6

From Burns to Burton:
Halloween and Popular Culture

As Halloween has transformed, spread and integrated through the centuries and around the globe, it has become a significant part of every culture that has accepted it. It has not only been defined by customs, politics and art but has sometimes served in part to redefine them. Home celebrations have reflected an area and time’s belief in religion and the occult, costuming and trick or treat have become irreversibly interwoven with the media, and books, films and art about Halloween have become their own cottage industries. There’s no question that Halloween has inspired popular culture – but to what extent? Would Washington Irving, Robert Burns, John Carpenter, Tim Burton or even Edgar Allan Poe be as widely known without Halloween? What about Stephen King, or zombies? Has Halloween made the entire genre of horror more accepted and popular? Does the goth subculture owe a debt to it? At the heart of all these speculations is one simple question: what does Halloween really represent?

The answer to that is that Halloween is – as folklorist and Halloween expert Jack Santino has noted – ‘polysemic’: it holds different meanings in different places and times, and even to different persons within a single place. To the modern adult American, it’s a chance to indulge fears in an environment that is relatively safe, because it’s defined by art and imagination. To a contemporary Russian, it’s a night on which to exercise freedom of expression. For a Scandinavian, it might be a last celebration before the long, dark winter sets in.

But 500 years ago – in what we might think of as Halloween’s infancy – it was perceived very differently. In a world just emerging from the Dark Ages and still under the threat of plague, All Hallows’ was a curious and uncertain mix of pagan and Christian, magic and meditation, raucous festival and sombre reflection.

Since Halloween has – at least until very recently – been ephemeral in how it was celebrated, its history must be sought primarily through the arts. Fortunately it has made an impact on poetry, fiction, theatre, film, radio, television, music, painting, graphic design and folk crafts, and has left a well-tracked but winding path along which its evolution may be traced.

The Literature of Halloween

The first modern novel, Don Quixote, didn’t appear until the same year in which Guy Fawkes attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Before that, the primary literary forms were poetry and drama, and certainly there are plenty of Halloween mentions to be found in both. The Scots were particularly fond of including references to the festival in their poems and ballads. Alexander Montgomerie’s ‘Montgomeries Answere to Polwart’, which contains the first famous reference to Halloween, is actually a playful attack on a rival poet. In effect, Halloween begins its own cultural history as a device for mockery.

The Scottish ballads, however, emphasize the day’s romantic side. Although Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border didn’t appear until 1802, it did include Scott’s own adaptation of the classic ‘Tamlane’, c. 1548. These stanzas from the ballad, as Tamlane tells his love Janet how she might rescue him from the fairies, paint a wild and lovely picture of early Halloweens:

This night is Hallowe’en, Janet,
      The morn is Hallowday;
And, gin ye dare your true love win,
      Ye hae nae time to stay.
The night it is good Hallowe’en,
      When fairy folk will ride;
And they that wad their true-love win,
      At Miles Cross they maun bide.1

Tam goes onto describe what transformations the fairy queen will put him through, and what Janet must do to keep hold of him throughout.

Shakespeare doesn’t refer to Halloween often, and when he does it’s in a derisive or off-handed manner – understandably, since he was an English playwright during the anti-Catholic and anti-All Saints’ Day reigns of Queen Elizabeth and James I – but there are none the less several mentions of it in his works. In Henry IV Part 1 (I,ii), Henry tells Falstaff, ‘Farewell, thou latter spring; farewell, All-hallown Summer!’, referring to the warm period often found towards the end of October. In Two Gentlemen of Verona (II,I), the character Speed accuses someone of ‘puling like a beggar at Hallowmass’. Richard II contains these lines:

She came adorned hither like sweet May;
Sent back like Hallowmas, or short’st of day (V,i).

For nearly two centuries, Halloween would virtually disappear from literature, as the British Isles were ruled by Protestants. Celebrating it was banned in 1647, when Parliament abolished all festivals but Guy Fawkes Day/Night. But in the late eighteenth century, as Scottish nationalism grew, the Scots once again turned a poetic eye to Halloween. Robert Burns, of course, provided the most famous example in 1785 with ‘Hallowe’en’, a poem which surely did more to influence generations of Halloween revellers than any other single work. The Burns poem, with its detailed descriptions of fortune-telling, food and flirtation, was quoted throughout the nineteenth century in virtually all the popular almanacs and miscellanies. In the edition of his Book of Days published in 1832, for instance, Robert Chambers quoted from the Burns poem at length, and even addressed what it omits:

It is somewhat remarkable, that the sport of ducking for apples is not mentioned by Burns, whose celebrated poem of Halloween presents so graphic a picture of the ceremonies practised on that evening in the west of Scotland, in the poet’s day.2

In 1898, Martha Russell Orne also quoted Burns in describing party games in her Hallowe’en: How to Celebrate It; most of the party pamphlets that would follow over the next three decades would continue to refer to Burns, even though their intended readers were middle-class, urbanized Americans.

Halloween made few appearances in the burgeoning Gothic literature movement, probably because most of the practitioners were British. However, it does feature prominently in the influential collection Tales of Wonder (1801), often considered a landmark work in the history of Gothic literature and poetry. The anthology was compiled by Matthew G. Lewis, the author of what many consider to be the most outstanding work of the entire Gothic movement, the novel The Monk (1796). After residing at Bothwell Castle in Scotland, the English Lewis was inspired to write ‘Bothwell Bonny Jane’, a poem which employs the form of the traditional Scottish ballad as well as the Scottish inclination towards the supernatural. Lewis chose the poem to open Tales of Wonder and it has since been frequently quoted, especially for its references to Halloween. The mock ballad tells of Bonny Jane, whose father intends to marry her to the wealthy Lord Malcolm, but Jane would prefer a life of poverty with Edgar, a local peasant. A sympathetic friar hears her plea and agrees to help her. On Halloween night, he escorts her to the River Clyde, and reveals that he himself is in love with her. He kidnaps her and puts her in a boat to cross the river, but a terrible storm arises; the boatman tells the monk that they must lighten the boat’s weight, and the monk hurls Jane into the water. The boatman then reveals himself as a demon; he clasps the monk to him and they sink into the stormy water. Many years later, the legend of the monk and bonny Jane lives on:

Yet legends say, at Hallow-E’en,
      When Silence holds her deepest reign,
That still the ferryman-fiend is seen
      To waft the monk and bonny Jane . . . 3

Even though Tales of Wonder was first published sixteen years after the Burns poem, Lewis felt the need to explain Halloween to his readers. The poem’s first mention of Halloween has been footnoted by Lewis: ‘On this night witches, devils, &c. are thought, by the Scotch, to be abroad on their baneful errands. See Burns’s Poem, under the title of “Hallow-E’en”.’⁴

Two years after Lewis released his Tales, Sir Walter Scott had published all three volumes of his collection Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, which included not just ‘Tamlane’ but several other works that referenced Halloween. In his lengthy introduction to ‘Tam-lane’, for example, Scott discusses the sixteenth-century case of accused witch Alison Pearson, and a satirical poem of the period that was written about her supposed relationship with a prominent bishop. In the poem, the Bishop is described as going to attend a meeting with witches ‘On horsback on Hallow ewin’,⁵ providing further proof of how the festival had already been linked to witches and diabolical doings by the end of the 1600s.

In 1820, Scott published his novel The Monastery, which despite being principally a historical novel includes many elements of the Gothic (one of the main characters is a ghost called the White Lady). It contains a direct Halloween element, since the protagonist, Mary Avenel, was born on Halloween. As Scott describes her in one en counter, ‘Something also had transpired concerning her being born on All-hallow Eve, and the powers with which that circumstance was supposed to invest her over the invisible world.’⁶ The Monastery could arguably be called the first Halloween novel.

Two other poems of the mid-nineteenth century are especially worth mentioning: the first, Halloween: A Romaunt, by an Episcopal bishop named Arthur Cleveland Coxe, is really a Christian devotional that contains a few brief references to Halloween. However, these references suggest that by 1842, when the poem was first privately published in America, Coxe’s readers would have been familiar enough with Halloween to understand:

’Tis the night – the night
Of the grave’s delight,
      And the warlocks are at their play!
Ye think that without,
The wild winds shout,
But no, it is they – it is they!7

More interesting, if less direct in its references to Halloween, is Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Ulalume’. The poem recalls a ‘night in the lonesome October’ as the narrator wanders ‘the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir’, thinking of a lost love. These lines strongly suggest that the night is Halloween:

For we knew not the month was October,
And we marked not the night of the year –
(Ah, night of all nights in the year!)⁸

When the narrator stumbles on the vault of his Ulalume, he remembers that it was ‘On this very night of last year’ that he brought his beloved to her vault.⁹ ‘Ulalume’ may or may not actually be set on Halloween, but it has often been recited on the night in question.

However, it’s another work by Poe that, despite no reference whatsoever to Halloween, has become so intertwined with it that it’s difficult to say whether the story has contributed more to the festival, or vice versa: ‘The Black Cat’, Poe’s classic story from 1843 of madness and murder. The well-known tale of an alcoholic who walls up a cat with the body of his murdered wife does include a reference to witches (‘my wife, who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise’¹⁰), and has become a classic Halloween reading, especially among school-teachers looking for Halloween entertainment. Certainly Poe’s entire catalogue is well-suited to the holiday, and as America’s first and greatest author of horror tales it was perhaps inevitable that Poe and Halloween should mix. However, it is the only Poe story that appears as a recommended Halloween reading in such seminal early Halloween books as Ruth E. Kelley’s The Book of Hallowe’en (1919) and Robert Haven Schauffler’s Hallowe’en (1935), which reprints the story in its entirety. ‘The Black Cat’ has almost certainly contributed to the popularity of a major icon for Halloween, which in turn has increased the story’s popularity.

Harry Clarke’s illustration of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat.

If one could choose only three stories that have both contributed greatly to Halloween and have in turn continued to be read and enjoyed year after year thanks to the celebration, the second would be Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman Brown’ (1835). As with ‘Ulalume’, there is no direct naming of Halloween, but the night is strongly implied when the story begins with young newlywed Faith pleading with her husband, ‘Pray tarry with me this night, dear husband, of all nights in the year.’11 The story describes how the eponymous hero, on a mysterious night-time journey through dark woods, encounters the Devil and learns that the most pious members of his community – Salem – are in fact in league with the Devil, and are all on their way to a diabolical meeting. The story includes frightening imagery of supernatural occurrences (Satan walks with a staff made of a living snake, an overhead cloud is full of voices, a flaming rock holds a baptismal font of blood) and a dismal ending that is a testament to Hawthorne’s guilt over the involvement of his own great-great-grandfather in the Salem witch trials. ‘Young Goodman Browne’ has long been a popular Halloween story, and has probably helped to promote the icon of the witch, just as ‘The Black Cat’ served to elevate its title animal to Halloween superstar.

The final story in the Halloween triple crown of fiction is Washington Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. First published in 1820, the tale of gangly school teacher Ichabod Crane’s encounter with the Headless Horseman makes no reference to Halloween, although it makes considerable use of an autumn setting, describing the seasonal countryside, harvest and a party. It has become a Halloween classic because of its use of a pumpkin – the Horseman (who is likely Ichabod’s rival Brom Bones in disguise) cradles his ‘head’ as he rides, and finally hurls it at the terrified teacher, but the next day all that’s found are ‘the hat of the unfortunate Ichabod, and close beside it a shattered pumpkin’.¹² Did Irving’s classic, in which a pumpkin serves as the head of a dreadful goblin, help to seat the jack-o’-lantern on the throne as the undisputed king of Halloween icons? Certainly, ‘The Black Cat’, ‘Young Goodman Brown’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ have appeared in more American school textbooks as Halloween selections than any other works of prose, and it’s surely no coincidence that their three respective subjects – black cats, witches and pumpkins – have become the three main symbols of Halloween.

Another of Irving’s tales is also set on ‘a fine autumnal day’ and is a Halloween favourite: ‘Rip Van Winkle’.13 This classic tells the story of a man who, while wondering in the mountains one day, encounters a strange group of little bearded men. Rip sips from their keg, falls asleep and awakens twenty years later. Similarities to classic fairy tales set at Samhain or Halloween are obvious: a lone mortal has stumbled on a supernatural gathering and upon returning to his own world finds that time has moved on without him.

