Halloween means different things to different people. Little kids get the chance to march through the neighborhood on a mission to collect enough candy to last them weeks. Families decorate their houses with cardboard skeletons and jack-o-lanterns, while others don’t give Halloween a second thought, too busy to debate witches and ghosts.

Yet others, like Chris Stenger, bass player for Milwaukee rock foursome You’re Pretty, love Halloween for its mystery and darkness. And as an excuse to view countless horror flicks.

“I’m a big horror movie fan, I watch a lot of old zombie movies like `Night of the Living Dead’ and `Dawn of the Dead.’ It’s a good scare; it makes you feel alive and gets the adrenaline going a little,” Stenger says. “Halloween to me is fun, it’s one way I remain young.”

Vocalist Beth Musolff mentions the fact that since the band is on the road so much, it doesn’t get the chance to partake in one of her favorite Halloween activities – visiting haunted houses. Instead she has to rely on her little sister’s accounts of the ones she has visited. But Stenger, being the true scare enthusiast, quickly admits that he took in a haunted house just the other night without Beth’s knowledge.

That doesn’t mean that the band hasn’t been a part of some of its own frightful experiences on the road though, most notably its show earlier this month at the Quest in Minneapolis. Skywind, who were headlining the show, overshot its pyrotechnics and ended up catching the entire ceiling of the club on fire, which needless to say, resulted in an complete evacuation.

Things will hopefully go a little smoother for the hard-rock act when it plays at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Maintenance Shop.

You’re Pretty has played countless concerts, not just through the Midwest, but across the country. Yet the band insists that the M-Shop is ultimately one of its favorite venues to play.

“The crowd is definitely very loyal and very honest, a great crowd,” Musolff says. “The M-Shop also really knows how to treat their acts; they just cater to you, they are just very personal and they came back stage and hang out and [M-Shop Coordinator] Eric Yarwood has become a very good friend of the band because of that.”

A lot has happened for the group since its appearance at the M-Shop last fall. They signed a distribution deal overseas for their most recent record, “Beautiful Accident,” with Tolerance Records and are also planning a June tour of England.

The group is also very close to signing a similar distribution deal with Scarab Records in the United States.

The band took part in one of the biggest music festivals in the nation over the summer when it played Summerfest in its hometown of Milwaukee. Summerfest is a 10-day festival that brings in a huge mixture of both national and unsigned acts. G Love and Special Sauce, Tom Petty and Saliva were just a handful of the artists that played.

You’re Pretty got the chance to play on July 4, sandwiched right between the up-and-coming metal band Skrape and rock group Stabbing Westward.

“It was very cool and the guys in Stabbing Westward were very cool too,” Musolff says. “The singer sat at the side of the stage and watched our whole set. You have to be very leery when you open for a national act because a lot of the fans are hard-core fans and just there to see that act but everybody was very receptive and a lot, I mean a lot of You’re Pretty fans were there.”

“You had two different kinds of crowds in that you had the metal crowd for Skrape and then the more pop/rock crowd for Stabbing Westward and us in between,” Stenger adds. “We were waiting to start hearing the cat calls or whatever but it didn’t happen.”

And although the group released “Beautiful Accident” less than a year ago, they have loads of new material they are anxious to record. Two of those new songs will be debuted this weekend at the M-Shop.

“Our new music has become a little harsher, not hard-edged in sound, but just a little more jaded,” Stenger says.

While the group is going through a bit of a change in musical style, it also thinks that it is going through a bit of an image change, trying to stray away little by little from the dark gothic image that has followed them since their breakthrough.

Although the band’s stage attire usually consists of all black dress, the members have stated numerous times in interviews that You’re Pretty isn’t goth.

But it will make for perfect match for the M-Shop’s Halloween party Saturday night, where concert patrons are encouraged to show off their Halloween costumes.

The members of You’re Pretty might even get into the spirit with costumes of their own. Stenger made quite an impression in his hometown the time he dressed up like Michael Myers from the “Halloween” series and wandered around town at 11 p.m., eventually provoking townspeople to call the cops on him.

Musolff’s history of dressing up isn’t quite as notorious as Stenger’s, but she did dress up as a toilet for one Halloween and as a dead person complete with casket in grade school. Saturday’s costume is up in the air, although she might rebel against the band’s stereotypical media image.

“Maybe I’ll wear all pink, you think? Like a pink dress – that would be a good costume.”