The Death of Halloween

I fell in love with autumn as a child. Much as I enjoyed summer, I always longed to see it immolated on fall’s prismatic pyre. I loved the fitful passage from hot to cold, the layering up of clothing, the waning of daylight, the thrill of hay rides and corn mazes, the raking of leaves, the smell of pumpkin guts, of dying vegetable matter, of things waiting to be burned. As a season of transition, autumn is more profound than spring for its melancholy. It spoke directly to my soul. 

Autumn also meant Halloween—and my birthday. My parents would throw me costume parties every October 26. The seriousness of growing older was always married to the playful freedom of Halloween. Trick-or-treating mattered less for sweets than for the opportunity to gallivant around the neighborhood with friends, reveling in the feeling that we could get away with anything, at least for one night. Halloween was for pranks, for terrorizing the girls at our elementary school dance. On one occasion, I ran transparent fishing line through the dark gymnasium, zig-zagging among clusters of sock-hopping girls. I fastened a mink pelt to one end of the line. (I had cut it from my mother’s stole.) Hiding behind a door, I reeled the line in, making the mink race like a huge rat around the girls’ feet. How they howled!

I have never experienced the real Halloween, though. The night of drunken carousing that now passes for Halloween bears little resemblance to the festival of old. Like spiders slurping the innards of a beetle, disenchantment and commercialization have bled it of meaning. And yet the carapace remains. Halloween’s history is a signal case of the process by which Western institutions descend into decadence.

“All that is meant by Decadence is ‘falling off,’” writes Jacques Barzun in his magisterial history of Western culture, From Dawn to Decadence. 

It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The loss it faces is that of Possibility. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted. . . . Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result.

This “falling off” is unmistakable throughout our cultural institutions. They have lost their animating force: the spirit of play.

In his celebrated study Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga defines play as “a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary life.’” In play, “real” life, the realm of the serious, is suspended, and we participate in realms that are altogether other. In doing so, we are changed. Set against ordinary life, play is non-serious, but in its own worlds it often achieves, even requires, high seriousness. For Huizinga, play is the genesis of myth and ritual and all that flows from them. Without the play-impulse, there would be no culture, no civilization, no language. 

If we agree with Plato that we “should live out our lives playing,” then the life of diminished play must be ignoble, something less than fully human. Today, Western civilization is dying because we no longer “play” at culture; lacking the generative powers of play, cultural forms and institutions are capable only of decadent repetition. We possess neither the playfulness proper to us as humans nor the reverence proper to us as creatures made in God’s image. As incapable of true play as of true seriousness, we are less than bestial, for even ­animals play.

Halloween originated in the Christian feasts of All Saints’ and All Souls’. In the Catholic Church, All Saints’ Day commemorates the Church Triumphant, all those baptized believers who have obtained perfect union with God in heaven, with a special emphasis placed on those canonized by the Church. The observance of All Saints’ Day on November 1 can be traced to the mid-eighth century, when Pope Gregory III shifted the date from May 13. In Eastern traditions it is still observed in the spring, after Pentecost. 

The linked feast of All Souls’ Day commemorates the baptized souls in purgatory, the Church Penitent. Though both days were opportunities for remembering departed loved ones, All Souls’ Day featured intercessory prayer for those being refined in purgatory. Rituals of intercession underlie a few recognizable contemporary Halloween practices.

All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days, known ­together in England as “Hallowtide,” were among the most important dates in the liturgical year by the end of the Middle Ages. Hallowtide was a period during which the faithful expected an increase of supernatural activity—both the evil and the benevolent kind. Church bells, believed to drive away demons, tolled all night. Many people anticipated visitations of the ghosts of loved ones and set extra ­places at the dinner table, or left food and drink out at night, a tradition that lives on in the ofrendas of Mexico’s Día de los Muertos celebration.

Because All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days reinforced the debt the living owed the dead, Hallowtide was a means of preserving a community’s historical consciousness. These festivals reminded people that they were a people, that they were connected as kin to others materially, through time and space, and spiritually, in the Mystical Body of Christ. 

This quality—of historical continuity, of duty to one’s ancestors and descendants—was essential to Halloween for most of its existence. But during the last century or so, Halloween has been robbed of this virtue.

A common but mistaken narrative presents Halloween as a Christianization of the ancient pagan festival of Samhain. Though there is little evidence of a cynical campaign by the Church to appropriate Samhain, after the dates of All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days were moved to November 1 and 2, elements of both traditions naturally merged, and today echoes of Samhain are easily discerned in Halloween. 

A Celtic harvest festival observed throughout Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man, Samhain marked the beginning of preparations for winter. Livestock were slaughtered in anticipation of the lean months, and ritual bonfires were lit in the belief that they would effect cleansing and confer protection. There is literary and archeological evidence that in pre-Christian times Samhain featured human sacrifice, a practice not uncommon among Celts and the tribes of northern Europe. ­Julius Caesar describes a particularly gruesome form of Druidic sacrifice in his Commentaries on the Gallic War: “Others use figures of immense size, whose limbs, woven out of twigs, they fill with living men and set on fire, and the men perish in a sheet of flame.” The image was put to unforgettable use in the British horror film The Wicker Man. 

Celebrated between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, Samhain was a “liminal festival” in which the fabric of reality grew thin and the Otherworld drew nearer to this world. The Celtic Otherworld was both the paradisal realm of faëries and the land of the dead—and certainly perilous to humans. It was believed that on Samhain the féth fíada, the magic fog that made the faëries (or elves) invisible to human eyes, lifted. “On that night in Ireland all the fairy hills are thrown wide open and the fairies swarm forth,” James Frazer writes in The Golden Bough. “Any man who is bold enough may then peep into the open green hills and see the treasures hidden in them. Worse than that, the cave of Cruachan in Connaught, known as the ‘Hell gate of Ireland,’ is unbarred on Samhain Eve or Hallowe’en, and a host of horrible fiends and goblins used to rush forth.” During Samhain, people would propitiate whatever faëries and spirits might be abroad by leaving out food and drink at night in hopes of a blessing for the coming winter.

The bonfires were used in divination rites, as were certain nuts and apples (thought to have a strong connection to the Otherworld). “Mummery” (pantomime) and “guising” (costuming) became common practices from the sixteenth century on. Youths, especially young men, would go from house to house costumed as denizens of the Otherworld, seeking payouts in exchange for blessings—a practice analogous to the “souling” and “doling” of Hallowtide, and a precursor to trick-or-treating.

Halloween in the British Isles was also characterized by a spirit of play, but unlike Samhain, it emphasized social inversion unique to the Christian imagination. In country parishes, community leaders would designate a “Lord of Misrule”—who reigned from Halloween to Candlemas—to spearhead the mischief. Revelers would parade around town and solicit contributions to keep the party going. Neighbors who refused were mocked and harassed. The Puritan pamphleteer Philip Stubbs provides a colorful polemic against the revelry in Anatomie of Abuses (1583): The Lord of Misrule marched his “heathen company towards the Church and Church-yard, their pipers piping, their drummers thundering, their stumps dancing, their bells jingling, their handkerchiefs swinging about their heads like madmen, their hobbyhorses and other monsters skirmishing amongst the route.” Frazer saw in this activity an extension of the ancient Roman tradition of crowning a mock king during Saturnalia, usually a slave who would be sacrificed at the festival’s end. The Christian festival, of course, embraces the joys of social inversion while dispensing with ritual murder. 

Amidst the tomfoolery, the dead were honored. All Souls’ Day, writes historian Nicholas Rogers in Halloween, featured “midnight vigils at gravesites and, until the eighteenth century, domestic offerings of food and clothing for the recently departed. As late as a century ago in Catholic Ireland, it was commonly believed that the dead would return on All Hallow Eve or on the days thereafter.” In certain English towns, the ghosts of those who would die in the coming year were believed to appear. The denizens of Faërie and the land of the dead, memorably depicted in Charles Williams’s novel All Hallows’ Eve, experience time differently than we do.

Key to understanding the sociological function of Halloween is the idea of the carnivalesque, famously explored by Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin in books on Dostoyevsky and Rabelais. Medieval carnivals were festivals that preceded important moments in the liturgical calendar, such as Lent, featured parades and raucous street parties, and gave a general license to mischief. More than that, carnival involved its own worldview and was in many ways a world unto itself. 

As Bakhtin explains, “Carnival is not contemplated and, strictly speaking, not even performed; its participants live in it, they live by its laws as long as those laws are in effect.” As in all true play, the norms and laws of regular life are shelved. “People who in life are separated by impenetrable ­hierarchical barriers enter into free familiar contact on the carnival square.” Carnival is a great leveler, joining “the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid.”

In practices central to carnival, such as “the mock crowning and subsequent decrowning of the carnival king,” the community embraces “the pathos of shifts and changes, of death and renewal.” Carnival was cathartic, an opportunity to vent the steam of conflict that naturally builds within communities. 

Sanctioned transgression of the normative order has always been a feature of Halloween. The practice of divination, for example, was tolerated as a traditional custom during Halloween, whereas at other times of the year it would have been proscribed, especially among Protestants. In the 1960s, the transgressive element of Halloween was eagerly embraced by gay culture in American cities, where homosexual behavior was outlawed. Halloween became the quintessential gay holiday in San Francisco, the only night of the year when crossdressing and public indecency didn’t run the risk of arrest. The trend in San Francisco soon spread to Greenwich Village and other gay neighborhoods.

But as homosexuality was normalized in the late twentieth century, the importance of Halloween to gay culture faded. The sexual revolution made carnivalesque transgression part of the normative order. As far as sex goes, every day is Halloween.

In an act of politically imposed disenchantment, royal authorities in England implemented changes to Hallowtide practices reflective of Protestants’ hostility to Catholicism, especially the doctrine of purgatory. Edward VI banned bell ringing in 1548, and by 1559, during the reign of Elizabeth I, prayers for the dead were excised from the Anglican Litany. The state church soon ceased celebrating Hallowmass altogether, and in 1647 Parliament banned all festivals that smacked of Catholic influence. (The ban lasted until the Stuart Restoration in 1660.) There were Catholic holdouts, of course, who kept alive such practices as hilltop bonfires on All Saints’ Night.

More pervasive than fire rituals was the pre-­Reformation tradition of “souling,” which prefigured both trick-or-treating and jack-o’-lanterns. Supplicants walked about their towns carrying lanterns made from hollowed turnips, the candle representing a soul in purgatory, and solicited “soul cakes” from neighbors in exchange for praying for the souls of their loved ones. As Catholic influence waned, souling took on a more secular character. 

Though All Hallows’ and All Souls’ had lost much of their Catholic religious character by the mid-seventeenth century, they preserved their distinction as a time of supernatural activity. In Lancashire, candles and torches were wielded to repel witches and evil spirits. The liminal, supernatural character of Hallowtide survived the Reformation, but the theological import of practices such as souling and doling was lost, with dire consequences for the festival’s play-element. Huizinga writes that in play, “‘representation’ is really identification, the mystic repetition or re-presentation of the event.” By representing a soul in purgatory, a turnip lantern made purgatory real to the person carrying it. The loss of theological referents meant that the festival was becoming less a world unto itself and thus less animated by a spirit of play.

The distinctiveness of Halloween was further diminished by the popularity of the Fifth of ­November. On Bonfire Night, Guy Fawkes was burned in effigy, often alongside the pope and other disfavored public figures. Many of the customs of Halloween were practiced on Guy Fawkes Night, among them souling and turnip lanterns. 

In Scotland, by contrast, Halloween retained its popularity. Over the centuries, its celebration became an opportunity for preserving the national character. Catholic Ireland likewise preferred Halloween to Bonfire Night, and many of the latter’s customs were transferred to the former, reversing the direction of appropriation in England.

