I used to LOVE Halloween.
It’s not that I don’t anymore, it’s more that my experience of it has changed. I’m less about the thrills and scares that I was obsessed with in my younger years, and I’ve become more interested in the history and traditions behind it all. This year I’ll be celebrating Samhain with a group of friends and some rituals to remember our ancestors, look ahead to the future and connect with the cycles of nature. It’s a far cry from the weeks of costume planning and research into the most terrifying contact lenses on the market that was the focus of October in my 20s.
But let’s rewind a bit. I remember loving Halloween even as a young child. We used to host a Halloween party for my and my brother’s friends, and my mum would go to town decorating the house in ever more creatively creepy ways and creating elaborate scary meals (spaghetti for brains, peeled grapes for eyeballs, that sort of thing - side note, now that I have children of my own, I am genuinely stunned that my mother put so much effort into peeling a bowl full of grapes for a kids’ party, and I am hoping that my kids will not expect this level of attention to detail in future, because they will not be getting it). We would play spooky games, tell ghost stories and go trick-or-treating. It was one of the best nights of the year for me then.
Once I was grown-up, my passion for Halloween had only intensified. I also made some friends who were fellow Halloween junkies, so we would begin planning outfits and parties in September, if not earlier. My friend Julia is the absolute queen of Halloween, with the kind of make-up skills I can only dream of, and none of our group have yet come up with a costume to rival the year she dressed as a doomed masquerade ball guest, half of whose mask had been removed… along with the top layer of her face. It was gruesome, and incredibly impressive.
The death of horror
What changed? Partly, I suppose, I got older. Julia moved back to her native Germany, the other members of my Halloween party crew have also scattered to the four corners of the globe, and now that most of us have children and are pushing 40, big nights out are harder to coordinate and less appealing. I don’t think I have it in me to float around the bars of North London all night before ending up at someone’s house and eventually taking a two-hour night bus journey home in the early hours of the morning dressed as an evil Alice in Wonderland anymore. It was fun at the time, but that time has passed. Gone, but not forgotten.
My relationship with ghost stories and the horror genre has changed, too. I have been a horror film fanatic since I was old enough to be allowed to watch them, and I used to consider a film a success if I couldn’t sleep without the light on after watching it. Since having children, though, I can’t watch even the most bland of scary movies. Films that, six years ago, would have had me yawning and rolling my eyes now leave me in floods of tears and will haunt me for months. I stay away from anything remotely scary, especially if there are children in it. It’s inevitable, I think, that once you have children any story that involves ghosts, death, suffering will trigger fears you have around your own kids. There is a part of my brain that is constantly afraid of them being hurt, or worse, and stories like this play on my very darkest nightmares. The theory behind why we enjoy horror as a genre is that it allows us to explore our fears in what we know is a safe container - we can be scared, we can experience, to a lesser extent, what it would be like to have the things we dread actually happen, but we know that we’re going to walk away safely at the end of it. But once you bring children into the equation, the fear is too much, too visceral, to be able to explore safely. It is for me, anyway.
I’m also aware that my relationship to my own mortality has changed. I have, of course, always known that I am mortal. But in my younger, child-free years, I was more blasé about the whole thing. Not because I didn’t care - I definitely wanted to be alive - but I was just less nervous about not being alive. Part of that is probably the gung-ho nature of youth - you know that you can die, in theory, but it just seems so unlikely. We all consider ourselves somewhat more invincible when we’re younger and we haven’t yet experienced many really bad things happening to us (hopefully) so we struggle to believe they could happen at all. We also have less to lose. And that, I think, is the other way that having children influences the whole thing. When I now consider the possibility that I might die, I think about my kids being told that Mummy isn’t coming home. I imagine them being devastated, them crying for me and wanting me back, and then having to grow up without a mother, I think of all the times in the future that they’ll need me and I wouldn’t be there. That’s what terrifies me, far more than the thought of my own non-existence.
So, all in all, it’s best if I steer clear of ghost stories these days. I am not psychologically up to it.
Less blood, more mood
Which leads me to an observation - I’m sure Halloween has got more gorey since I was a kid.
I remember pumpkins being dotted around in shop windows, and a few paper ghosts and cardboard bats, maybe the odd spider’s web, for a couple of days before Halloween, and then they would all be gone on 1st November.
But now it’s only early October and already there are decorations everywhere, and not just paper ones. So far I’ve seen a huge inflatable vampire, a 3D mummy dripping with blood, and scores of wicked witches with twisted faces and evil grins, all in public spaces. It just feels a bit much. Overkill, you might say. (Sorry.)
Last year, I tried to take my kids to soft play a week before Halloween, but we had to walk straight out because the giant skeleton and blood-soaked Frankenstein’s monster terrified my then four-year-old daughter. I mean, in a children’s soft play… really?!
The thing is, I just feel like all that over-the-top blood and guts stuff spoils the mood. You don’t need it. I was never a fan of slasher movies - they’re not really scary, they’re just disgusting. They make you jump and they gross you out, but they don’t get to you in the way a truly terrifying horror movie can. The ones that get inside your brain and make you afraid to turn off the light, that make you run from your car to your front door as quickly as possible late at night, the ones that have you pulling your duvet over your head rather than getting out of bed to see what that noise was… those films usually show very little blood and gore. By holding a little back, they allow your imagination to go wild. They play on your deeper psychological fears, rather than your physical ones. Surface pain is bad, sure, and there is fear there, but what goes on inside your head is far more scary.
But Halloween isn’t even about fear. It’s about magic. Tradition has it that the veil between this world and the Otherworld is thinner on the evening of Samhain (or All Hallow’s Eve, as it became once the Christians tried to take ownership of all the pagan festivals). It’s a time that you might be able to get messages from the other realm, making it a perfect time for divination or prophesy. It’s also a time where it might be easier to contact deities that you’d like guidance or favours from. Samhain is mostly known as a time to honour ancestors and remember the dead, but it’s also the Wiccan new year, so it’s a time for celebration for witches.
You can see why this time of year calls to mind a connection to other realms. October has a particular aesthetic that has a distinct chill to it. I’m not just talking about the fact that the weather is getting cooler, but there is a sudden drop in temperature once September draws to a close, which sends a shiver down your spine. The brown and orange leaves swirling around in circles, dancing to an unseen breeze, has an eerie air, and mists hang ominously across fields and forests. There’s something about the quality of the light in October - the sun is still very definitely there, but it’s softer, hazier, and it hangs low in the sky. In August and September, it blazes bright and bold, and by November it’s virtually disappeared to not much more than a milky puddle that someone spilled a singular drop of yellow paint into. But in October, the sun is shifting, shimmering, spilling light that takes on an orangey hue when it shines through the trees and an almost purplish tinge in the evenings as the sun begins to set. We’re suddenly faced with darkness early on - it’s become palpably noticeable that the days are shortening. And death is all around us: the leaves are having their final blaze of glory before they fall to the ground, and the plants and foliage are fading back ready for the fertile void of winter.
And maybe it’s a result of watching too many American horror films, but every year when I take my family pumpkin picking, I find it impossible to stand in a wide open field studded with orange orbs and watched over by dangling scarecrows without feeling icy fingers tickling at my neck.
So we just don’t need to put on such a big show of the macabre at this time of year. The world around us is already putting on a show of its own. Maybe the next world is too. And that’s already pretty thrilling.
Such a good read! I have never been into horror but since having children, I absolutely can’t watch anything in the slightest bit upsetting or stressful without becoming a mess.
I love the feeling of October as a month-long ritual, you capture the shifts in the living world beautifully. I am all for celebrating the magic over the macabre at this time of year (especially since having little ones!) xx