Are you scary? Take a Halloween quiz to find out

When we were younger, Halloween meant scary: Scary costumes, scary noises, a really scary intake of sugar. You wanted to both frighten and be frightened.

But these days, Halloween's all about the sex.

Chris Kula Unsung Ann Arbor

When the appeal a of fun-size Snickers bar wears off at the age of 13, the sex appeal of a sly, revealing costume takes its place, especially among those girls who conduct themselves like proper young ladies the whole year long and then simply bust out - so to speak - in a risqué get-up on Halloween.

On that one wicked night, they're less Cinderella than Sinderella, less Little Orphan Annie than Little Whore-Fun Annie and less Little Red Riding Hood than Little Red Thong Riding Up Their - whoa, Mr. Kula, how easily your mind wanders these days!

(Sorry, but nothing quite gets my devilish heart racing at this time of year like a girl decked out in horns and a pitchfork, shaking her pointy tail to Michael Jackson's "Thriller.")

Gone are our childhood days of running around the neighborhood in the name of innocent paganism. Now, everything Halloween-related has a sexual connotation to it. Trick or treat? Surely a carnal proposition. Bobbing for apples? A colloquialism for oral sex. Carving pumpkins? C'mon, now, there are freshmen reading this column.

With Halloween hookups seemingly taking precedence on this dark holiday, the question has become, "Can Halloween still be scary?" My answer: Yes, but it all depends on the person.

And by that I mean everyone has a different idea of what constitutes "scary," even in similar situations. For anyone who remembers Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," an ordinary shower can be scary. For me, a shower without hot water is scary. And for your basic patchouli-drenched hippie, the mere idea of a shower is pretty fucking scary.

Whether or not you will have a scary Halloween depends on your FQ, or Fright Quotient. Take the following FQ test and check the key at the end to see how easily you scare.

1) Your idea of a spooky haunted house is ___? A: Bed sheets strung across the gym of the local YMCA; B: The setting of nine out of 10 episodes of "Scooby Doo"; C: East Quad.

2) The scariest musical performance you've ever witnessed is ___? A: Early Alice Cooper biting the head off a chicken; B: later Alice Cooper doing "Feed My Frankenstein" in "Wayne's World"; C: The animatronic animal band at Chuck E. Cheese's, regardless of song.

3) The scariest film you've ever seen is ___? A: "The Exorcist"; B: "Weekend at Bernie's"; C: "Weekend at Bernie's 2."

4) The scariest man alive is ___? A: Christopher Walken; B: Christopher Walken; C: Christopher Walken.

5) You're afraid of the dark because ___? A: You can't tell if anyone's watching you; B: It has more calories than the regular milk chocolate; C: It reminds you of the time you went temporarily blind from drinking too much Five O'Clock vodka.

6) When you hear howling in the distance, you ___? A: Check to see if there's a full moon; B: Read some Allen Ginsberg; C: Wonder who let the dogs out.

7) When you picture a man dressed head-to-toe in black, you're thinking of ___? A: Dracula; B: Johnny Cash; C: Edward, the nihilist GSI in your Philosophy class who never speaks above a murmur, carries a pocketwatch and drinks green tea while smoking cloves.

8) When you get frightened suddenly, you usually exclaim ___? A: "Goodness me!"; B: "Fie, oh, fie!"; C: "Sweet holy Moses Malone!"

9) The name for the devil that most disturbs you is ___? A: Satan; B: Lucifer; C: Shatner.

Fright Quotient Key:

If you answered mostly A: Hi, Mom, thanks for reading.

If you answered mostly B: You may fear death, but you don't ... fear ... the reaper!

If you answered mostly C: You scare me.

- Chris Kula can be reached

via e-mail at ckula@umich.edu.

Have a Halloween kula than most.