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| Kids wearing masks for halloween. Anthony Rizzuto. 1964. |
We need ghost stories because we, in fact, are the ghosts.”
Stephen King
Danse Macabre
Before the Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Saxon conquest of their land, the Gaels held cultural dominion over what is today Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man. One of the markers of Gaelic culture were the four annual festivals that celebrated the changing of the seasons. The festival known as Imbolc was celebrated around February 1st, in between the winter solstice and spring equinox, marking the beginning of spring and the lambing season. Next was Bealtaine, which landed between that spring equinox and summer solstice, marking the beginning of summer, where the cattle were released to their summer pastures and special bonfires were lit to ritualistically protect the herd. Lughnasadh was the harvest festival, held between the summer solstice and autumn equinox, and appeared to be the most lively, with not just feasting but horse racing, trading, athletics, and ceremonial performances.
Then there was Samhain, the celebration of the darker half the year. During Samhain the cattle were brought in from the summer pastures and some were, along with other livestock, slaughtered. Ancient burial mounds were opened, creating, the Gaels believed, portals to the “Otherworld.” Offerings were given to spirits to ensure survival through the winter months. But, because of this exchange, it was also believed the souls of dead loved ones returned as well, at least temporarily, seeking out the place that families left for them at their dinner tables. Since this festival took place between the autumn equinox and winter solstice, it was celebrated around November 1st. However, since the Celtic day began at sundown, celebrations started on what we would call October 31st. Eventually, those kooky Gaels started the tradition of guising, dressing up in costumes and reciting simple poems at their neighbor's doorsteps in exchange for food.
And then, like everything else with a witchy follow-the-moon Pagan vibe, Samhain was eventually Christianized and rebranded “The Feast of All Saints” or “All Saints Day.” Ultimately, because absolutely everything Pagan had to be replaced, the powers that be took the night before when the Gaels usually started celebrating and made it its own holiday. They called it “All Hallow’s Eve."
This appears to be the most popular historical origin story for modern Halloween.
As the decades turned into centuries, enough of those All Hallow’s Eve celebrants became American immigrants. Then American capitalism, as it is wont to do, turned that folk tradition into a festival of consumerism. With the push of industrialization, the holiday spent the 20th century growing to encapsulate other traditions: petty vandalism, ultra-processed candy, binge drinking, and horror-movie imagery. It isn’t the livestock that gets slaughtered these days; it’s sexy teens in formulaic but wildly profitable slasher movies.
Of course, something similar happened in the 16th century when the Aztec festival of Mictecacihuatl, the Lady of the Dead, blended with Catholicism to make Dia de Los Muertos. But that holiday has a cultural weight and resonance that modern American Halloween abandoned long ago. The Day of the Dead is still, actually, about departed loved ones and about their survivors wrestling with the meaning of their absence. American Halloween, on the other hand, is more about disposable spectacle; picture rows of gory masks and sexy witches in the Spirit Halloween store that popped up where the old Payless Shoes used to be.
If you can’t tell, I do not like Halloween. I find all the things that people find fun about the holiday deeply unfun. I do not like costumes, parties, or being out late at night. I don’t drink and I hate pranks. I do like candy a lot, but when that becomes a fifty-foot long grocery store aisle fully stocked with enough plastic packaging and red-dye 40 to destroy an ecosystem, my sweet tooth becomes considerably dulled.
The long-ago Gaels used Samhain to process their anxiety about the coming winter. Winter meant death and so the holiday adopted the status of being a liminal space in time, a moment where the boundaries of the living and dead blurred. The holiday had a social and psychological function.
What is the function of modern American Halloween? What anxiety are we processing?
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The scientists at the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark do precisely what the name of their lab suggests they do: they study why we get scared for fun. They call these things “frightening leisure activities”; think horror movies and haunted houses, but also playing peek-a-boo as an infant or being chased by your goofy dad as a toddler. These activities inspire a strange set of responses that physiologically look like anxiety, aversion, and dread. But these are activities people pay for, wait in long lines for, seek out again and again. What is going on here? This habit seems perverse, counter-evolutionary even.
The directors of the Recreational Fear Lab—Marc Andersen and Mathias Clasen—embody the two extremes of human responses to recreational fear. Clasen is the horror junkie who loves Steven King and haunted houses. Anderson is the academic who does not. Yet they both like investigating the questions of recreational fear, and their research has led them to a couple of interesting observations and hypotheses.
First, an observation: those who like some recreational fear seem to be quite particular about the level of fear they enjoy. They want to be challenged, surprised, and even shocked by their fear-for-fun activities, but they do not want to be truly consumed with fear. There is a recreational fear “Goldilocks Zone” where the stimuli are just right. When a scary movie or haunted house or book really clicks with people, it’s likely because whoever made the thing knows how to create something right in that zone.
Thus, a hypothesis: When we are afraid-for-fun we are not actually fearful of harm, otherwise we would feel consumed by that fear. Compare the feeling of evading a chainsaw-wielding clown in a haunted house to the aftermath of a close-call car accident. The car accident is banal in comparison, but if you feel the very real and threat of danger on the expressway—even when it is quickly avoided—it can take your breath away at best and make you feel existentially unsafe at worst, and for a long time too.
So recreational fear is different. So then, what is it for?
