While sitting at my local Dutch Brothers Coffee hut the other day waiting for my large hazelnut latte (it’s one of my few vices), the barista asked an interesting question. When did Halloween become about displays of serial killers in the act of dismembering their victims or depictions of execution by electrocution?
This took me back to the Halloweens of my childhood. I can remember my cousins, my brother Ronnie and myself dressing up in homemade costumes and going out with pillow cases or paper bags to collect candy. One particular year I remember Ronnie dressed as Dracula, my cousin Greg wore his mother’s pearls, a blue dress and a matching purse and either my cousin Tim or myself dressed as an old man. I’m a little unclear which of us was the old man but I know there is a picture of us somewhere. Once or twice our moms might have bought us a plastic mask but overall store bought costumes were not an option and we really didn’t care. The challenge was to come up with the best costume possible with what we had so we could score the most candy on the block. Tim and Greg lived one street up from us so that gave us a block or two radius that we were allowed to roam. We operated on the “buddy” system. Our parents didn’t go with us and didn’t worry about our safety because our neighborhood had a really good parenting network where every parent looked out for their neighbors’ kids just like they looked out for their own. This same network kept us in line and prevented us from acting up. The last thing we wanted was for our mothers to find out that we had soaped someone’s car windows or toilet papered a house.
Even then there were the stories of kids getting apples with razorblades in them or poisoned candy but we were under strict orders to not eat anything until after our parents had inspected it. And believe me, we didn’t.
The displays in our neighbors’ yards were made up of homemade scarecrows, sheet ghosts hanging from the trees, carved jack-o-lanterns and the occasional gravestone. Some neighbors even had haunted houses set up in their garages but nothing too scary. Nothing like the fake blood soaked, decapitated corpses, and chainsaw wielding psychos in commercialized horror houses of today.
This brings me back to the barista’s question: When did Halloween change? Many people will tell you it started with the movie “Night of the Living Dead” and the string of slasher films it spawned that desensitized the last couple of generations. I don’t disagree with this theory but I also don’t think you can lay the blame on just the film industry. Technological advances in communication and entertainment over the last few decades have removed a lot of the isolation and buffer that communities and children once had. With the expansion of networks, cable, satellite and the internet has come not only a wealth of instant news and knowledge but also instant scenes of the horrors of war and disaster.
My cousins, brother and I were on the tail end of the Frankenstein/Dracula/Vincent Price generation. These movies scared the bejeezus out of us as kids but we knew it was make believe. Later, as movies became more graphic in their depiction of violence, they began to match the images we were seeing on the evening news. Today, you can watch an episode of a primetime crime drama and see more graphically violent and bloody scenes than I could of seen in an R-rated movie of my childhood, had I actually been able to go to one.
Sure, the expansion of all types of media have helped desensitize us to the harsh things in life but I feel that just the process of growing older makes us less sensitive as well. Sort of a thickening of our skins as a protection against bad things.
Don’t believe me? Well, think about the kids who rang your doorbell this year and yelled “Trick or Treat”. I didn’t have a single axe wielding killer at my door. Just a dozen or so innocent children dressed as witches, princesses, fairies, vampires, and star troopers whose goal was only to collect as much candy as possible. I smiled and laughed at every one of them because they all made me remember my childhood and gave me hope that childhood traditions will live on and kids will be kids.
Happy Halloween!
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