They're watching you.

The uninitiated moviegoer might toss out a dig at silent films, and be heard speaking dismissively of black-and-white movies. It's a juvenile offense. But nobody jokes about The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Weine's 1920 horror film and an early gem of German Expressionism. That influential movement sought to convey mood, emotion, and psychology through the lighting and sets, an approach that directors of film noir copied a couple decades later.

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yandy.com

We're not the type of person to harp on slutty Halloween costumes. We frankly don't give a damn about whether you think wearing a silver bikini makes you an "astronaut" because, let's be honest, Halloween is a holiday about getting laid, just like New Year's Eve, and National Feral Cat Day. If slutting up Big Bird helps you accomplish that, then, well, we can't say we applaud it, but we do understand. With that in mind, we present to you the most downright laughable "sexy" Halloween costumes this year. Because now we have uncomfortable images of Sesame Street characters in our head and we don't want to be the only ones.

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Jose A Guzman Colon

In his Halloween! The Ballad of Michele Myers, drag performer Raya Light brings a bunch of people to their deaths, but, more importantly, he brings the 1980s back to life. Dunn cherishes the glory decade for its music, sitcoms, slasher flicks, political incorrectness, and its San Francisco Halloween spirit, which has changed for the worse, he says, now that "so many people come in to gawk."

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Daniel Hollister/Flickr

In the spirit of Halloween, we present to you life advice from a zombie, who may not have all the answers, but he's definitely got the brains.

I used to have the most beautiful girlfriend in the whole world. I feel like I have too high of a standard now with who I choose to date. I've been single for two years. What do I do?

Beauty is important in a relationship because it is what originally attracts us to each other. It can also help keep the flame lit during those rough times (all relationships have them). So physical appearance does have some importance. But honestly, all that really matters is a girl's brains.

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Claire Rice

Zombie mine!

Did the season premiere of The Walking Dead leave you with a craving? Not to worry. The fine folks of San Francisco Theater Pub have your back. Over the last couple years they've done an amazing job filling the theater week's dark nights with cold pints and footlights, interpreting the works of Václav Havel, Alfred Jarry, Euripides, Sophocles, and the Bard in an atmosphere that makes all that sophistication pretty easy to swallow. And we're not just talking about the tasty victuals from their rotating pop-up kitchens.

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October calls for scares, and despite the very scary state of the world, there is still a desire for entertainment that frightens us. Here we look at the broad, deep legacy of horror comics in a series that delves into the genre's many variations and highlights from the 1940s to the present.

Jack Cole

The expansive visual format of comic books, along with the fact that they are published serially, encourages sprawling, epic stories with dozens of characters and webs of subplots. The possibility of epic storytelling in comics has served the horror genre particularly well. Several key horror epics have sold well, but, more importantly, stand as lasting contributions to the genre as a whole.

With the 1888 Jack the Ripper killings as its basis, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell (1991-96) firmly broke from mainstream horror such as Tales from the Crypt and The Tomb of Dracula by taking a serious, historical approach to its subject. Moore's text is tight, literate, and deeply couched in English social history. Campbell's impressionistic black-and-white art evokes the London fog, the shadowy halls of ritual and power, and the inherent creepiness of the British royal family.

From Hell ravenously chews up and reassembles facets of the Jack the Ripper story -- many true, some famous speculation, and others invented. Moore and Campbell make familiar material compelling by creating characters who feel real, as opposed to just being types. And From Hell is nothing if not a series of miniature, detailed biographies, all of which interlock in ways that will seem surprising, even to those familiar with the Ripper story.

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wwarby / Flickr

Zillow recently rated San Francisco as the best place in the nation for trick-or-treating, but its reasoning wasn't all that clear. Our immediate guess was "Noe Valley." There are more high-end baby strollers in Noe Valley these days than cars, bicycles, and scooters combined. But we soon realized that would be a mark against the nouveau-something neighborhood -- think of the gridlock that thousands of little vehicles would cause, factor in the very steep hill between 19th and 24th streets, then multiply that by every parent believing his or her kid is The Most Important Child on the Planet. Sounds like a better place for personal injury lawyers to look for business.

Erin Sherbert at our sister blog, The Snitch, looked into it a little further and came up with five reasons our city ranks first for candy and kids. The first one has to do with training kids to be panhandlers, or something like that. Regardless, read it before you go out tonight -- and if you're heading to Noe Valley, bring a lawyer.

Jeff Dwyer

We've asked a lot of people living or working in allegedly haunted places whether they've experienced anything ghostly, and the answer is often immediate and absolute: No. Nothing. Not even close. Then the back-pedaling begins. It starts with a phrase like, There was this one time, though ... and ends with something like ... I just knew someone was there.

That's what most of ghost-hunting is: standing still in dark places, waiting for tiny sensations, sounds, or visions -- not being pushed down the stairs by a translucent guy with a long beard and red eyes wearing a tattered black overcoat. Jeff Dwyer knows this. He also knows a lot of places to look for ghosts, and some advanced ways to digitally record subtle (and possibly paranormal) things that our all-too-human eyes and ears might miss. He appears today at Books Inc. Opera Plaza.

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For original Halloween costume ideas this year, look to the far East -- Hong Kong especially, for inspiration. Movies over there are always replete with a cornucopia of ragtag characters drawn from Wuxia mythology and Chinese folklore, and they all wear fantastic outfits. It really is surprising that some of Martial Arts cinema's most iconic personalities have not become a part of standard Halloween wardrobe. To get you started on newfound movie-geek/Halloween-party respect, here are some characters to model after:

Bride with White Hair: In this ultraviolent, fantasy Romeo and Juliet-esque love story, Bridget Lin is a deadly assassin who in a fit of romantic rage morphs into a white-haired fiend with supernatural attacking prowess. Supplies needed: a wig with four-foot-long white hair, plenty of face powder, and an optional pyrotechnics team to make your entry as grand as possible.

Be sure to walk up to the boring Darth Vader impersonator and strangle him with your hair.

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I used to work in a costume shop. We had to wear outfits from the store throughout the month of October, and I quickly exhausted all the slightly slutty options my 16-year-old self was daring enough to wear. It got to the point where I was willing to call in sick rather than shimmy into another French Maid or Little Bo Peep outfit. The experience made me so uncomfortable that I started making my own costumes, and it's much more fun than grabbing one off the rack.

Here are five last minute ideas (for guys and girls) that won't bust your bank account. Most items you can easily find in a thrift store, but some will require a trip to the craft store, the dollar store, or even the costume store.

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