Because Reformation disenchantment held less sway in Scotland and Ireland, space existed for the revival of certain older pagan customs. Nicholas Rogers notes that in the Scottish Highlands, “many of these customs recalled the fire rituals of Samhain that were to be found in the first Celtic sagas.” The link to Samhain was even stronger in Ireland, thanks to the preservation of Celtic oral traditions. The Catholic and pagan traditions were in tension, but not mutually exclusive. “The wandering spirits associated with ancient Samhain and the wandering souls of purgatory could be acknowledged at the same time, even by priests.” Such syncretism could also be observed in Scottish practice.

Though associations with Samhain lingered, the connection of Halloween to All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days grew attenuated. By the eighteenth century, Halloween was more an occasion for courtship and merrymaking than for solicitude for the baptized dead. 

Nonetheless, Halloween courtship rituals exuded an irrepressible spirit of play. Robert Burns preserves these rituals in his poem “Halloween,” which depicts young people engaging in a variety of divination practices to learn the identities and qualities of their future spouses and even their marriages’ fates. The rituals range from simple (saying a spell and looking into a mirror to scry the face of your spouse) to elaborate (hanging a wet shirtsleeve to dry near a fire and waiting until midnight, when an apparition of your lover would appear and turn the sleeve over to dry the other side). Some even involve consulting the Devil. The youths believe in the efficacy of these rituals, and they practice them with delight and not a little fear. For them Halloween is a time out of time, a world unto itself, possessing its own rules and ethos, permitting behaviors proscribed in “ordinary life.”

Because the Puritans despised Halloween for its connection to Catholicism and its pagan spiritualism, the holiday wasn’t observed in North America until the mid-nineteenth century, when it was introduced by Irish and Scottish immigrants. Consequently, Halloween was a marker of ethnic identity during the first decades of its observance. The promotion of the holiday by ethnic organizations, such as the Caledonian Society in Canada, emphasized its public, rather than its familial, character. Masquerades and street festivities were celebrated, increasingly to the exclusion of traditional fireside rituals.

This trend was exacerbated by urbanization. Wage-labor markets afforded a novel independence from family and community, deregulating courtship. Old traditions, especially roasting nuts to divine the success of romantic pairings, were still practiced, but as self-conscious performances of ethnic identity. Play’s quality as a world unto itself was diminished.

Merchants were quick to seize on the commercial opportunities afforded by the holiday, and one could buy Halloween masks in stores as early as 1874. Grocers promoted the sale of a variety of nuts suited to traditional practices, and by 1897 candy manufacturers were marketing to Halloween shoppers. Commercialization no doubt hastened the death of traditional Halloween practices, just as it had previously those of Christmas. As early as 1876, the New York Times could moan, “The glory of this once popular festival has departed. Its triumphs and rough jollities, festivals and strange rites are a matter of history, and live only in the immortal verse of Burns and traditional lore.”

While customs of home and hearth faded, other traditions were expanded, if also altered. Halloween had always had its gendered expressions, with girls more interested in romantic divination and boys more apt to venture outdoors in costume and roughhouse, and this distinction largely remained. But in more densely populated cities, the opportunities for mischief-making were endless, and pranking increasingly characterized the holiday. As had been the case in the British Isles, authorities customarily looked the other way. Pranking typically involved light vandalism, such as placing wagons on rooftops, but could get as ambitious as the greasing of streetcar tracks.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Halloween rowdiness had become so problematic in some places that one newspaper counseled readers to “load their muskets or cannon with rock, salt or bird shot and when the trespasses invade your premises at unseemly hours . . . pepper them good or proper.”

In the early twentieth century, college students became especially known for nefarious activity on Halloween, belying the idea that misbehavior was the domain of the lower classes. The Chicago Daily Tribune records a rather gruesome prank pulled by medical students at the University of Michigan on Halloween of 1900. “When the attendant whose office it is to open University Hall arrived to perform his duty, he was confronted by a hideous sight. Propped against the folding doors of the building and facing outward stood the headless corpse of a woman still swathed in the antiseptic bandages of the laboratory.” Because of its timing early in the fall semester, Halloween provided an opportunity for hazing freshmen, which included the common practice of marching downtown in costume and “rushing” theaters. Local populations grew weary of these collegiate shenanigans, and by the 1920s university administrators put an end to the rushes. When schools moved the start of ­classes to earlier in the fall, Halloween ceased to be a rite of passage. 

