We hit 7,000,000,000 people today. How’s that for some Halloween horror?

Well it scares the shit out of me. And it’s not just because I’m a misanthrope who doesn’t like the idea of being stuck on the same hunk of space rock with that many assholes. Rather, I’m terrified of the next wave of children that will be showing up at my door every October 31, looking for a handout. It gets worse and worse every year.

My wife bought so much shitty candy this Halloween (shitty so we wouldn’t be tempted to eat it ourselves) I thought we’d never get rid of it all. Normally we get a few hundred kids in our area. This time around we got hit by that many in the first forty minutes. We were cleaned out by a quarter past seven, and the streets were still packed with the sugar-fuelled piranhas. The feeding frenzy was so brief and intense, it hardly seemed worth my ten minutes of effort to butcher an innocent pumpkin into something reasonably jack-o-lanterny.

As always, I made a careful tally of the costumes on parade. My favourite this year was the kid dressed as Don Cherry. At least, I assume he was supposed to be Don Cherry. He was a clown in a hockey jersey so I think I made a fair assumption there. I like to take this annual opportunity to tap into the psyche of today’s youth to see which costumes most commonly appeal their pop-culture ravaged hive mind. In reverse order, here was tonight’s top ten:

10) Cowboy (An oldie but a goodie. Sadly, most of them were of the Sheriff Woody variety.)

9) Robot (Like Apple hasn’t already turned everybody into one of those with all their iShit.)

8) Trailer Trash (At least, I keep telling myself those were costumes.)

7) Darth Vader (Nooooooooooo! You’ll only encourage George to keep reissuing those damn movies.)

6) Various Harry Potter characters (Yes, still. It’s over. Please stop.)

5) Fairy Princess (Disney Inc. scrambles the brains of yet another generation of young girls.)

4) Spider-Man (The web-head blew away the superhero competition. Batman, Iron Man, Thor and Green Lantern only made one appearance each.)

3) Skeleton (Or, arguably, an Eating Disorder. Take your pick.)

2) Pirate (I guess the kiddies still like those Johnny-Depp-cashes-a-paycheck movies.)

But it was the number one most popular Halloween costume of 2011 that shocked the hell out me, so to speak.

1) The Devil

Boys, girls, the tiny five-year-olds, the giant teenagers, and at least one parent — they all wanted to hit the town and paint it devil-red. I was beginning to wonder if there was a fire sale on eternal damnation over at Walmart, but there was too much variety in evidence. These weren’t off-the-rack one-sin-fits-all getups. They were cobbled together do-in-yourself Beelzebubs and Belphegors. And it pleased me greatly. It was sinister, it was horror related, it was on-topic. And it had nothing to do with sparkling vampires or beefcake werewolves.

Satan had his night, so suck it you Jesus Ween tools. Eat shit you anti-scary-costume Calgary schools. And kindly suck my balls all you Christian fanatics who freak out every time anybody has anything critical to say about Christmas or Easter, but then turn around and fuck with my spooky pagan candy fest.

The horror nuts and gore hounds have taken back the night. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to spend the rest of that night melting my brain with another half-dozen crappy monster movies.

Pwned! All Your Soul Are Belong To Us.