The Spooks of Halloween

It’s Halloween! Last week, I talked about five facts concerning the Christian origins of Halloween. This week, I want to talk personally about my reasons for loving this holiday. It comes down to one thing: the aesthetics. While I do love the Trick-or-Treating and candy, I love the costumes and decorations even more. I find the Halloween décor unique and interesting. If nothing else, it adds a bit of spice to one’s life.

As a child, I remember going around looking at all of the Halloween decorations that were out in the neighborhood. For some reason, they always interested me more than the Christmas decorations. Halloween decorations are always a mixture of macabre and whimsy.

One of the most iconic Halloween aesthetics is the classic haunted house – an old manor filled to the brim with ghouls and goblins. The haunted house has been a classic since the Victorian Era. At that time, the English were experimenting with illusions and attractions. At that time, despite the era being known for a rise in scientific knowledge, people started becoming attracted to stories about fairies, ghosts, and psychics. Yes, this was the era of the Industrial Revolution, but it was also the era of the revival of fairy tales. People were rediscovering and reviving old superstitions and myths even as science progressed more rapidly than ever before.

The very first haunted house was a nineteenth-century London house full of wax sculptures of decapitated Frenchmen who’d died in the French Revolution. This “Chamber of Horrors” shocked and intrigued the native Londoners. As the century grew on, so did the public’s appetite for the spooky and the supernatural. This phenomenon of the haunted house was naturally intertwined with the idea of Halloween when parents would create haunted houses to entertain would-be vandals.

What I enjoy about haunted houses is its fantastic nature. The iconic haunted house is a medium between this world and another one. In this place, the subtly fantastic becomes reality. Fantastic things have a certain charm to them, even when they are grim. Fantasy allows us to explore familiar concepts in new ways. In the case of the haunted house, the explored concept is the abandoned manor filled with dark corners and (possibly) hidden treasures.

But make no mistake, I don’t like being scared by these things. Being scared isn’t a fun experience, especially the kind of cheap jump scare you see in many low-budget Halloween attractions. Things like steep staircases or heights startle me more frequently and effectively. The feeling I get whenever some ghost comes out and shouts “Boo!” isn’t novel.

I remember this feeling whenever I went out Trick-or-Treating as a young boy. Each year, I’d put on a costume and go out to see the different houses. Each one had interesting decorations in their yards, like fluffy, fake cobwebs (giant spiders optional), or ghostly balloons or statues of various monsters. Some of the Trick-or-Treaters’ costumes held my interest too, like a zombie with very convincing make-up or the Grim Reaper costume made up of a skull mask and black fabric.

I eventually decided was too old to wear a costume. But I still wanted to participate in Halloween. One year, my parents set up a statue of a skeleton with a microphone inside its mouth at the front of our house. The wires for the skeleton went inside the house, allowing me to speak through the skeleton as if it were talking. Whenever some unsuspecting Trick-or-Treater came by the house, ready to take some candy from the bowl at the skeleton’s feet, I’d let out a deep, evil laugh. “Mwahahahahahahaha! So, you’ve come to take my candy, eh? Very well. Happy Halloween!” The experience certainly shocked a lot of young kids, but most of them enjoyed it. They liked to pretend that I was a real talking skeleton rather than a guy using a microphone to speak through a fake skeleton. I suspect this is because they wanted the skeleton to be real. They wanted to experience something fantastic, even if it wasn’t real.

The novelty of the bizarre and the whimsical has fascinated generation after generation of people. This Halloween, I plan on continuing that tradition. God bless you, everyone, and Happy Halloween!