By the mid-nineteenth century, a new form of popular entertainment had taken hold thanks to advances in printing and distribution techniques: the magazine. By 1850, more than 600 magazines were being printed in the U.S., all hungry for content. In 1830, the first magazine that targeted women began: Godey’s Ladies Book, which early on acquired Sarah J. Hale as editor. Ironically, Hale would go on to be remembered for her involvement with another festival – she campaigned to have Thanksgiving recognized as a national American holiday – but Godey’s was one of many nineteenth-century periodicals that featured Halloween-themed pieces in its pages. ‘Halloween, or Chrissie’s Fate’ by Meta G. Adams is a typical example of the quaint Halloween stories to be found in American magazines of the 1870s and ’80s. First published in 1871 in Scribner’s Monthly Magazine (and reprinted a year later in The Century), Halloween is apparently unknown to the story’s elderly spinster narrator until the arrival of a youngster:

So it came to pass that my niece Kitty Coles was spending the month with me, and having happened upon an old book upon ‘The Supernatural’, had become imbued with a frantic desire to test some of her newfound theories on the approaching ‘Halloween.’14

The party consists entirely of girls (age is never specified, although they are described as ‘young’ and ‘girlish’), and activities include pouring melted lead into water to read the shapes, naming chestnuts in pairs and burning them on the hearth, and (after a frightful walk through a deserted wing of the spinster’s house) eating an apple before a mirror at midnight. One of the girls, Chrissie, encounters a wraith while at the mirror, and the rest of the story is a standard nineteenth-century romance, as Chrissie finally meets and weds the man she encountered via a mirror’s reflection on Halloween night.’

Not all the Halloween-themed pieces found in these magazines were short stories; many took the form of non-fiction accounts of folklore beliefs. In 1886, for example, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine ran ‘Halloween: A Threefold Chronicle’ by William Sharp. The sections in this triptych are titled ‘Halloween in Ireland’, ‘Halloween in Scotland’ and ‘At Sea’, which describes a Halloween spent in stormy weather near the Cape of Good Hope:

The only custom it was in our power to observe was that of dipping for apples; this, however, would prove impossible unless the sea greatly moderated, for it was all the steadiest of us could do to keep our feet at all.¹⁵

Later the weather calms enough to allow for bobbing, followed by music, dancing and telling of eerie tales.

These magazines probably provided many Americans with their introduction to Halloween, and no doubt housewives were charmed by the descriptions of the parties. America was becoming more industrialized and urbanized, and the middle class, who now had disposable income, were happy to follow in the footsteps of their British kin, whom they still saw as sophisticated older cousins. It’s probably no coincidence that Meta G. Adams’s ‘Halloween, or Chrissie’s Fate’ was published two years after Queen Victoria’s Halloween visit to Balmoral Castle, an event that was widely reported in the American press.

It was also about this time that a small explosion of works exploring folklore of the British Isles appeared. Over the space of seventeen years, dozens of small, regional histories were recorded, and many of the key major studies: Lady Wilde (mother to Oscar) published Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland in 1887 and Ancient Cures, Charms, and Usages in Ireland in 1890, and introduced readers to stories of fetches and Halloween mischief. Sir James G. Frazer focused on Halloween bonfires and saw Halloween as a Celtic celebration of winter’s approach when he published the first edition of The Golden Bough in 1890; Douglas Hyde’s Beside the Fire: A Collection of Irish Gaelic Folk Stories came out in 1890, and included the whimsical folk tale ‘Guleesh na Guss Dhu’, about a peasant boy who rides with fairies on Halloween night. Sidney Oldall Addy’s Household Tales with Other Traditional Remains (1895), John Gregorson Campbell’s Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1900), T. F. Thistelton Dyer’s British Popular Customs: Present and Past (1900) and Sir John Rhys’s Celtic Folklore, Welsh and Manx (1901) all included a wealth of Halloween folk beliefs and stories of malicious spirits. Lady Gregory published Cuchulain of Muirthemne: The Story of the Men of the Red Branch of Ulster in 1902 and Gods and Fighting Men: The Story of the Tuatha de Danaan and of the Fianna of Ireland in 1904, offering one of the most extensive collections to date of Celtic legends and Samhain lore. By the end of the trend, readers had been introduced to Scottish superstitions, pookas, fire customs, talking corpses on Samhain eve and fairies in every conceivable shape and mood.

It wasn’t just that Halloween had arrived; more specifically, American interest in Halloween had arrived. By the end of the nineteenth century, Americans were ready for a book focused solely on Halloween. And in 1898, the Fitzgerald Publishing Company in New York gave them exactly what they wanted with the publication of the first book devoted solely to the celebration of Halloween: Martha Russell Orne’s Hallowe’en: How to Celebrate It. This slender, 48-page pamphlet opens with a brief discussion of Halloween history, but spends the bulk of its time focusing on home decoration, preparing invitations and party games, as already mentioned. Although it borrows liberally from Burns and John Gay’s The Shepherd’s Week, there’s no question that it is intended for American women: the sample invitations all include American-style addresses (‘441 Columbus Ave.’), there are jokes made about famous American historical figures (one party suggestion is that guests each be given a white sheet upon entering and introduced to one another with such epithets as, ‘This is my great-uncle who died in 1798; he was an intimate friend of George Washington’16); and of course pumpkins – not turnips – figure prominently throughout.

Hallowe’en: How to Celebrate It inaugurated a torrent of similar party pamphlets over the next three decades, and it didn’t take long for them to eclipse Orne’s work: by 1903, Werner’s Readings and Recitations: Hallowe’en Festivities spanned 192 pages of ‘Entertainments’, ‘Recitations’, ‘Ghost Stories’, ‘Hallowe’en Recipes’, and ‘Games’. The book’s opening line gives some idea of how Halloween was viewed at this time:

Hallowe’en, or All Hallow Even, the name given to the night of October 31, and the eve of All Saints’ Day (November 1), is one of the most delightful opportunities for entertaining. On such a night there should be nothing but laughter, jollity, and mystery.¹⁷

The section on decorations mentions jack-o’-lanterns frequently, but includes this note: ‘Jack-o’-lanterns are made by removing pulp from apples, cucumbers, squashes, pumpkins, etc., cutting places for eyes, nose, and mouth, and fastening a lighted candle inside.’¹⁸ The suggested programme for a typical Halloween party also provides a look at some of the very different ways in which parties were celebrated at the turn of the century, complete with actual theatrical performances to be staged in either the barn or parlour:

Reception and Introduction of Guests
Shadow Pantomimes
Spook March
Witches’ Dance
Goblin Parade
Play: ‘Clever Matchmakers’
Games and Mysteries for Early Evening
March to Supper
Supper and Supper Games
After-Supper Sports, Test, Mysteries
Your Lucky Sticks
Fagot Ghost Stories
Fortune Telling
Games
Home Tests19

This book is plainly intended for adults; the short play ‘Clever Matchmakers’, for instance, is about a middle-aged couple anxious to marry off their daughter, who has almost reached the age of 30.