One of the interesting things about studying recreational fear is that you can study people who are willingly subjecting themselves to extreme circumstances. In any other experimental setting, it would be ethically dubious to freak out your subjects so that you can measure their response. But it’s a different story if your subjects are walking into the haunted house already.
That same principle made the COVID pandemic such an interesting time to be a researcher. Never before could you interview so many people in such extreme circumstances. But when lockdowns forced us indoors, cut off from a lot of the activity that filled our lives, it seemed important for science to wonder about the effects.
The Recreational Fear Lab wondered if horror fans were faring better than others when faced with a pandemic. The idea was that horror fiction is a genre defined by terrible things happening to people—from death and dismemberment to demonic possession. Perhaps a horror fan was much more rehearsed and in-tune with how they would respond to a very real danger? Perhaps the person who had faced killers of all kinds through the proxy of fiction felt a little more comfortable facing a viral killer in the real world? Perhaps the person who had studied worlds destroyed by zombie apocalypses and evil influences was a little more prepared to face a world transformed almost overnight by disease? The Lab’s findings were both informal and correlational, but they were also illuminating. Horror fans were, in fact, a little more chill during COVID.
There’s no evidence to suggest that horror taught these people how to be calm in a crisis. But I do identify with the notion that fiction allows us a type of rehearsal and that horror fiction especially gives people the chance to imagine a world gone wrong. And if you can imagine that, everything you experience won’t be able to come close to the terrors that you've already experienced in your imagination.
And so: even though I might find its trappings annoying, American Halloween might have a similar effect, at least when it's done right. Think of the classic Halloween concept of things "undead." In real life, the ultimate absurd horror is death itself. But what if death was just the start of some adventure? What if death just meant you were a ghost, zombie, or animated skeleton? What if losing your life was just gaining something else? What if instead of death being scary, death made you something fun and cool that was scary to others?
The other thing that horror movies provide is an example of someone overcoming an unstoppable evil. Most classic slasher movies have fun-to-watch and sometimes charismatic villains, but everyone still cheers when they die. This is perhaps where American Halloween differs from other cultural incarnations. Sure, you can be a ghost, goblin, witch, zombie, or devil. You can also be Batman. You can dress up as the hero. Hell, you can dress up as a doctor. Or an astronaut. Or the goddamn Monopoly Man. When I was in the fourth grade, I went all deconstructionist and dressed up as a television set. Even then, I was playing with identity.
The anxiety that fuels Halloween creativity is no longer, as it was with our Gaelic brothers and sisters, "Will we make it through winter?" It is now "What will I be when I die?" and "Is this all I am while I'm alive?" Halloween lets us play around with those questions. It let us rehearse. We watch the horror movie and practice in our minds how it would feel to escape it. We put on a cape and wonder in our bodies how it would feel to wear it.
I remember a group of grade school jocks dressing up as women for Halloween, with curly blond wigs stuffed bras and high heels. That was Halloween allowing one of the ultimate identity rehearsals and reversals, and making it safe in an environment—rural America in the 1990s—where it otherwise was not.
All those beyond-the-Goldilocks-zone scary things are not really external threats. They are internal fears. We fear being trapped inside a flawed body that we didn't choose to have. We fear that it is only one body—a body burdened with so much expectation, but one that can only do so much, and only for so long. We fear what happens after death, just as we fear the suffering before death. The horror-genre battles of real life are just us battling ourselves. We are killers and the victims. We are the haunted and we are the ghosts.
So what do we do with all this fear? We do what we've always done, for thousands of years. We take the thing that is impossible to face, we make it an idea, and then we carve out a safe space when we can mess around with that idea. In that space, we can perform. We can rehearse. We can play. And, as it is with all types of play, we can come to understand something new about the scary world and make it, maybe not less scary, but more livable.
Some of us have other spaces to do that play. But many don't. And for those that don't, there's Halloween.
I still don't enjoy Halloween and likely never will, but I can at least respect it for that.
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References:
Breen, Benjamin. “A Very Deep History of Halloween.” Res Obscura. Substack. https://resobscura.substack.com/p/a-very-deep-history-of-halloween. Accessed 15 October 2024.
Feltman, Rachel and Fonda Mwangi. “Exploring the Science of Spookiness at the Recreational Fear Lab.” Scientific American. 30 Oct. 2024.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/exploring-the-science-of-spookiness-at-the-recreational-fear-lab/
Pinkerton, Byrd. “Why is Horror So Fun?” Unexplainable. Vox Media. 30 Oct. 2024. https://www.vox.com/unexplainable/380512/science-behind-why-fear-is-fun-horror-halloween
Rizzuto, Angelo, photographer. Kids wearing masks for Halloween. [October] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2021636
Wikipedia contributors. "Beltane." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 3 Nov. 2024. Web. 3 Nov. 2024.
Wikipedia contributors. "Imbolc." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 31 Oct. 2024. Web. 3 Nov. 2024.
Wikipedia contributors. "Lughnasadh." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 31 Aug. 2024. Web. 3 Nov. 2024.
Wikipedia contributors. "Samhain." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 1 Nov. 2024. Web. 3 Nov. 2024.
Media:
Consider accompanying your reading with the track The Batman Theme from Danny Elfman’s score to 1989’s Batman.
Here's the episode of the Podcast that inspired the dramatic rewrite of this anti-halloween screed into something more interesting: