Antlers, fur, and nails;
teeth, hooves, and tails. 
A jangle of bells,
a clattering of bones,
a shuffling of straw.

What separates human from beast?

As long as civilization has defined what it is to be human, humans have harbored a longing for our wild past. In remote villages throughout Europe, the Wild Man persists, as Carnivalesque processions of Kukuri, Wildermann, Pelzmartel, and Schnappviecher to remind us that we can never quite shed our animal DNA. To prepare for battle, Norsemen once donned “the bear shirt” (literally the “ber-serk”) exchanging the mantle of civilization for the potency of their animal past. More often, though, the Wild Thing affirms life over death, celebrating rites of fertility, safeguarding the herds, or simply reminding us to love life’s most basic and visceral gifts. Like vines creeping from beneath the sidewalk cracks, the Wild Thing persists and pushes through our consciousness where and when he can. Fearsome, ribald, and capricious, the he/she/it rekindles for a moment the mixture of fear, awe, and desire that mirrors our complex relationship to nature itself.

These days, as we increasingly experience our world via tiny screens and dwell in virtual realities, we need the Wild Thing, more than ever, to return us the re­alm of the physical, the visceral, the material. Like Max in his Wolf Suit, it is time for us to make a little mischief, to let the bedposts grow into trees as the rectangular confines our little rooms give way to a bigger, wilder, and realer world.

The Village Halloween Parade has always been a wild place, but this year we call on our revelers to put on your bear-shirts, don your horns and antlers, your cloaks of fur and straw. Official Parade Puppeteers Superior Concept Monsters will lead the way with a clanging, shambling, bestiary of towering Wild Things, inspired by extant wildermann traditions ranging from Sardinia to Siberia. Our own troupe of wolf-suited Maxes, torn between civilization and wildness, will try to keep them in check, corralling them occasionally into a frenzied, stamping herd, only to have them break free again – as our true natures always will.

Let the Wild Rumpus begin!