By the mid-1920s, there were more booklets about Halloween entertaining being published than ever, but now 50 per cent of their space was given over to activities for children. These activities were usually fairly large in scale, suggesting that they were probably meant to be performed in schools or civic settings rather than homes. The activities included recitations, skits or short plays and drills, like ‘The Jack-o’-Lantern Drill’ from a 1926 booklet:

This is a simple little drill arranged especially for small boys. The boys wear ordinary suits or Hallowe’en costumes, according to tastes and opportunities. The lanterns are not lighted, but red paper is placed over the openings on the inside to simulate light. Lively music. The boys enter from opposite sides of the stage, half on the right, half on the left. They swing their lanterns as they come, in time to the music, and meet at center of the front line.²⁰

Cover to the Halloween pamphlet The Best Halloween Book (1931), by Lenore K. Dolan.

This drill goes on to delineate 31 separate movements the boys were to make in unison before departing the stage; one can only imagine how anxious those lads must have been to go pranking later that night and put the drill behind them.

By the 1930s, Halloween books were largely or entirely for children, and fortune-telling was dismissed as a superstition from the past. A poem of 1936 entitled ‘Her Opinion’ opens with this stanza:

When Mother was a little girl,
      Halloween tricks she used to try,
Chestnuts roast and parings twirl –
      As silly, then, as you or I.21

Pranking figures more prominently in these booklets as time goes on, with plays and recitations in the later books often mentioning the practice. Sometimes it’s dismissed as an innocent boys’ activity, with the line ‘Boys will be boys’ often providing a conclusion, but other poems and skits offer up warnings against the practice, as in the short poem ‘The Tale of the Jack-o’-Lantern’ from 1937:

A Jack-o’-Lantern played some pranks
      One moonlit Hallowe’en,
He started out all by himself
      Determined to be mean.

After scaring kittens, puppies and even human babies, the narrator makes the mistake of trying to frighten a witch’s black cat:

Its mistress witch then came to sight
      And whacked him with her broom,
So that is how one pumpkin head
      Was cracked unto his doom.²²

The end of consumer interest in pamphlets largely came as Hal loween moved into being almost completely a children’s celebration, and one oriented towards controlling destructive pranking. Tellingly, Dennison’s stopped producing its Bogie Books in 1934, suggesting that the era of adult Halloween parties and decorations had faded. One of the last of the pamphlets, the Halloween Fun Book, was produced in 1937: its introduction advises: ‘Instead of con demnation for pranks which too often overstepped the line, youth should be given the cooperation of their parents and leaders in making Hallowe’en a gala, carefree holiday.’²³ The same booklet includes detailed descriptions of house-to-house parties and costuming events, all of which led shortly afterwards to trick or treating.

These pamphlets also suggest a timeline for the evolution of the word ‘Halloween’: up until 1937, the word nearly always includes the apostrophe that omits the ‘v’ – ‘Hallowe’en’ – but the apostrophe begins to vanish from then on. It would still occasionally appear in use through the rest of the 1930s and into the ’40s, but seems to have been completely dropped by about 1948.

In 1919, while housewives were apparently buying up Halloween entertainment pamphlets and getting small doses of Halloween history (if they bothered to read the introductions), a 26-year-old American librarian named Ruth Edna Kelley literally made Halloween history by writing The Book of Hallowe’en, the first serious historical treatment of the festival. The publisher was no paper goods company or novelties publisher, but Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, a long-established company that had emphasized children’s books, literature and mythology. They obviously took The Book of Hallowe’en very seriously, releasing it with a lovely gilt-decorated binding, illustrations, an index and even bibliographic references. Kelley makes it clear in her preface that this is not just another party book: ‘Those who wish suggestions for readings, recitations, plays, and parties, will find the lists in the appendix useful, in addition to the books on entertainments and games to be found in any public library.’24 Her history is good overall (she correctly notes Samhain as ‘Summer’s End’), and is in fact sometimes more accurate than books that came after. Related subjects – ‘Witches’ and ‘Walpurgis Night’ – each receive their own chapters, while the bulk of the book assembles old superstitions and folklore related to Halloween. One of the most interesting passages in the book is the paragraph with which it closes: after a discussion of fortune-telling customs still in use at the time in American Halloween parties, Kelley notes:

A far more interesting development of the Hallowe’en idea than these innocent but colorless superstitions, is promised by the pageant at Fort Worth Texas, on October thirty-first 1916. In the masque and pageant of the afternoon four thousand school children took part. At night scenes from the pageant were staged on floats which passed along the streets. The subject was Preparedness for Peace, and comprised scenes from American history in which peace played an honorable part. Such were: the conference of William Penn and the Quakers with the Indians, and the opening of the East to American trade. This is not a subject limited to performances at Hallow -tide. May there not be written and presented in America a truly Hallowe’en pageant, illustrating and befitting its noble origin, and making its place secure among the holidays of the year?25

First edition cover, 1919, for Ruth E. Kelley’s The Book of Hallowe’en.

Kelley would undoubtedly have approved of the Greenwich Village Halloween parade, and would be happy to know that her book is now widely reprinted in both electronic form (it can be found online at such sites as Gutenberg.org) and in hard copy. Original printings of the book are now among the most sought-after of Halloween collectibles, and can command four-figure price tags if the original paper jacket is included.