Throughout the twentieth century, the carnival inversion with the most staying power was the perceived license Halloween gave to destructive, often criminal, impulses. The 1934 Chicago World’s Fair concluded with a Halloween riot involving upwards of 370,000 people, many in costume. The Chicago Daily Tribune reported on November 2: “As the evening wore on roistering groups began a mad hunt for souvenirs. Signs were ripped off of buildings and carried away. Then, as the lack of adequate police protection was realized, the souvenir hunting became vandalism. . . . Soon the general scene was one of wreckage.”

Halloween riots could be considerably more ­violent and destructive, and the 1930s and ’40s saw everything from race riots to arson sprees. The ­violence prompted efforts to “tame” the holiday. In 1950, for example, Harry Truman (unsuccessfully) directed the Senate to repurpose Halloween as a “Youth Honor Day.” Though “Youth Honor Day” sounds irredeemably hokey, it was just one part of a largely successful campaign across the ­United States and Canada to redirect youthful energy into pro-social activities, such as high school Halloween dances and other efforts to distract young men from jackassery.

Trick-or-treating, which gained popularity in the 1950s, was especially useful for defanging the holiday. In earlier generations, door-to-door doling carried the threat of recriminatory action if social obligations were unfulfilled. But, explains Rogers, the new “trick-or-treating sought to marginalize adolescent pranking and to defuse the antagonism inherent in the festive tribute, transforming the exchange into a rite of consumption.” 

Candy manufacturers began advertising their products in connection with door-to-door soliciting, and costumers promoted Halloween as an opportunity for conspicuous consumption. Gone were the homemade costumes of the interwar years; beginning in the 1950s, children bought their masks and outfits from retailers. Commercialization helped to infantilize Halloween by compromising its internal unity as play. “Not ­being ‘ordinary’ life,” writes Huizinga, “[play] stands outside the immediate satisfaction of wants and appetites, indeed it interrupts the appetitive process.” But when commercial interests are imposed upon it, play ceases to be a world unto itself and is robbed of its generative power. By the 1960s, Halloween had lost much of its former anarchy (and not a little of its charm). The spirit of carnival was replaced by spirits bought in liquor stores.

Less than a decade later, a new threat emerged. In the late 1960s, rumors of drug-tainted candy and razor blades in apples became commonplace. The accounts of “Halloween sadism” were almost entirely baseless, but they had a profound effect on the social imagination. Even venerable news outlets fanned the flames of moral panic. In 1970, for example, the New York State Health Commissioner warned New York Times readers: “Children should not eat any of their collected goodies until they have been carefully examined by an adult. In recent years, pins, razor blades, slivers of glass and poison have appeared in the treats gathered by Children across New York State.” The claim was simply false.

The 1970s also saw the reemergence of Halloween rioting and large-scale destruction of property in urban centers. Detroit experienced the worst of it, with young men setting fires to abandoned houses, of which the city had no small supply. The arson reached its peak in 1983, when nearly a thousand fires were set during the three days surrounding “Devil’s Night.” As play ceases to be play, and as transgression is normalized across society, it would seem that carnivalesque transgression must be intensified to deliver a frisson.

Trick-or-treating survived the chaos of inner-city violence and threats of Halloween sadism, though its popularity waned considerably in the 1980s. Compared to its practice in the ’50s, when thick, homogenous communities meant that children could roam without supervision, it was much diminished, hemmed in by parental vigilance. And as Halloween was further hollowed out by social decay, consumerism continued to fill the vacuum. (Last year, Americans spent $11.6 billion on the holiday, $700 million of which was for pet costumes.)

If there’s one feature we have come to expect, it’s the close association of Hollywood horror films with Halloween. Interestingly, it wasn’t until the 1978 release of John Carpenter’s Halloween—the first film to use the word in its title—that this relationship crystalized. The slasher films that proliferated in the 1980s often timed their release to coincide with the Halloween season, and increasingly people’s costumes reflected the impact of film. 

