Halloween is on a Saturday this month. That might not mean a lot to kids who are going to be done trick-or-treating by 8 p.m. or adults who define a holiday by its paid-day-off value.

But it means a lot to me. Halloween is my favorite holiday, and as a member of that cabal of adults who still love the childlike aspects of the imagination-firing holiday, I look forward to those years when it actually falls on a night that doesn’t involve me worrying about the following day. I can give candy to the kids, and not be concerned about showing up to Roger’s block party too late, the awkward guy arriving to a shindg that’s been over for two hours because everybody has to get up for work the next day.

But “adult Halloween” seems a little, erm, dead this year. The cable channels that usually run horror movies starting around the first of the month have been derelict – look, I love Anthony Hopkins’ Magic as much as the next die-hard, but AMC seems to have abandoned Fear Fridays completely, and Syfy (what’s up with that “redesign” BTW, I coulda killed it for half the price) is running pretty much regular programming under the false aegis of their Halloween-centric marketing plan. Yeah, they’re rolling out new shows like Stargate Universe, and new seasons of Sanctuary, but none of it is particularly horror-themed or Halloween-centric, so, you know … WTF?

I don’t ask for much. I sit through hours of bad horror movies looking for the kernel of originality or creativity – looking for something good to say about a genre that increasingly lends itself to dismissiveness. Because I LOVE IT. And I wait for Halloween to fall on a weekend night because I figure other horror-fied adults do the same, and will treat it with a little extra-special action because our schedules might permit. But nobody at all is stepping up this year; it’s as if Halloween is actually less important to grownups this time around, despite the fact that we’re going to be able to celebrate it with both our kids and our adult friends.