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Oct 31, 2013 Web Exclusive By Mark Redfern

We sent out the same set of Halloween-related questions to a bunch of different musicians. All Halloween week we are posting their responses. Here are some spooky answers from Nini Fabi, Ben Gebert, and Garrett Ienner of HAERTS.

What was the best Halloween costume you ever dressed up in and/or what was the best Halloween you ever had?

Nini Fabi: Halloween 2012 was by far our favorite and purest Halloween experience. We walked over the Williamsburg Bridge into the Lower East Side and since the city was blacked out at the time there was a point on the middle of the bridge where everything went pitch black. In the city there were no lights, no cars, almost no people and everything was wrapped in a silence that New York never knows. It was us together with Jean-Philip [Grobler] and Patti [Beranek] from St. Lucia, and when it almost got a bit too creepy we saw a dim light in a window. As we walked towards it, we realized that it was a bar that was candle-lit and serving warm liquor and wine to anyone who came in. We had amateurishly painted our faces and shared two wigs amongst six people. We sat down at a table and each told our personal encounters with magic and the supernatural. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh.

What was the worst Halloween costume you ever dressed up in and/or what was the worst Halloween you ever had?

Nini: In a way last year’s Halloween was also the worst as it was the start of a very hard time for many New Yorkers and people all over who were affected by the hurricane.

What do you plan to dress up as for Halloween this year?

Nini: I never plan it until the day of.

Garrett Ienner: It’s fun to see how creative you can be with the things in your closet and very little time.

What have you always wanted to dress up as for Halloween but never had the guts and/or resources to pull off?

Ben Gebert: I always wanted to dress up as a bathtub but it has not come to fruition so far.

What’s your favorite scary movie?

Garrett: Candyman scared me more than any other movie, and I’ve never seen the film. I just heard about the plot and my relationship with the mirror was a burden for years. The scariest things are really in your own mind.

Nini: The Last Unicorn was the scariest movie for me at the time I first saw it. It’s from the ‘80s and it is rated G, but I was around six years old and certain images just burned themselves into my memory.

What’s your favorite spooky song?

Nini: We just watched the Buffalo Bill scene from The Silence of the Lambs the other day when we took a break from recording new demos for our album. It features the Q Lazzarus song “Goodbye Horses” and it’s definitely a very creepy song. Maybe it is less spooky than psychotically charged but it is definitely haunting, especially in the context of the movie.

Garrett: That scene—all the elements are so well wrapped up with that song! It’s perverted and unsettling but sensual and oddly arousing at the same time. It’s comical even though there is a woman trapped at the bottom of a hole—waiting to be murdered, skinned, and turned into a dress—whose only hope of escaping is torturing her captor’s fluffy bichon frisé! It all works so well together, that the scene and the song can never be dissociated. It touches so many of our buttons.

www.haertsmusic.com