For over 30 years, Kelley’s book stood alone as the only comprehensive source of Halloween history. Then, in 1950, the Henry Schuman publishing company released Halloween Through Twenty Centuries by Ralph and Adelin Linton as part of their ‘Great Religious Festivals’ books – and nearly set Halloween scholarship back forever. Neither as lengthy (108 pages) nor as obviously thoughtfully presented (there is no bibliography or appendix, and only a two-page index) as The Book of Hallowe’en, Halloween Through Twenty Centuries is a curious and repulsive mix of fact and misinformation so sensationalized that it could best be described as horror fiction. The third sentence of the book states that Halloween ‘commemorates beings and rites with which the church has always been at war’, and of course the Celts are savages who sacrificed horses and human beings at Samhain until ‘this horrid practice was outlawed by Roman command’ (the Romans, of course, never conquered Ireland or the Irish Celts).26 The book is most shocking, however, in apparently either upholding the witch persecutions of the Middle Ages – when at least 40,000 supposed witches were executed, most by being burned alive at the stake – or dismissing them as mere human nature: ‘We cannot be too scornful of the excesses of former times, for at times of fear and chaos we do our own witch hunting.’²⁷ Witchcraft is described as ‘an organized cult in opposition to the church’, and it is claimed that ‘these followers of Satan served their master with devotion and met their death unrepentant’.²⁸ The book is even illustrated with numerous drawings and paintings of witches celebrating, practising their black arts and of course being executed.

Unfortunately, the Linton book found its way onto many library shelves, and stood alongside Kelley’s for the next 40 years as the two books solely focusing on the historical aspect of Halloween. Ironically, Halloween Through Twenty Centuries offers an explanation of the appeal of witchcraft that could be equally well applied to why the book found favour with many readers over the years: ‘To many peasant folk, the excitement and ecstasy of the Witches’ Sabbaths had more appeal than the droning monotony of the church services.’29 The Linton book would go on to become the standard reference source for generations of evangelical Christians seeking to prove that Halloween was (as the Lintons themselves sum it up in their book’s conclusion) ‘a degenerate holiday’.³⁰ Kelley’s sober and more accurate portrayal obviously held less appeal for those predisposed towards fire and brimstone.

For the next 40 years, Halloween history was confined to either magazine articles or playful children’s books with colourful illustrations. Then – as the celebration became more popular again with adults – that thankfully changed in 1990, with the publication of Lesley Pratt Bannatyne’s Halloween: An American Holiday, an American History. For the first time, Halloween had a modern history that was comprehensive, well-researched and entertaining. While it may have been too late to sway some readers away from the Linton book, Halloween: An American Holiday, an American History ushered in a new era of scholarly interest in Halloween. It was followed in 1994 by the first collection of academic papers: Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life, edited by Jack Santino; in 2002 by David J. Skal’s Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween, the first Halloween history to be published by a major New York publisher (Bloomsbury); in 2003 by The Halloween Encyclopedia, the first encyclopaedic reference work on the day; and in 2005 by Halloween in der Steiermark und anderswo, the first collection of academic papers to focus on European celebrations of Halloween.

Even given that the modern study of popular culture is essentially less than 40 years old, it’s none the less surprising that Halloween has yet to be much dissected in the world of academia. There are, for example, more critical analyses published and university courses taught on Buffy the Vampire Slayer than on Halloween. The first (and so far only) academic conference on Halloween was held at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland in 2006, and included participants from universities around the world. ‘Halloween remains a surprisingly under-researched and under-theorized topic in academic writing’, noted the conference’s website.31 Whether the lack of Halloween critical studies is the result of academic disinterest or the fact that Halloween has been so thoroughly integrated into any number of other topics remains an unanswerable question, but given Halloween’s burgeoning global popularity, academia will surely begin to take it more seriously in the very near future.

If popular culture theorists have been slow to recognize Halloween’s importance, popular culture collectors certainly haven’t. In 1995, another cycle in Halloween publishing began with the release of two books: Halloween Collectables: A Price Guide by Dan and Pauline Campanelli, and Halloween in America: A Collector’s Guide with Prices by Stuart Schneider. Halloween collecting had first been recognized in print form in 1984, when Pamela Apkarian-Russell started publishing a newsletter called The Trick or Treat Trader, and indeed, in the introduction to his book Schneider mentions collectors who have been searching for particular items for twenty years, and notes that ‘time has proved them to be visionaries’.³² Just as items like comic books, movie posters and trading cards have become highly valued by aging baby boomers, so have vintage Halloween materials. The Campanellis sum it up in the introduction to their book:

Many of us seem to recall another Halloween from another place and time. There seems to be a Halloween from the innocence of our childhood, filled with candy corn and jack-o’-lanterns and candy wrapped in orange napkins printed with black cats and flying witches. The memory of it gives us comfort . . . ³³

Both books are lengthy and focus on colour photographs of particular pieces with detailed descriptions that mention the year and place of manufacture and the name of the manufacturer. Halloween collectors may specialize in one area – postcards, for example, or any items depicting cats – or may simply acquire any and all vintage Halloween items. Some enthusiasts focus on certain companies – Beistle or Dennison’s paper decorations are highly sought after, especially Dennison’s Bogie Books (the first Bogie Book, from 1909, may fetch in excess of $2,000 in good condition). The Bogie Books are perhaps unique among Halloween collectables in offering Halloween graphics in a Jazz Age setting, showing sophisticated flappers with bobbed hair cavorting in decorated ballrooms. Figural candles from Gurley, metal noisemakers from Kirchhof or US Metal Toy Co., postcards from Winsch or Raphael Tuck (or from particular artists like Ellen Clapsaddle, known for her depictions of idealized children), and early jack-o’-lanterns or candy containers in composition material or papier mâché (with no manufacturer listed) all capture the day’s visual appeal, featuring ghosts, witches and pumpkin-headed goblins in vivid autumn colours. Some collectors focus on costumes from manufacturers like Collegeville or Ben Cooper; a rayon costume with garish graphics complete with plastic mask in its original box evokes childhood memories of trick or treat, and may include the bonus of depicting a favourite television, movie or children’s book character. Halloween retailing has not been confined to creating items that might be collectable in the future, since some contemporary companies have also taken advantage of the zeal for Halloween collecting by deliberately creating higher-priced instant collectables: Department 56 makes detailed ceramic recreations of whimsical haunted buildings, Disney has released a tidal wave of Nightmare Before Christmas material and Mattel has recreated its venerable Barbie doll as a yearly Halloween figure. Reproductions of vintage material are also now widely available, and occasionally fool even the wariest of collectors.

