from our neighborhood and all unsupervised! In my mind, it seemed we walked till midnight, but I’m sure we were done much earlier than that. It felt like an adventure!
LikeLike
Favorite would have to be the smell of those 80s/90s costumes combined with that unforgettable scent of heated pumpkin innards hit with those candles burnin strong!
LikeLike
Taking my girlfriend to see the new Suspiria for Halloween in 2018. It was one of the best horror experiences I’ve had in the theatre in a long time.
LikeLike
I remember browsing the Halloween merchandise at the local pharmacy down the street from my house. Kodo Pharmacy was my very own version of Vincent Drug Store. Looking through the Beistle die-cut Halloween decorations was by far my favorite memory and I still have my very first flocked wolfman die cut that I bought when I was about ten. Good times!
LikeLike
A fav Halloween memory of mine is watching Salem’s Lot on tv for the first time around Halloween time. It made going out on Halloween night that much more scary for me!
LikeLike
Reading all these memories made me happy. I’ve had many good Halloweens but I think a favorite would be when we had a really cold one in Texas and my parents took a group of us trick-or-treating first to the “rich” neighborhoods, then back to our own. We were LOADED with candy and topped the night off with a bonfire, roasted marshmallows, and my dad scaring the HELL out of us in an old gorilla mask (which, as you know, was way more terrifying than today’s masks 🤣)
LikeLike
My favorite memory are those plastic 80’s costumes. The more I walked the more that princess costume ripped. By the end of the night I was Shredder lol.
LikeLike