As a child of the eighties, my primary school friends and I would spend every 31 October dressing all in white and heading to church. This gothic little tableau of deathly pallid eight-year-olds elicited bemusement from our mothers, and probably would have done from us too, had we given it a moment’s thought.
I am mystified by the fact that costumes frequently appear to have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Halloween
And yet we were not a bunch of macabre miniature Miss Havishams off to lie on gravestones like precocious disciples of Mary Shelley. We just happened to be classmates with a child whose family belonged to an evangelical London church that annually rounded up a clutch of prospective converts to protect us from the dark, Satanic spirits supposedly unleashed for one night a year. The defence against these forces of evil consisted, as I recall, of dressing in the aforementioned white and drinking fizzy drinks until our parents came to collect their sugar-high progeny. My mother’s bafflement? That was, in large part, thanks to the fact that back then, Halloween was barely a thing – its elevation to one of our chief calendar ‘holidays’, in the American parlance, was still in its infancy.
Fast forward almost four decades and everything has changed. In those days, no trick-or-treaters ever knocked on our door. Now, if you don’t catch Tesco in time to secure the requisite tin of Celebrations, you will, alas, join the ranks of those condemned to draw the curtains and cower in darkness all night long lest you court the rabid attentions of little ghouls ravenous for yet more sweets. The refusenik aesthetic is arguably much spookier than the enthusiast’s.
Yes, the mania for All Hallows’ Eve: The American Edition has been imported wholesale. We have embraced it with a Trumpian lack of restraint. Meanwhile, as Alpha-espousing churches too have burgeoned, those ‘white parties’ have transmogrified into ‘light parties’, the evangelical alternative to Halloween at which children are encouraged to dress as angels rather than devils lest the latter open a portal to the underworld via, say, a pumpkin costume.
Unlike my erstwhile hosts, I actually quite like the idea of a festival with pagan roots. The folklore of our sceptred isle is crawling with ghosts, witches, ghosts of witches and a general array of spectral things that go bump in the night; indeed, a mere five days after our welcoming of the undead, we enthusiastically burn effigies of Guy Fawkes – a healthy dose of scheduled eeriness entirely consonant with our national character.
Naturally, I object to its rampant commodification. But then I object to the rampant commodification of almost everything (here’s looking at you, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s, et al.). But for children, what’s not to like? My own daughter ranks Halloween second only to Christmas and Easter in the calendar of annual excitements, the thrill lying in the sanctioning of things usually off limits to a 10-year-old, such as carousing in gangs through the streets after dark and demanding sweets from strangers under threat of unspecified mischief. As for me, tramping about after her and her friends is fine so long as I don’t have to dress in anything other than a warm coat. If she returns home with enough sweets to see her through until Easter, well, that’s pudding taken care of for months.
The objection I have to Halloween – and it rises from the grave with renewed vigour every October – has nothing to do with the possibility of inadvertently summoning Beelzebub. It concerns grown adults – specifically those not accompanying children on their rounds of trick-or-treating – who insist on earnestly joining in. Perhaps it is my advancing years, but I am mystified by the fact that contemporary costumes frequently appear to have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Halloween. The object is no longer to look frightening, or even remotely supernatural, but rather to ‘slay’ in some variation on a theme of Playboy bunny-style sexiness.
Sexy witches, sexy vampires, sexy devils, sexy nurses are all, apparently, now de rigueur. I am not entirely sure what nurses have to do with Halloween, unless the idea is to remind us of the horrors of trying to get a GP appointment. I wouldn’t mind if these adults were turning up as genuinely terrifying apparitions, having fashioned elaborate costumes from bedsheets and, er, red food dye. But instead, vast quantities of synthetic tat are ordered from Amazon and Shein, worn once, photographed for the socials and then dispatched to their ultimate destination. Not actual hell, as it happens, but rather the hellscape that is landfill.
Anyone who remembers Mean Girls will recall Lindsay Lohan’s character turning up to a Halloween party dressed as a bloodied bride with false teeth, only to discover that everyone else has come in lingerie and some form of animal ears. That was 2004. Two decades later, the joke appears almost quaint. And yet, for all the flesh on display, there is something pretty joyless about the whole thing – it’s become an emblem of organised fun at its most exhausting, with every last detail arranged in advance and photographed for the delectation of an online world. I suppose that I should be pleased everyone is getting out, but I do wonder whether anyone is actually enjoying themselves, or whether the point is simply to look as though they are.
Perhaps, then, the evangelicals were right to fear what Halloween might unleash after all. Not Satan, obviously, but something more chilling – a generation of adults who can only enjoy themselves within prescribed parameters and with 300 pictures to prove it. Frankly, I’d rather close the curtains, play dead and tuck into that tin of Celebrations.
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