Trying to Keep Halloween Sacred in a Culture That Disrespects It

It’s not a day to celebrate horror movies…

It’s autumn, my favorite season of the year, and coming up on Halloween, my favorite holiday. I don’t mean any of this in a superficial way. It’s not just that I love the changing colors of the leaves, it’s definitely not about Pumpkin Spice Lattes (I actually don’t like them, at all), and not because I like to dress up for that one-time-a-year costume party.

No, I actually think this time of year is sacred. I think it’s the way the earth takes in a long, deep breath before going to sleep. It’s a gentle riot of wind and color and texture before a season of utter stillness.

And Halloween? That day is holy to me. I wish it were an officially observed holiday in our country because it is such an important day to me. Yes, I believe in the whole “veil is thin” thing, that our ancestors are speaking to us more clearly at this time of year, that it’s a moment to honor them and observe and honor the powers of death and mystery. Some even call it the Celtic New Year, when a whole new cycle begins.

America does not observe it as a holiday, however. I can live with that. But what bothers me is what this day has become.

Every year, I love looking at the Halloween decorations that appear around town. Mostly, it’s cute, kitchy stuff like giant spiderwebs strung from lawn to eaves, motion-sensitive, life-sized werewolves, or those weird, inflatable decorations that look like a puddle of fabric during the day, when not in use.

But there are a handful of houses in my city that decorate their front yard serial-killer-style. There are plastic body parts everywhere, tables with manacles, torture devices, and fake blood splattered on everything.

It’s genuinely horrifying.

Then there are the local movie theaters who play slasher films 24/7 at this time of year.

This always makes me cringe. It’s not that I want everyone to celebrate this day and season the way I would see fit. I believe in religious freedom (the real kind — not the kind where people say that but actually mean “the freedom to force everyone to adhere to Christian values”).

I don’t understand it, for one thing. Why does our culture love and crave heinous acts of violence? I guess it’s fair to say that even I experience some attraction. While I will never watch a slasher film, I do enjoy a good BBC murder mystery. (I’m addicted to Vera.)

Isn’t it odd that we have this fascination with not just death but murder?

And then there’s the drunken costume parties and random, petty vandalism that seems to come with the this holiday. I feel like American culture doesn’t respect Halloween, at all.

There are so many misconceptions about this holiday. I grew up going to private Christian schools and many of my friends did not celebrate Halloween because their families believed it was a holiday to celebrate Satan. Then there are the people who believe Halloween was created by the candy companies to drum up more business. And of course, there are plenty of people who think it’s just a day to celebrate horror — the bloodier, the better.

First of all, Halloween (or Samhain, as it was once known), was the end-of-summer celebration in the pre-Christian Celtic world. Therefore, there was no Satan and as such, this holiday can’t celebrate a figure that didn’t exist at that time, in that culture. Though I realize many Christians believe that all other religions were created by Satan, so I guess no one is going to be able to win this argument.

But my point is, I have never cared for being shamed for celebrating a day that is important to me based on the argument that I’m ill-informed and being manipulated by an evil figure I don’t believe in. And I definitely don’t appreciate having people smear something that is holy to me. You can have your Christmas and Easter, and by the same token, I’d like to enjoy my Halloween without all the religious condemnation.

And no, this holiday wasn’t invented by candy companies. The tradition of dressing up in costume dates back to pre-Christian days when people disguised themselves to avoid being targeted by malevolently-minded spirits that had crossed over into the land of the living. Later, people would dress up and perform for others, in exchange for cakes and other food or drink, which historians believe was the origin of this tradition. These practices evolved over time into the tradition we practice today. It’s true that candy companies have taken advantage of this, in true capitalist style, but they absolutely did not invent this holiday.

As for the horror…

When I got my latest assignments from one of my biggest clients this month, I was dismayed to see what was on the list. They wanted me to write about haunted houses in various locations around the country.

My hesitation turned out to be validated. A lot the websites for these haunted houses didn’t have much informative content that could help me describe the experience — so I had to watch their marketing videos in order to come up with some material.

They were horrifying. Several of them featured a young, skinny, stunningly beautiful woman tied to a bed (or other piece of furniture), wearing Daisy Dukes and a tight, cropped tank top, grunting and screaming, trying to break free from the ropes binding her wrists and ankles. When freed, she’d wander through the haunted house, becoming increasingly unhinged with terror at each scene that she stumbled into: a dining room with a table covered not with food, but human body parts, another bedroom with another set of ropes tied to the bed, and a mattress soaked with blood, a kitchen with a dead body inside, the victim’s throat slashed.

And then…a man appears on the screen wielding a knife or chainsaw or axe and she screams and… Insert evil laugh, and information on where to purchase a ticket for this allegedly awesome experience.

I was so annoyed that I had watch those videos and have those images in my head. No, it wasn’t realistic by any means — campy and purposefully melodramatic — but still. I do not want that in my consciousness. Especially the whole tired-ass trope of 20-year-old hot girl being tortured and killed by a seriously deranged older man.

I was also super annoyed that I had to write about it in a way that encouraged people to attend these events. I know it was my job, but still…I don’t want my work to uplift violent experiences or promote the fetishization of violence against women (or anyone, for that matter).

On the other hand…there is a part of this I understand. We live in a culture that works very hard to deny death or at the very least, brush death underneath the rug. We are both blessed and cursed with the knowledge of our imminent demise. We must live with the mystery of it every single day.

This, in itself, can be horrifying knowledge to carry. And if there’s one thing we know, it’s that we can’t really talk about it. That’s just not what we do as a culture. We pretend it doesn’t exist.

I suspect Halloween has given us a bit of an out in this respect. Now we have a culturally-approved way to dive deeply into death, into fear, into sheer horror, into all the things that haunt our dreams, and we don’t have to admit that any of it actually bothers us. We don’t have to confess that we are haunted by the knowledge of our mortality on a daily basis. We don’t have to even confront this within ourselves because we can purge it by watching dramatizations of other people’s horrific, violent deaths.

At least, that’s how I explain this phenomenon to myself. It makes me feel better than to believe that most people in the world love watching other humans being tortured and slowly killed with sharp objects.

Maybe we, just like my ancient ancestors, are a little bit scared of the thinning of that veil. Maybe we are afraid of what lies on the other side, or at least, the knowledge that we will never know what’s on the other side until we get there. Maybe this is our way of sacrificing animals to appease the spirits — instead, we do it through a collective imagining that we can replay again and again.

And maybe it is even proof of why we need Halloween so much — and why we need to remember it as a sacred moment in the cycle of the seasons.

© Yael Wolfe 2020

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