Halloween used to be a time when children would dress up in costumes and trick or treat through the neighborhood. Today, adults have mostly taken over the holiday, turning it into a gruesome scare fest.
Used to, houses would be decorated with funny jack-o-lanterns. If you walk through neighborhoods today, you are likely to see festive decorations of rotting corpses, skeletons wielding chainsaws, severed limbs, and dead babies.
A school or church might sponsor a haunted house, which offered mild chills by having you walk through a dark hallway festooned with threads (“cobwebs!”) at the end of which you would put your hand into a bowl of peeled grapes (“eyeballs!”).
Today we have “extreme” haunted houses. In the Bible belt of rural Tennessee is McKamey Manor, the subject of a story in the U.S. Sun with the deck, “World’s scariest ‘torture chamber’ haunted house where thrillseekers agree to have TEETH yanked out & fingers broken.” Celebrants first have to sign a 40-page waiver, giving the proprietors permission to subject them to physical and mental torture. Visitors are waterboarded, bound and gagged, stuffed into freezers, tormented by tarantulas, covered with snakes, and otherwise tormented. Those who can endure the entire 10 hour experience are promised an award of $20,000. So far, no one has collected.
McKamey Manor is so successful that another one, open year round, has opened in Huntsville, Alabama. The attraction has a waiting list of 24,000.
Not just children but adults don elaborate costumes, dressing up as zombies, monsters, or politicians. They gather at occult-themed parties and crowd the streets in Halloween parades, the more grotesque the better.
Halloween is the favorite holiday of 15% of Americans, the third most popular after Christmas (36%) and Thanksgiving (23%).
My question is “why?” What, exactly, is this holiday now celebrating?
I know what the old Halloween was celebrating. It was the evening before “All Hallows”–that is, All Saints’ Day–which, according to legends, was a day so holy that no demons or demonic creatures could come forth. So they do so on the night before the Holy Day, their last chance to come out and play before they are vanquished. So Halloween came with a lesson about the power of holiness to quell the dark forces. For all of the costumes and horseplay, it was a Christian holiday.
Today, All Saints’ Day, once a very popular holiday, is hardly celebrated at all. But Halloween is, though it has surely changed its meaning. So what does all of the wallowing in death and gore and horror mean? Why do 24,000 people want to subject themselves to McKamey Manor?
Fr. Donald Planty also complains about the increasing ugliness of the holiday in his essay Modern Halloween Celebrations Are Spiritually Empty. He uses it as an example of what secularism does to holidays. “Without the supernatural,” he writes, “the natural degenerates into the unnatural.”
But one might reply, death is a fact of nature. Isn’t it healthy to face up to death one night a year? Fear is a natural emotion. Jolts of horror from a Halloween movie night of slasher films can give us a healthy emotional catharsis.
Death might be a fact of nature, but it is unnatural to take pleasure from death. Fear has a natural function, to trigger the “fight or flight” reflex. It is unnatural to take pleasure from fear. That defeats its whole purpose.
Please note that I am not begrudging children the opportunity to dress up and go trick or treating. We will gladly choose the “treat” option, bestowing candy to anyone who comes to our door. And yet, since fewer and fewer children seem to be trick or treating these days, I make a point of buying candy that I like, so I can treat myself.
And I’m not begrudging adults the opportunity to dress up and have a good time. Enjoy yourself.
But in the enormous popularity of the dark side of Halloween, I am haunted (!) by a scene from Dante. In his Inferno–there is some Halloween reading for you!–he depicts the damned waiting to cross into Hell as “eager” for their punishment (Inferno, Canto 3, line 124). After all, the torments that await them represent the sin they have chosen.
Perhaps today’s version of Halloween is a foretaste of the Hell to come.
Photo: Liliful 5ft Hanging Corpse Dead Victim Props Scary Fake Body Bag Halloween Decorations Outdoor Halloween Creepy Haunted House Decor for Indoor Outdoor Halloween Party Decoration, Black, White (2 Set) via Amazon.com
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