Happy Halloween Spookies! Welcome to the HGB Halloween Special for 2026. In earlier specials we shared about the history of key elements of Halloween like carving pumpkins and wearing costumes and trick or treating. Then we've looked at the history of haunted attractions, vintage Halloween decor, horror hosts, and 1980s Halloween horror movies. We weren't sure what our theme was going to be this year and then we got contacted about this black comedy/horror/pseudo documentary film named Guillotine and then we had our theme: the history of the guillotine!
The guillotine is a mechanical execution device created during the French Revolution to provide a fast, equal, and supposedly humane form of decapitation. It was proposed by Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, for whom it is named, and built by German harpsichord maker Tobias Schmidt, and designed by Dr. Antoine Louis. The first prisoner was executed with it on April 25, 1792, and remained France’s official method of execution until 1981. Guillotine is an award winning film that is narrated by legendary actress Sean Young and was co-written, produced and directed by Iranian-American Filmmaker Ray Izad-Mehr (EE-zahd Mare) and I had the opportunity to interview him, which we are going to share here. This is a great film to put on tonight. It's available on TUBI. Kelly, probably the most fascinating thing about this film is this section about consciousness after the head chop. Something I had heard years ago is that it takes 3 seconds after the head is removed for death to occur and you explore this question of how long one is conscious after the beheading. Now I know that this is considered an urban legend, but one of the sections features famous French chemist Antoine Lavoisier (ahn-TWAHN lah-vwah-ZEE-ay) who was sentenced to death by the guillotine in 1794 during the French Revolution and he decided to conduct one final scientific experiment right at the scaffold: he told his assistant or colleagues that he would try to blink his eyes for as long as he remained conscious after being decapitated so they could measure how long a human head retains awareness. There are various claims that he successfully blinked anywhere from 15 to 30 seconds.
Halloween is our favorite night of the year. We've got the garage all decorated to scare the little kiddies while we dish out the candy. We hope you all have some scary or fun or both plans for tonight. There's plenty of haunts on History Goes Bump to keep you company. Happy Halloween from the crew here at HGB: me, Diane, Barnaby the Ghost, Mort the Gravedigger and our new mascot, Poe the Raven.
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