MGWCC #850

 

hello, and welcome to episode #850 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 2 puzzle (but aimed at week 1 difficulty) called “Friday the 13th”—appropriately enough, since that’s the day it came out. what are the theme answers? the grid contained five long (13+ letter) across answers:

• {French Revolution period} REIGN OF TERROR.
• {Like serial killers in slasher pics} STARK RAVING MAD.
• {“We were just talking about you!”} SPEAK OF THE DEVIL.
• {Greeting from a jack-o-lantern, maybe} HAPPY HALLOWEEN.
• {Makes spooky wolf sounds} BAYS AT THE MOON.

all five of these answers are somewhat spookily tinged, with the possible exception of SPEAK OF THE DEVIL (which at least contains the word DEVIL). anyway, the meta is just about as simple as it could be: just take the 13th letter of each of these five answers and read them off to get RAVEN, which is along the same somewhat-spooky lines as the rest of the theme.

friday the 13th happens about once every seven months on average (and of course, it’s always the second friday of the month when it does happen), and this feels like just about the simplest possible mechanism you could base off of that phrase. so i suppose it’s sensible to do this in a month where matt wanted a week 2 that was really a week 1. given that in some sense there are only five squares of theme material in the grid, it makes sense to impose some further thematic constraint on the long answers, hence the theme of “vaguely unsettling”/horror-adjacent.

that’s all i’ve got this week, except to say: RIP, james earl jones.