90s Halloween: costumes, candy, school parties, and the TV that made the season Alex kicks off a nostalgia-heavy look at what made Halloween in the 1990s feel bigger than a single night. He traces how costumes, trick-or-treating, school events, decorations, and TV specials worked together to turn October into a month-long ritual. This episode is a solo reflection from Alex, blending personal memories with pop culture history. He also closes with a top-five 90s Halloween candy ranking and a broader argument that the decade’s Halloween worked because it felt communal, homemade, and unpolished.

Key topics

• In this episode, Alex revisits how Hocus Pocus became a Halloween tradition despite bombing in theaters in July 1993, with only about $8 million opening weekend and roughly $39 million total on a $28 million budget.
• He argues that 90s Halloween was built by reruns, school parties, neighborhood participation, and the shared ritual of costume planning and candy hunting.
• He compares store-bought box costumes with homemade costumes, making the case that the boxed costume was the most iconic because it was instantly recognizable and tied to whatever character was popular that year.
• He remembers the costume eras of the decade: Ninja Turtles, Batman, Power Rangers, and late-90s Scream masks.
• He contrasts the classic orange plastic pumpkin bucket with the pillowcase, framing the pillowcase as the serious trick-or-treating strategy for maximum candy.
• He describes how Halloween looked different depending on where you grew up, including apartment buildings, schoolwide trick-or-treating, and classroom candy swaps.
• He highlights the “full-size candy bar house” as neighborhood legend and breaks candy into tiers, from premium name brands to the unwanted leftovers like candy corn, hard butterscotch, toothbrushes, and raisins.
• He reflects on school Halloween culture, including hallway decorations, classroom parties, costume parades, art projects, and paper pumpkins taped to windows.
• He explains why Halloween cartoons felt so special in the 90s, especially The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror, where writers got permission to go darker, funnier, and more chaotic than usual.
• He closes by arguing that Halloween in the 90s felt communal because nearly everyone in the neighborhood participated, from parents and teachers to store owners and grandparents.

• “Halloween in the 90s was one of the last nights of the year that belonged to everybody in the neighborhood.”
• “The costume was never really about the costume. It was permission for one night.”
• “We didn’t wait for the calendar. We just decided what Halloween was.”

1. Reese’s peanut butter cups
2. Snickers
3. Skittles
4. Warheads
5. Ring Pops and Push Pops

• Airheads
• Kit Kat
• Twix
• Sour Patch Kids
• Nerds
• Crunch

• Candy corn
• Hard butterscotch
• Toothbrushes
• Fruit snacks
• Popcorn balls

The 90s gave us some of the greatest horror movies ever made, and today I rank my Top 10 and defend every pick. From Misery to The Silence of the Lambs, this is Scream Season. What was the 90s horror movie that actually got you? The one where you ran from the light switch to the bed?

THE LIST

10. Misery (1990)

9. Candyman (1992)

8. Interview with the Vampire (1994)

7. The Blair Witch Project (1999)

6. I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

5. Se7en (1995)

4. Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994)

3. Scream (1996)

2. The Sixth Sense (1999)

1. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Also in this episode: - Did You Know Though: three October facts from the decade, including Anthony Hopkins' screen time in Silence of the Lambs and the Blair Witch budget-to-box-office math - Top 5 Horror Scenes from the 90s That Are Still Living in Your Body - Why the 90s understood what made horror work: dread, ideas that follow you home, and villains who win

Chapters

• 00:00 The Essence of 90s Horror
• 07:12 Ranking the Top Horror Films
• 11:04 Cultural Commentary in Horror
• 15:19 The Evolution of Horror Techniques
• 43:20 The Impact of Iconic Scenes

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1993 was the year the 90s stopped feeling like the 80s' little brother and started feeling like the future. Jurassic Park, Mortal Monday, Wu-Tang, Bane breaking Batman's back, and the World Wide Web going public, all in one year. Episode 16 of In Case I Missed It: 90s Edition is the full 1993 recap, plus a spooky season flashback to October 1993.

Here's what we cover:

🎬 Movies: Jurassic Park and Schindler's List in the same year, The Fugitive, Mrs. Doubtfire, Free Willy, Addams Family Values, Dazed and Confused, Cool Runnings, Demolition Man.

🎮 Video games: The Sega vs. Super Nintendo console wars, Mortal Monday and the blood code, the Senate hearings that created the ESRB, Doom, NBA Jam, Star Fox, and the two completely different Aladdin games.

📚 Comics: Knightfall and Batman #497, Reign of the Supermen, the adamantium rip in X-Men, Maximum Carnage, and the speculator boom.

🎵 Music: Nirvana's In Utero and MTV Unplugged, Doggystyle, Wu-Tang's 36 Chambers, A Tribe Called Quest, Pearl Jam's Vs., Mariah Carey, Tag Team's "Whoomp! There It Is," and the lost art of taping songs off the radio.

📺 TV & culture: The X-Files, Frasier, Beavis and Butt-Head, Animaniacs, Power Rangers, TGIF, and the day CERN gave the web to the world.

🎃 Spooky Season, October 1993: Hocus Pocus, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Treehouse of Horror IV, and The Halloween Tree.

We also pull the receipts. Other shows remember the 90s wrong, and we get the dates, the facts, and the details right.

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Next week: Episode 17, Scream Season: the Top 10 Horror Films of the 90s.

New episodes drop every Saturday. Subscribe so you never miss one, and leave a 5-star review if you grew up in the 90s.

Chapters

• 00:00 Welcome to Spooky Season
• 01:58 Reliving 1993: A Cultural Snapshot
• 06:54 The Cinematic Marvels of 1993
• 10:28 The Musical Revolution of 1993
• 15:41 The Video Game Wars of 1993