Inside Montreal, journalist Louis-Philippe Messier mainly travels on the run, his office in his backpack, searching for fascinating subjects and people. He talks to everyone and cares about every walk of life in this urban history.
Halloween, for normal mortals, is a party. For Montreal Garrett Mann, it’s a call.
His passion for “Day of the Dead” even earned him…a career!
Mr. Mann organized Halloween parties that were so successful, starting in 1997, that city theaters wanted to recruit him.
Photo by Emilie Lapointe
Garrett Man’s Halloween parties in Montreal have already gathered nearly a thousand costumed attendees, and they’re making some pretty cool photos.
At the age of 25, in 2002, “Monsieur Halloween” was already directing the programming of Club Soda. go ahead.
“At first, I just wanted to have a good Halloween party, but it went way beyond what I expected!” Mr. Mann laughs.
This English-speaking from Deux-Montagnes has always attended the French school.
He even has a special affection for his youth films (like Back to the future where Ghostbusters) dubbed in French dripping with Parisian colloquial.
“Halloween is the mark of my time in life. It replaces my birthday.”
When the pandemic prevented his big annual party for two years in a row, Garrett Mann took it as a vacation:
“Normally, with everything I organize, it’s a crazy 7/7 day rush, never stopping until Halloween…and there, I could see the leaves and the apple picking!”
Last Saturday, Montreal found the big traditional Halloween party, so it was crazy again for Mr. Man.
old school
This year’s Halloween party has been called old school (“old fashioned”) and based on cinema themes from the 80s and 90s.
“It was a fight of the ’90s against the ’80s with two DJs engaging in a musical duel with the repertoire of those decades.”
All tickets were already sold out a few days before the event, which took place at the Plaza Theatre, in Plaza St Hubert.
These parties are often almost full, so you need to plan a little in advance. You will know for the next year.
Festival around the party
This year, Mr. Mann, a film studies graduate from the University of Montreal, produced the twenty-first filme A copy of the SPASM Extraordinary Short Film Festival, which he founded himself.
The SPASM Festival fills rooms with enthusiastic people screaming, laughing and applauding genre films made by young Quebec filmmakers.
Photo by Valerie Leclerc
Pumpkin on his head, Garrett Mann, Mr. Halloween, stands on his unusual film festival poster, SPASM.
It was initially for the infamous Halloween party that Mr. Man wanted to serve up the horror movies of the day before, but soon these cinematic aperitifs became bigger and more important than the party itself.
After several years managing the CISM university radio station and KINO, Mr. Mann started a new job as director of the Cinéma Moderne, a new 55-seat independent auditorium with café-bar on Saint-Laurent Boulevard.
This Halloween fanatic suggests a way to avoid the excitement of this holiday or put it off if you happen to fall on a Monday:
“That All Saints [1er novembre] Become a legal holiday! “
“Amateur entrepreneur. Professional internet expert. Zombie maven. Incurable pop culture scholar.”
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