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NOT EVERYONE LIKES Halloween decorations. I remember driving to the cider stand with a family member one crisp fall morning, passing the various ghoulies, ghosties, and goblins dotting neighbor’s gardens. With a gimlet eye, she stared down a plastic inflatable witch. “People like putting up these witch decorations,” she said, “But witches are not funny.” I was intrigued by her tone, which was not one of fretful censoriousness or pious fear of the occult, but grim and matter of fact—a tone for explaining which groceries can’t be trusted to sell fresh meat. What chain of events brought you to acquire this opinion? I wanted to ask, but thought better of it. Some family lore is best left unexamined.
For the most part, I myself love Halloween decorations. I love not only the real, carved pumpkins, but the many artificial variants: flat wooden pumpkin faces, painted orange and grinning on their stakes; pumpkin pincushions crowned with felt capotains, assembled by toddler hands between snack and story time; the cheap dye and corn-syrup waxy pumpkins for which no self-respecting person would go fishing in the candy bowl (I eat them by the handful). I like the tin witches and the black cats creeping across people’s yards and the ghosts hanging from their trees. I like tacky artificial cobwebs and inflatable Frankensteins. I even like those enormous skeletons that became popular a few years ago, striding across suburban lawns like revenant nephilim when glimpsed in peripheral vision.
But there is one case where I agree entirely with my relative’s sentiment. It’s the murder. I don’t like all the murder. I don’t like the body bags that are multiplying among the ghosts and goblins. I don’t like the police tape and the headless corpses. I don’t like the fact that scattered across tidy suburban lawns in quiet neighborhoods there are human figures strung up on fake nooses and chainsaws without blades and the defanged paraphernalia of a hundred inventive ways to murder and mutilate a person. Recently, walking at night, I noticed a light coming from a garage. Handprints had been etched on the illuminated window, and “HELP US” daubed in red paint beneath. Inside the garage, desperate people were being imprisoned and tortured. That was the joke. Ha, ha.
I find these tableaus of inhuman cruelty repellent. Why? I don’t mind horror movies, even those that make cruelty their business; I watch The Silence of the Lambs every year. I don’t really mind haunted houses, a time-honored institution where for a reasonable price you can be chased through the darkness by a teenage stoner playing an axe murderer. I suppose one obvious answer is that these other cultural products are gated by age. You have to seek them out, and there is—if everything is functioning as it should—someone at the door whose job is to turn away those of tender years. These things are not happening casually out in the street, an unavoidable part of public life. They have not been woven into the Halloween ritual of knocking on a stranger’s door—the central ritual of the holiday, and the one part of the holiday that is still firmly centered on children and the carnival antics in which adults participate with and enable them.
This is not to say that children cannot handle being scared. Children love being scared. Halloween brings the genuinely frightening things of the world into a child-scale perspective. Death is real, and children learn early that it is coming. On Halloween, they can look at death in the form of a dancing skeleton, surrounded by the lighted windows of their town. There is a way to bring death and skeletons, ghosts and goblins, darkness and danger, into the viewfinder of childhood.
This play of scale and proportion is simply incompatible with the specific visual minutiae of real murders. Children among themselves may thrill and torment each other with any number of lurid (and perversely funny) campfire stories. But these exist in a shadowy, exaggerated dreamscape where the escaping hook-handed lunatic might at any moment shapeshift into the Jersey Devil. There is no pretense of concrete verisimilitude.
And importantly, there is, in fact, no way for adults to offer vivid slasher fantasies to children as they would a werewolf tale or a story about Dracula—as part of a tradition. The latter come to us as symbols, and work on the symbolic level in our imaginations. Murder comes to us from the everyday world we read about in the newspapers, and the fear and horror we feel upon confronting it is not general and thematic dread, but revulsion and empathy for outrages committed upon a specific person. There is no cheerful and kindly way to invite children to contemplate the fact that sometimes real people, for their own interest or gratification, cut other people (too often children) up into little pieces with knives. Adult art made for adults can grapple with this fact of the world; art made by adults for children cannot. Circumstances end up forcing children to face these facts all the time anyway; every time, it is a tragedy.
There are already too few places where children and adults can come together in something like a shared civic life; there are too few parts of civic life that are specifically for children, to all of our detriment. There is something dreary about these crime-scene Halloweens; they feel like the burnt-out suburban hipster’s attempt to make one last stand for their own quirked-up edginess, at the minor cost of running children out of their own holiday.
THERE IS SOMETHING ELSE. The creeping tin cats and the green plastic ghouls and caricatured devils are kitschy. They are jolly. They are decoration. It’s not that murder should never be enlisted in the service of kitschy decoration because it is real, while animated skeletons and devils are fair game because they are not. I believe that the devil is real. And we all agree, at least in theory, that death is real.
But we can reduce the devil and the grim reaper to blow-up plastic caricatures because they are already symbols of the forces with which we struggle and the pains which we endure. The devil, that old deluder, is our enemy of limitless malice. Death is the sorrow and the problem of our species; it is something that will happen to all of us. To the extent that, once a year, we turn evil into a figure of fun, we are engaging in counterpropaganda on behalf of humanity.
We don’t have the right to do that with murder. Perhaps to some degree, you can extend this joking defiance toward the figure of the murderer—the axe-wielding stoner you pay to be chased by, and ultimately, to escape from in the corridors of the haunted house. But we can’t, and shouldn’t try to, make the mere fact of murder, the corpse cut down by human hand, into a visual public joke. Murder is our own willful collusion with evil at its most extreme. Each instance is a mark in the long ledger of humanity’s own failed solidarity and internal corruption, not a visible or invisible external enemy. And as much as we would like to think of Ted Bundy or Bryan Kohberger as some interloper from another dimension, human only in name, the shame of human violence sits on all of us. Every day corpses are discovered, battered, and stripped of the loving dignities we normally accord to our loved ones in their deaths. Every day, horrifying acts of violence are visited upon the smallest and softest of us.
There is a stage in life after we have become aware of these realities but before we often have the internal substance to treat them with the gravity they deserve. It is called adolescence. I can’t get too worked up about 12-year-old boys drenched in fake blood. But I do blame the adults—often, people who have carefully built a life for themselves and their offspring safe from the smallest breath of risk, and whose success in this project engenders not gratitude, but the casual reduction of human suffering and human horror to one more plastic prop in an epic Halloween.
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