The Night I Ran With the Wolves

[glitter_n_gore]

Tis the night—the night
Of the grave's delight,
And the warlocks are at their play;
Ye think that without,
The wild winds shout,
But no, it is they—it is they!

Boys In the Trees is the most elegant and personal tribute to Halloween I’ve ever seen. Don’t bother telling me Halloween’s over because I don’t care. And honestly, coming back around to this movie a couple days after the day itself was strangely fitting.

I’m not going to tell you the plot. I went in cold and that’s how it should be experienced. The story is loosely constructed, more mood than action, heavily dialogue-driven, and paced like a dream. It also brought back a lot of memories of what it felt like to be a “kid” on the verge of growing up, but not quite wanting to. The fact that it’s set in the late 90s, with a grunge-industrial soundtrack to match, helps a lot.


Screenshot of a teenager in a red hoodie
facing a path in the foggy woods

What I am going to tell you is what I remember about one particular Halloween night in 1996, when I was thirteen years old. Technically too old for trick-or-treating, not old enough to be content staying home to hand out candy. That’s the theme running through Boys In the Trees: fear of growing up, coupled with fear of being left behind, compounded by fear of all the people who you’ve wronged by trying to fit in.


There’s also a theme of wolves as a metaphor for teenage boys who have grown up just enough to be cruel. The travel in packs and tear apart those weaker and smaller, no matter how they try to hide. Junior high and high school are particularly vicious times. We all grow up at such different rates. You could stand two kids the exact same age next to each other, and they look worlds apart. It’s important not to forget what that feels like, that sudden displacement when so many of your peers are eons away from you, and others are clinging to childhood things.

What do you do when the world won’t let you be a kid anymore, but still doesn’t see you as an adult? Well, that one night in 1996, I dressed up as a dead babydoll and went out to walk the streets with my friends. That’s all we could do. Walk the streets of the neighborhood for as long as we could. Somehow, our group had grown larger than just the kids I grew up with: A baby-bat with a top hat covered in spiderwebs and chunky black Doc Martens; a boy old enough to grow a beard, who showed me a curved knife with a skull molded around the handle; a tall, sweary guy who never took off his mask, and chastised us for not getting enough candy.

I don’t remember their names and I barely remember their faces. It’s possible I’m blending a few memories into one here. But believe me when I tell you there was magic in the air that night. It scared me, but it also made me feel invincible. These people weren’t my friends. After this one encounter, I never saw them again. Because of that, they’ve become almost mythical in my mind, dark creatures who melted away at sunrise. They screamed and howled, they broke bottles, they smashed pumpkins. My old friends and I stuck together in a knot at the center of this group, laughing with nervous excitement at hanging out with the Bad Kids our parents had warned us about. None of us got hurt or in trouble, if you’re wondering. We ate way too much candy, talked about nothing, and walked until we were tired enough to go home. I think I believed that if I was with the monsters, even though I wasn’t one of them, nothing else could touch me.

The thing is, they weren’t monsters. Not really. They were just kids like us, only a little wilder. For all I know, they have respectable jobs and families now. I’ll probably never know. I sometimes wonder what we mean when we talk about the loss of childhood innocence. The easy answer is it’s when you start to see the ugliness in the world that grownups try to hide for as long as they can. But I don’t think it’s that simple. I think it’s the moment you realize you can no longer believe in fairy tales, even the ones with ghosts, monsters, and dark magic. That Halloween in 1996, and that time period in my life, is when I started to feel that slipping away. That’s the loss that really hurts, and it creeps up on you slowly, like a dream you can’t quite wake up from.

The Boys In the Trees recaptures everything about how it felt to believe in that type of magic, for just one more night. It’s scary, and impossible, and perfect. Dear readers, never let anyone tell you you’re too “old” for the things you love. Don’t forget what it felt like to walk in the darkness, and run with the wolves.