It’s probably no coincidence that 1995 was also the first year of ebay, the auction website that swiftly became the world’s biggest garage sale and made buying and selling of vintage items available on a global scale. Now that Halloween collectibles had been codified and evaluated in print, collectors began to gorge themselves and prices rose sharply. The next decade saw a wealth of books on Halloween collectables published, including such specific titles as Halloween Favorites in Plastic and Timeless Halloween Collectibles, 1920–1949: A Halloween Reference Book from the Beistle Company Archives With Price Guide. Apkarian-Russell, who probably owns the world’s largest Halloween collection, not only contributed three books on the subject (Collectible Halloween, 1997; More Halloween Collectibles: Anthropomorphic Vegetables and Fruits of Halloween, 1998; and Halloween: Collectible Decorations and Games, 2000) but went on to open the world’s first Halloween museum: The Castle Halloween Museum in Benwood, Virginia, which is housed in a former school building and holds over 35,000 pieces.

Vintage Halloween paper decoration, c. 1940.

Halloween fiction also came into its own in the twentieth century. The first novel to feature the festival’s name, Hallowe’en by Leslie Burgess, was published in 1941, and although it was a slight mystery with a heavy debt to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca it did at least centre on the day itself and included references to Scottish rituals. Four years later, the fantasy writer Charles Williams, who belonged to the literary group the Inklings with J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, produced the supernatural dark fantasy All Hallows’ Eve, which could perhaps be thought of as the first novel of horror to focus on Halloween. It wasn’t until 1972, though, that Ray Bradbury produced what many consider the ultimate Halloween novel: The Halloween Tree, which offers a fictionalized history of Halloween in the story of a group of trick or treating boys who are whisked away on a time-travelling adventure by the mysterious Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud. Bradbury, who had touched on Halloween in his earlier classic novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, here turns his poetic sensibilities fully on it: ‘Night and day. Summer and winter, boys. Seedtime and harvest. Life and death. That’s what Halloween is, all rolled up in one’, Moundshroud tells the boys at the end of their adventure.34 In an interview in 2004, Bradbury recalled that The Halloween Tree came about in response to the animated television show It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown: Bradbury felt that show had seriously erred in never actually showing the Great Pumpkin, and when he met up with animator Chuck Jones and found that Jones agreed, they set out to produce an animated special that would depict what they felt was the real ‘spirit of Halloween’.³⁵ Bradbury wrote a screenplay, but after production fell through he finally turned his script into the novel, which was eventually turned into an award-winning animated short in 1993. The book, which also includes illustrations by Joseph Mugnaini, has remained in print since its first publication.

The social revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s were not confined to civil rights and women’s liberation, but spread to pop culture and gave birth to a new era of relaxed standards and more explicit sex and violence. No genre was as impacted by these cultural shifts as horror. Gone were the polite cobwebbed castles and thunderstorms of yore; in their place, films like George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Richard Donner’s big-budget hit The Omen offered gruesome scenes of cannibalism, dismemberments and be-headings, while the new bestselling novels tackled former taboos like foul-mouthed children (William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist) and religiously re pressed sexuality (Stephen King’s Carrie). Given Halloween’s existing ties to horror, it seemed likely that Halloween would also begin to figure more in the immensely popular new horror films and fiction, but this was slow in coming. The trick or treaters of the 1950s were now nostalgic adults, and perhaps their warm memories of Halloween were too taboo; some Halloween collectors, like Pamela Apkarian-Russell, have reflected this in stating that they have no interest in modern gore-heavy haunted attractions. In the mid-1970s, Halloween fear was still related to the pleasurable tingle, not the terrified scream.

Of course all that would change in 1979, when John Carpenter’s Halloween rampaged through cinemas, meshing the new explicit horror with the festival of fear, but references to the day seemed confined to film. There were, of course, brief appearances and the occasional novel, but it wasn’t until the 2000s that a new cycle of Halloween fiction suddenly appeared. The kick-off point may have been an anthology called October Dreams: A Celebration of Halloween, edited by Richard Chizmar and Robert Morrish. This massive, 660-page volume mixed reprinted and original Halloween short stories with authors recalling favourite Halloween memories and essays about Halloween’s role in fiction and film. After the release of October Dreams, books like Norman Partridge’s award-winning Dark Harvest used Halloween to explore the dark underside of the myth of idyllic small-town America, and other authors even began to make Halloween fiction their mainstay (Al Sarrantonio, for example, and his cycle of books and stories set in the fictional Halloween town of Orangefield). Halloween has also proven a gold mine for small press publishers in the horror genre, many of whom now include special annual Halloween releases, frequently offered only in expensive signed and limited editions, in their catalogues.

Halloween has arguably always found a more comfortable fictional home in short stories than novels. Virtually every major horror author of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has explored Halloween in fiction (usually short fiction), and non-genre authors including James Joyce (‘Clay’, 1914) and Edith Wharton (‘All Souls’’, 1937) have also appropriated it, although they often seem to continue the nineteenth-century notion that Halloween celebrations are the province of rustic servants. One of the first short stories set during a bourgeois Halloween celebration was Robert Bloch’s ‘The Cloak’ (1939), a witty and eerie tale of a man who attends an upscale Halloween party in a rented vampire costume and finds he has an urge to drink blood. By 1948, the festival was firmly entrenched in the middle class, as in Ray Bradbury’s ‘The October Game’, which plays on the Halloween party tradition of passing around various food items in the dark (peeled grapes, wet spaghetti and so on) and pretending they’re body parts. In 1964’s ‘Heavy Set’ by Bradbury, Halloween is an accepted suburban ritual that causes a disturbed body-builder to turn on his mother after being humiliated at a party.

Cover to 2000’s October Dreams.

The best Halloween stories of the twenty-first century seem to have turned away from the lighter, sometimes humorous fiction of the Blochs and Bradburys and focused on bleak tales that comment on isolation and alienation: examples would be Jack Ketchum’s ‘Gone’ (2000), about a strange encounter between some trick or treaters and a woman who lost her own child; and ‘Mr Dark’s Carnival’ (also 2000), Glen Hirshberg’s novella about a folklore professor who finds a legendary haunted house in an isolated patch of Montana prairie, where nineteenth-century frontier justice has given way to the haunted attraction’s strange and bloody horrors. The new Halloween fiction is less concerned with class than disillusionment, cannily using baby-boomer nostalgia to turn childhood memories and expectations inside-out.

