Give Me the Candy, but You Can Keep the Scares

Halloween is over. 

The celebration that, for many of us, marks the beginning of the holiday season has concluded. We’re past the days of full harvest and more than a month into our descent to darkness in the northern hemisphere – days when the hours of sunlight are overshadowed by the hours of night. Many cultures believe this as a liminal time of year when the veil between the living and the dead is thin, and they created holidays that honor the dead: Halloween, Día de los Muertos, All Souls Day and All Saints Day.

For most Americans, Halloween is all about decorations, dressing-up and trick-or treating. The National Retail Federation says that Halloween is the second biggest retail event of the year and projected that this year we would spend $102.74 for every person in the country – setting a new record and for the first time ever hitting triple digits per person. That’s over $10 billion worth of costumes, candy and decorations for our apartments, houses and yards.

And my experience while going around Happy Valley is this spending was evident by the amount of Halloween paraphernalia I saw adorning houses. It seems as though people are accepting that vaccines and other methods are working, and we are returning to pre-pandemic activities with gusto. Especially during trick-or-treating on Sunday night when, for the first time I can recall, we almost ran out of candy at our house. Even though the amount of candy we purchase follows our guidelines (outlined here), meaning we have always gotten enough with plenty to spare, this year the number of ghosts, goblins, pumpkins, princesses, knights and various spooky apparitions that showed up at our door seemed to be more than usual. This was a very happy turn-of-events and hopefully one of many signals that we’re getting back to life as normal

The only downside of all the young people joyfully accepting our candy is that it left almost nothing for me to rationalize consuming as a way to save it from going to waste. C’est la vie. My wife, doctor, trainer and dietician would all agree that’s a good thing!

One thing I won’t miss about Halloween is all the scary movies and shows on television. Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Pennywise and every other nightmare-inducing character to ever show up on the screen can all disappear forever as far as I’m concerned. For the last month it seems every network has had some kind of homage to this genre – Freeform’s 31 Nights of Halloween, AMC’s  FearFest, Disney Channel’s Monstober, Syfy’s 31 Days of Halloween…  and the list goes on. 

I don’t get it. 

I still remember my first introduction to horror films. When I was a kid, every Sunday around lunchtime WPIX channel 11 in New York would show an Abbott and Costello movie. As I had cable television and access to New York channels, watching the comedy of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello became a staple of my youth.

A number of the films had names that suggested they could be scary: “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” “Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff,” “Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man,” “Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” “Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.” But as you soon found out, the movies were all comedy and pranks. There was nothing in them to cause fear. And so I became conditioned to believe that if movies had sinister sounding names that was just marketing for the comedy – it was part of the inside joke. After all, why make a movie if it wasn’t funny?

Then one weekend I was searching through the TV Guide magazine for something to watch. For those too young to remember, TV Guide was a weekly magazine you bought at the grocery store that listed every show that was going to be on your television that week – there wasn’t a “guide” button on your remote back then (there wasn’t a remote either!). While looking through the offerings I stumbled across a movie titled “Two on a Guillotine.” 

As I had been studying history I knew what a guillotine was, and as nasty and scary a contraption of death it might be, the movie starred Cesar Romero, who played the Joker on the “Batman television series, and Dean Jones, who was in Disney’s “The Love Bug” movie. It wasn’t an Abbott and Costello movie but “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken” with Don Knotts had taught me I could count on humorous television show characters to still be humorous in movies no matter how horrible the title sounded. So I turned “Two on a Guillotine” on and watched.

That was a mistake. 

This was a movie whose intent was to instill fear. To cause you to be scared. To close your eyes and cover your ears every few minutes. It was creepy and nasty and not-at-all funny. And I hated it. 

Since then I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve watched a horror film. Actually I can count on less than one hand because I’ve never again purposely watched a single horror film. Certainly I’ve seen bits and pieces of them while I, my wife or my kids were flipping channels, but I don’t watch them. I just don’t get it. I don’t have any desire to go through those emotions when my purpose is to be entertained. 

Which puts me at odds with many other people.  

Horror films generate hundreds of millions of dollars at the box office. According to industry sources, at least 19 mainstream horror films will debut in theaters this year. From “The Seventh Day” to “The Forever Purge” to “Candyman” to “Halloween Kills,” there are plenty of opportunities for those who enjoy things-that-go-bump-in-the-night to get their thrills. 

Academics have postulated for years why people like horror movies, suggesting theories such as an unconscious, repressed part of every human is savage and that while we consciously disapprove of what the monster is doing, deep down part of us enjoys seeing the murder and mayhem the monster unleashes. Or that we enjoy rooting for the good guys as they battle the monster. Or we’re endlessly fascinated by monstrous entities and psychotics. Or that some people are wired in such a way that they get a kick out of the fear, especially in a context where there’s no real threat to them. Or that fear can bring people closer together and create bonding over watching things like horror films.

Even those in the psychiatric profession study why scary movies are popular, suggesting that fear is part of our evolution. That seeking out a little scare in movies helps us recognize danger and survive it. That scary movies may in fact be a relatively safe way of working out that part of our brain that controls our reactions to fear.

But whatever the theory, I’m having none of it. Which is why I am a bit glad that Halloween is over. The holiday season of scary things is past and the season of glad tidings and joy is upon us. Bring on all the sappy Thanksgiving and holiday movies and television shows – I’m ready to watch!