It was the early evening of 31 October and I was three years old, sitting in the living room with Mum, on the brink of bedtime, when I turned to the corner and a decorative wicker armchair. (It was the 1980s.) ‘Mum,’ I enquired sweetly, ‘who’s that man sitting there?’ Mum, suitably unnerved, asked me for details about the invisible guest, whereupon I outlined a farmer resembling every description Mum had heard of her great-grandfather. Her great-grandfather was a 19th-century ploughman who worked the fields where our home would later be built. My parents had never spoken of him in my presence.
I have no recollection of that night beyond maternal retellings, but I like to think I was getting into the Halloween spirit at an early age, trying to scare the bejesus out of Mum and just got lucky with the great-grandfather thing. That is what Halloween is about after all: scariness. Or at least it used to be. I can’t be the only one to have noticed that it is increasingly being elbowed out by something called ‘spooky season’. It’s been creeping into frame for some time now, like a masked maniac closing in on the unsuspecting heroine of a slasher movie, only far more sinister.
The plot to Disneyfy Halloween is a wholly adult phenomenon. Children love the menacing and the macabre
Next is flogging ‘Spooky Season’ sweatshirts while Dunkin’ Donuts is serving up 12 ghoulishly glazed treats billed as the ‘Spooky Season Dozen’. Birlinn, Virago and Audible are pushing horror-themed books for ‘spooky season’. Teen Vogue has taken time out of extolling Maoism to the TikTok generation to recommend ‘17 Best Scary TV Shows on Netflix This Spooky Season’, while Netflix itself announces that ‘Spooky Season Has Arrived with Netflix & Chills 2024’.
The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan is at it, and so is the British Library in London. The Royal Zoological Society of Scotland wants us to ‘celebrate spooky season at Edinburgh Zoo’ while the RSPB urges us to ‘look out for wildlife this spooky season’. Gwent constabulary reminds Halloween celebrants that not everyone wants to participate in ‘spooky season’. The term is used by the New York Times and the FT. It’s even used by reputable newspapers like the New York Post. Oh, and BBC iPlayer’s Halloween offerings? ‘Spooky Season.’
I’m all spooked out. To every thing there is a season, and the time to trick and the time to treat is called Halloween. In its defence, I suspect ‘spooky season’ began as a well-intentioned attempt to extend the Halloween fun beyond just one night and give it a decent run-up like Christmas. This I fully endorse. With apologies to Wizzard, to hell with Christmas; I wish it could be Samhain every day. Halloween fans in this country fought a long, bitter battle to overcome fuddy-duddy objections to ‘Americanisation’ and now there is nary a street in this green and pleasant land that doesn’t contain at least one house that spends October under a gauze of synthetic cobwebs and lurid orange lights. We even triumphed over the pedants and their damned apostrophe.
But somewhere along the way, this noble effort to draw more from Halloween has become a conspiracy to squeeze the scariness out of the festivities. ‘Spooky season’ is used to market a dull, diet, defanged Halloween to anxiety-riven Insta-mums who fear their little darling will be traumatised by the sight of a macabre mask, a splatter of fake blood or a glimpse of any entertainment scarier than Casper the Friendly Ghost (and no doubt they’d find a way to deem him problematic). The plot to Disneyfy Halloween is a wholly adult phenomenon. Children love the menacing and the macabre. It’s why, before the advent of streaming, they smuggled parents’ VHS copies of forbidden fright flicks into sleepovers and gasped from behind trembling pillows at every vampiric feasting and bloody axe swing. (My record: Salem’s Lot, aged six; Halloween, aged eight; A Nightmare on Elm Street, aged 11.)
Halloween and horror movies hold the same appeal in childhood: they supply safe scares that allow us to test our courage and prove to ourselves that, whatever lurks in the closet or under our bed, we can survive it. For me, the joy of trick-or-treating was not the armfuls of Freddos and pickled onion Space Raiders – Nineties childhoods, snuck in before the rise of calorie-conscious mommy bloggers, were awash in fructose and fats – but the chance to be out at night, scaring and being scared, with the frisson of fright and possibility that comes from darkness, and for it all to be sanctioned and even encouraged by adults. I remember my beloved Primary One teacher Mrs Jordan instructing us in the seasonal ditty, ‘Halloween’s Coming’: ‘Halloween’s coming, Halloween’s coming / Skeletons will be after you / Witches’ cats, and big black bats / Ghosts and goblins too.’ Today’s Spooky Season Karens would choke on their pumpkin spice lattes.
I’m well aware that I’m inviting a charge of nostalgia and maybe I am looking back at the autumnal chills of my childhood through candy corn-tinted glasses, but I still reckon that ‘spooky season’ is the trick and scary Halloween the treat. Spooky season is a social media phenomenon, designed to be a hashtag for filtered snaps of Mickey Mouse jack-o’-lanterns and expensively bland Frozen and Buzz Lightyear costumes. It’s an adult’s idea of scary fun, which is neither scary nor fun. If you’re going to do this night properly, do it like my Mum who, despite the uncanny events of Halloween night 1989, retains a youthful affection for the eerie side of 31 October, and still festoons her home in gnarly pumpkins and cackling witches, to the delight of generations of neighbourhood trick-or-treaters. Or take some tips from Roseanne Barr and her eponymous Nineties sitcom which became as famed for its elaborate Halloween episodes as it did for its blue-collar, slice-of-life comedy stylings. Season after season, fright fiends Roseanne and husband Dan would escalate their annual campaign to give nightmares to their smart-mouthed kids and buttoned-up neighbours with revving chainsaws and heads served on platters.
That is the spirit of Halloween. Not cosiness, or ‘non-scary Halloween films’, or that infernal mouse. It’s about witches and goblins, Celtic superstitions and more modern fears, the joy of ghoulish dress-up and the buzz of nocturnal adventures, Snickers and slashers, childhood thrills and grown-up fun. It’s about confronting the lifelong fear of the dark and realising, or perhaps just telling yourself, that there’s nothing to be afraid of.
That noise? Just the wind.
The back door? Probably locked.
That shadow glimpsed from the corner of your eye? Trick of the light.
Search the house? I wouldn’t if I were you.
This year, 31 October falls a few days before the US presidential elections, and I’m in campaigning mode. This ‘spooky season’ I’m pulling on a hat, black rather than red, with a pointed top, and the slogan: Make Halloween Scary Again.
Comments