No discussion of Halloween books would be complete without mentioning those for children, although a comprehensive list of these would be a book itself. Halloween stories for children have of course been around as long as the holiday itself, and once took the form of folklore and fairy tales. In 1833, a Scottish explorer in Canada, J. E. Alexander, spent 31 October in the wilderness and recalled:

We spent the evening of Halloween among drowned woods and swamps, and a deluge of rain, whilst we recounted the legends and ghost-stories, with which the Scottish crones are wont to affright their juvenile audience on that dreaded night . . . 36

Possibly the first Halloween story for children published in book form came in 1888: ‘Elsie’s Hallowe’en Experience’ (from a collection also bearing that title) by Mary D. Brine. It tells of Elsie, a little girl experiencing her first Halloween, and includes this revealing description of Halloween by Elsie’s mother:

It is the vigil of Hallowmas, or ‘All Saints’ Day’, dear, and is a relic of pagan times, when people were given to superstitious, heathenish ideas and notions, and were great believers in mysterious rites and ceremonies. The Scotch people of old times kept to the custom of celebrating Hallowe’en, and fancied it to be a night when fairies were unusually active, and spirits walked about. In the north of England it is called ‘nut-crack night.’ There’s really nothing in it at all, but like many of those queer ancient customs it hangs on as years go by, and has become a sort of institution now, as they call it, – a night devoted to fun and all sorts of frolic, as your little friends will probably show you.37

The dismissive tone expressed by Elsie’s mother soon vanished from the pages of fiction as Halloween grew in popularity and entered the twentieth century. Compare it to 1915’s Ethel Morton’s Holidays, in which Halloween is now a popular civic celebration, with clubs and committees hosting parties (and boys shamefacedly admitting to past pranking, but promising not to indulge this year). Halloween at Merryvale of 1916 begins with a definition of the word ‘Halloween’ itself, but Halloween activities require no explanation in this charming tale of a boys’ party, hosted by mother dressed as a witch and father dressed as a ghost, and consisting of bobbing for apples, snap-apple, retrieving a dime from a pan of flour using only the mouth, and receiving gifts of fake spiders and snakes (since these are boys, after all). By 1941, printing techniques had im proved enough to allow for colour illustrations on every page of the early reader Jack O’ Lantern Twins, but the Halloween activities are strangely similar: there’s still no mention of trick or treat, but children have a party in which they bob for apples, play other games and have a decorative dinner. The only difference between this party and Halloween at Merryvale’s is that the children arrive in costumes and masks.

Illustration by Charles F. Lester from Hallowe’en at Merryvale, showing a boys’ Halloween party, 1926.

There were surprisingly few Halloween books for children published in the 1940s and ’50s; Georgie’s Halloween by Robert Bright, from 1958, is the best-known from this time. It offers a gentle tale of a shy ghost who becomes popular on Halloween, and is still fondly remembered by many adults.

It probably took the book version of the very successful television special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown to create the demand for more children’s Halloween books. It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was first printed in 1967, and was reprinted a year later in mass market paperback; within a few years, the popularity of children’s Halloween books had blossomed, and dozens were printed during the 1970s, leading to hundreds and thousands in the succeeding decades. Now there are Halloween books for children of every possible type: non-fiction histories, crafts guides, pop-up books, sticker books, scratch-and-sniff books and of course storybooks are published every year.

In 1998, as the young adult fiction area was just starting to expand, a previously unknown author named J. K. Rowling introduced the world to a boy wizard called Harry Potter, and a new Halloween favourite was born. The seven books (not counting peripheral volumes) in the phenomenally successful Harry Potter series have made clever use of Halloween, with scenes of Halloween celebrations that include live decorations (bats), huge pumpkins grown specifically for the day by Hagrid, and real ghosts as guests. The Potter books have spawned a new wealth of Halloween costumes and collectibles, but it’s also possible to suggest that the books owe part of their success to Halloween’s expanding popularity in the late 1990s. Perhaps both point to a search for magic and fantasy in the life of the modern urban dweller.

Halloween in Hollywood

Surprisingly, Hollywood was late to the Halloween party. Prior to 1944, there were no significant uses of Halloween in feature films, and only a handful of animated shorts that had used it; the most well-known of these is the almost surreal ‘Betty Boop’s Hallowe’en Party’ of 1933, which includes such images as a pranking gorilla chalking an owl and finally being chased by witch decorations come to life. Radio, however, was still the dominant medium of broadcasting and discovered the charms of the festival early on. Halloween-themed radio plays were airing as early as 1933, when the horror series The Witch’s Tale broadcast a show entitled ‘All Hallows’ Eve’. Nearly every suspense or horror programme (Inner Sanctum, Suspense, Quiet, Please) over the next twenty years featured at least one Halloween episode, but the day was also featured on comedy and variety series, including The Jack Benny Program – which made jokes about pranking, costumes and food – and The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show, which featured special guest Orson Welles.

Welles had, in 1938, created not only the most famous Halloween radio special in history, but also the greatest Halloween prank ever when he broadcast his adaptation of H. G. Wells’s classic science fiction story The War of the Worlds. Aired as a one-hour teleplay over the Columbia Broadcasting System on 30 October 1938, the Mercury Theatre production presented such a realistic performance that over a million listeners phoned police stations, convinced a Martian attack was taking place. At the end of the show, Welles reminded his audience that ‘it’s Halloween’, and the next day the 21-year-old held a press conference about the uproar created by his broadcast. The controversy continued for some time, with the FCC taking a dim view of fictitious news broadcasts afterward, while Adolf Hitler delivered a speech in which he referred to the broadcast as evidence of democracy’s corruption and decadence. Both praised and damned, there were two incontrovertible facts about The War of the Worlds: it made a star of Orson Welles, and it became a Halloween classic, still broadcast by radio stations every year. As radio expert Richard J. Hand has noted, ‘it remains unlikely that any Halloween “trick or treat” will match the sheer audacity and tangible impact of this 1938 offering.’38

By the 1950s, radio had been pushed aside by the new medium of television, and Halloween found an equally warm welcome there. As with radio, Halloween could be found in nearly all types of television shows, and often painted an interesting light on each decade’s interpretation of the day. In 1952, for instance, the hit sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet aired an episode entitled ‘Halloween Party’ which centred on Ozzie’s misguided attempt to stage a gathering, but also featured trick or treat heavily. Youngest son Ricky is excited about going out, but Harriet seems surprised by his shop-bought skeleton costume; later, when two small children come to the door, their trick or treat outfits consist of ordinary clothing with simple face paint. Ozzie also mentions several times his belief that Halloween is really for children, although the adults are planning their own party.