About the same time that Halloween and Hollywood horror became entwined, the phenomenon of “haunted houses” got off the ground. Elaborately staged haunted houses offered a controlled environment in which to let off steam and indulge morbid curiosities. They were also another opportunity for entrepreneurs to cash in on the season, as anyone who has been to Knott’s Scary Farm or Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights can attest. But such big-budget productions were inspired by “home haunts” staged by enthusiasts for their local communities. These bootstrap productions fostered community bonding, hearkening back to the earlier social function of Halloween. Inside the haunted house, play is renewed: One submits to its rules, suspends ordinary norms, and takes joy in the tension of alternately surrendering to and resisting the scares. But, like so many other localist enterprises, home haunts were largely wiped out by zoning laws and that most frightening of specters: the liability lawsuit.

Halloween’s transformations since the late nineteenth century exemplify the fate of institutions under “liquid ­modernity,” Zygmunt Bauman’s term for “the growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty. A hundred years ago ‘to be modern’ meant to chase ‘the final state of perfection’—now it means an infinity of improvement, with no ‘final state’ in sight and none desired.” 

We can apply this observation to Halloween by means of an analogy: Some of the physical buildings that make up Harvard University are quite old, but the people, courses, ideologies, and identities that inhabit them change with increasing frequency. Much of the old form is still in place, but its content is in radical flux. A similar thing has happened over time with Halloween. The “forms” or tropes of Halloween have been emptied of their traditional content by the processes of secularization and commercialization. Costumes no longer gesture to genuine belief in faëries or spirits. The practices of “souling” and “doling” (now trick-or-treating) no longer bear any connection to belief in the afterlife, or to veneration of lost loved ones, or even to norms of mutuality. Jack-o’-lanterns no longer call to mind the souls wandering in purgatory, but refer only to themselves. Romantic games remain but no longer have marriage in view. For most people, Halloween is neither a reminder of the claims the dead have on the living, nor an anticipation of new life, futurity. We are left with only the eternal now of the market. The lingering customs and artifacts have been stripped of their referents; they are vacuums waiting to be filled and emptied and filled again, until we abandon them out of sheer boredom.

Josef Pieper writes: “In all religions, the meaning of a feast has always been the same, the affirmation of man’s fundamental accord with the world.” The wrinkle is that “there is no such thing as a feast ‘without Gods.’” Compared to the practices of living communities of faith, all our efforts to celebrate new feast days on grounds other than divine worship have been abortive. The same is true of our attempts to secularize the feast days of old.

Halloween’s carnival function barely survives, if at all. Though elements of inversion are still recognizable, they are less and less potent. Because ethical norms are now “liquid”—which is another way of saying that they are not really norms—there is scarcely anything left to invert.

If Halloween is to mean anything more than boozing and philandering, it will do so only in smaller contexts, where communities both acknowledge their normative orders and sanction inversions of those orders. The carnivalesque might still be possible in a place like Mormon Utah, which has done comparatively well at preserving traditional cultural norms. But even there, the porous, interconnected nature of our world threatens to rob social inversion of its catharsis. Carnivalesque play may be irretrievable for our time.

This is a shame. The laughter of carnival is powerful medicine—powerful precisely because it is shared, and shared within play’s transformation of reality. Humans are the only animals that laugh; we are Aristotle’s Homo ridens as much as Homo sapiens or Homo ludens. And, given our country’s current pathologies, we are in need of powerful medicine, medicine that transforms, ­re-humanizes. As ­Huizinga observes of politics, “it is the decay of humour that kills.”

“It was the victory of laughter over fear that most impressed medieval man,” writes Bakhtin. That victory reaches its zenith in Christian culture. Faith in Christ allows us to truly laugh in the face of death. “Where, O Death, is thy victory? Where, O Hades, is thy sting?” (1 Cor. 15:55). Others may laugh at death—mockingly, nervously, nihilistically—but theirs is at bottom a laugh of despair. The Christian laughs in joy. When Christ was resurrected, surely the first sound to issue from his lips was joyous laughter. If Halloween is to retain any value for Christians, we must learn again to play in the laughter of Christ.