Marketplace of Ideas Blog

Today is Halloween, originally known as All Hallows Eve, and known locally as the anniversary of the death of escape artist Harry Houdini.

The religious themes of death and the dead around Halloween (including Houdini’s Halloween 1926 death and aftermath) morphed over time into the theme of terror and general scariness. That goes with the long-standing fear of that which you can’t perceive, specifically the dark — vampires only come out at night, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster came to life during a sky-blackening thunderstorm, people change into werewolves under a nighttime full moon, and so on.

One famous example is the CBS radio play “War of the Worlds,” based on the H.G. Wells novel, whose broadcast Oct. 30, 1938 was so well created by director Orson Welles that many listeners actually believed Earth was being invaded by Martians. (The program can be heard here. The owners of what now is WDUZ (107.5 FM) in Green Bay played “War of the Worlds” repeatedly when they changed to a new ’80s format, “The Planet,” in 1998.)

Halloween is another example of the secularizing of religion in this country, similar to Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day. Catholicism and its immediate post-Reformation alternatives celebrated Nov. 1 as All Saints Day and Nov. 2 as All Souls Day, commemorations of our deceased ancestors. The latter has largely been replaced by Memorial Day, which of course originally commemorated our war dead but now seems to commemorate death and life (as in the beginning of summer).

All Saints Day is taken more seriously in other countries, particularly Spanish-speaking countries that celebrate Dia de Los Muertos between Halloween and All Souls Day. Our honeymoon was in Mexico around Halloween 1992. (On Halloween, I caught, of all things, an 8-foot-long 115-pound striped marlin in the Pacific Ocean off Baja California, an event as likely for me as my voting for a Socialist Party candidate.) On All Saints Day we were sitting in a Catholic church where the priest asked everyone to avoid the apparently popular local All Saints Day ritual of pelting tourists with things.

Halloween today is a simultaneous triumph of the American economy and an example of the fleeing of American culture from liberty toward safety.

The first point hits you between the eyes upon walking into your favorite retail outlet. Some parents still make homemade costumes for their children, and some children can devise their own, but the choice and variety of costumes for sale, for children and adults, vastly exceeds the length of time children can wear them.

One week ago, I witnessed this while volunteering in my oldest son’s third grade class. (Grade school kids + Friday + Halloween candy = an excuse for adults to run for their nearest favorite adult beverage immediately afterward.) The school held an indoor Halloween parade, and there was a lot of variety, from football players (both the local high school and college are having winning seasons) to characters from “High School Musical” to various animals to representatives of the beasts about to strike, complete with flashing or gyrating eyeballs.

Related to that is the number of haunted houses for public view, a relatively recent trend. They are smaller-scale versions of the famed Disneyland haunted house, workers at which would ask people to move farther into the waiting area, because “others are dying to get inside.”

There are even some businesses that allow or even encourage their employees to dress up for Halloween. (And if that list includes you, email pictures to sprestegard@jcpgroup.com — I’m dressing up as a business magazine editor today — and we’ll post them on our Marketplace Today blog.) That seems unprofessional to many, but some business owners have learned that the atmosphere of a workplace has a great deal to do with obtaining and retaining the services of the best employees, and that fostering a creative workplace environment, whether that means having pets at work or other nontraditional features is the best way to keep quality employees.

My last point about Halloween is proven by two facts — trick-or-treating never takes place at night anymore, and trick-or-treating in most communities is split between the weekend before Halloween and Halloween only if there is no school the next day. (The end of Daylight Saving Time has even been moved to after Halloween — Sunday at 2 a.m., for those who didn’t notice.) Halloween as a daytime event is a cultural change, and change is inevitable, but positive change is not.

The Halloween experience of people my age included some kind of Halloween school event, followed by trick-or-treating after dark, accompanied by our fathers until the age where we were considered old enough to go out by ourselves. Halloween was sometimes accompanied by such “tricks” as toilet-papering of trees or throwing eggs at houses, but that used to be seen as an annoyance (in addition to a waste of locally produced products) instead of, now, vandalism, which seems like an overreaction.

The event that eventually ended nighttime trick-or-treating in Wisconsin was the Halloween 1973 murder of nine-year-old Lisa French of Fond du Lac. (French’s killer, who was released on parole after serving half of his 38-year sentence, is now part of state employment law.) Trick-or-treating has been moved to weekends so that parents are able to go out with their children, which may be safer, but takes some of the thrill out of Halloween.

That could be said to be a reaction to not just safety, but the general coarsening of our culture. Hollywood produced movies that, because of lack of sophistication in special effects and the Motion Picture Production Code and television Seal of Good Practice, horror movies or shows (particularly those in black and white) used to be more effectively scary, whereas horror movies of today are more gory than scary.

Halloween is the source of the never-proven but often-repeated urban legend of poisoned or tampered Halloween candy. There have been several alleged cases of poisoned Halloween candy, but none have ever been proven to have been anything but crimes for which the Halloween connection covered up the real motive — for instance, a Texas father who in 1974 poisoned his daughter’s candy with cyanide — or deaths around Halloween whose causes weren’t from Halloween candy poisoning.

This may seem like a stretch of a comparison, but former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was asked after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks if he felt the world was a more dangerous place. He said it wasn’t, because we now knew more. Perhaps Halloween has been turned down in intensity because the world seems like a scarier place today, whether or not it actually is.

Ultimately, Halloween is part of our simultaneous fear of death and attraction to, if not death, then getting as close as possible without actually dying, similar to our attraction to scary movies, daredevils and amusement park thrill rides. (I think a college professor of mine made that argument.) Winston Churchill once claimed that “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”

If you don’t believe me, go out to a poorly lit cemetery at night, and watch what involuntarily happens to your heart rate. Or sit at your home computer with the only light in your house coming from your monitor writing a blog entry, when you hear a noise …