A decade and a half later, Halloween was more popular than ever, and trick or treat was well-established, as evidenced by sitcoms like Bewitched, a series about the comedic adventures of a real witch trying to fit into suburban life. In an episode from 1967 called ‘The Safe and Sane Halloween’, trick or treat is taken for granted, and dozens of children are depicted prowling the neighbourhood in a variety of costumes. Even the science fiction series Star Trek had a Halloween episode: in 1967 they broadcast ‘Catspaw’, written by famed horror author Robert Bloch, the creator of Psycho and author of ‘The Cloak’. The story focuses on two mysterious aliens who have created a world based on the human subconscious, and both Halloween and trick or treat are referenced.

Costume-less trick-or-treaters from 1952’s The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.

In 1989 and 1990, two successful comedies aired episodes that would return such high ratings and critical acclaim that they begat yearly Halloween specials: Roseanne ran the episode ‘Boo!’, and The Simpsons began their ‘Treehouse of Horror’ cycle. The Simpsons played primarily on Halloween’s relationship to horror movies and lit erature, and even included a parody of Poe’s classic poem ‘The Raven’ with father Homer as the narrator beset by a raven bearing son Bart’s features. More interesting, in a way, is ‘Boo!’, which depicted the working-class family at the heart of Roseanne creating a home haunt (a ‘Tunnel of Terror’ through their house, complete with set dressing and grotesque makeup), limning a moment somewhere in between the old-style ‘Trails of Terror’ and the high-tech haunts that would soon mark American Halloweens.

Shows that are already part of the horror genre have often playfully inverted Halloween, creating highly regarded episodes in the process. In 1997, Buffy the Vampire Slayer presented the first (and most successful) of three Halloween episodes with ‘Halloween’, which began with the notion that Halloween was the dullest night of the year for the eponymous teenaged slayer, and moved on to reveal that enchanted costumes were turning their wearers into the actual characters they represented. Unfortunately, Buffy had chosen to dress as an eighteenth-century lady and proved capable of little more than fainting at the sight of demonic creatures.

The Buffy spin-off series Angel offered a playful Halloween episode in 2003, ‘Life of the Party’, which suggested that demons and creatures enjoyed a good Halloween party as much as any human. And the 2011 season finale of HBO’S True Blood featured Wiccans using Samhain to call on the help of ancestors to protect them not from the show’s vampires, but from other Wiccans. The show apparently resulted in a rise of youthful interest in Wicca: ‘Since the new season of “True Blood” began, I’ve seen an increase in new members who are in their teens’, reported an Atlanta witch who runs an online pagan forum.39 Unfortunately, the season finale left many of its Wiccan viewers less than amused by the actions of its witch characters, which included mispronouncing ‘Samhain’ as ‘Sam-a-hayne’.

While Halloween was playing out on radios and televisions throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and cross-pollinating the actual celebration by giving rise to hundreds of costumes, depictions of it seemed to be strangely absent from the movie arena. In fact, it took the releases of Meet Me in St Louis and Arsenic and Old Lace in 1944 to solidly introduce Halloween to moviegoers for the first time. Vincente Minnelli’s part-drama part-musical may be chiefly remembered today for the performance of a young Judy Garland and ‘The Trolley Song’, but Meet Me in St Louis also features an extended look at an idealized Halloween of 1903, complete with pranking children and bonfires.

More interesting, though, is Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace. The film opens with Halloween-themed credits and informs us up front that the date is Halloween, and also features a group of costumed children (who never utter ‘trick or treat’) being given treats, despite the fact that the Broadway play upon which the movie was based was set in September. Obviously Halloween was popular enough by 1944 that the film’s producers opted to centre the action on that day, and Arsenic and Old Lace remains a favourite family movie for Halloween viewing.

Over the next decade, the two best portrayals of Halloween on film both came from the Disney Studios. In 1952, their animated short ‘Trick or Treat’ confirmed that the masked solicitation ritual had finally been completely integrated into American society. The short focuses on Donald Duck’s three trick or treating nephews, and the pranks the irascible Donald plays on them until a friendly witch places him under a spell. More telling, though was the 1949 release of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad, a feature comprised of two adaptations: The Wind and the Willows and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Narrated by Bing Crosby and overall sticking fairly closely to Washington Irving’s original story, the Disney version is notable for changing the tale’s setting from simply ‘autumn’ to very specifically Halloween. In the original tale, Ichabod is invited to ‘a merry-making or “quilting frolic”’,40 but in the Disney adaptation he is not only invited to a Halloween party, but a party at which (as the narrator informs us), ‘Van Tassel always called upon his guests to tell him ghostly tales of Halloween’. There’s even a song, entitled ‘The Headless Horseman’, performed by Crosby, which tells us that the title character is ‘a fright, on Halloween night’. The Disney film was so successful in firmly enmeshing Irving’s tale and Halloween that most readers will probably be surprised to discover that the original story makes no mention of the festival.

For the next 50 years, Halloween cinema was dominated by John Carpenter and his seminal slasher Halloween (1979). The film’s original title – as conceived by producer Irwin Yablans – was The Babysitter Murders, but the canny move to change the title was undoubtedly a huge part of the film’s success (and successful it was – its investment of $300,000 earned back over 50 times that). Yablans also compared Halloween to horror radio: ‘I grew up with radio, Inner Sanctum, Lights Out, radio horror shows . . . and I said I want it to be like a radio show. I want it to be spooky, scary, but leave much of it to the audience.’41

Halloween none the less gave audiences plenty of sexually fuelled violence and (implied) gore in keeping with the new explicitness of the 1970s, and was an immediate surprise hit. It also scored with critics: Roger Ebert gave the film four stars and noted, ‘Halloween is an absolutely merciless thriller . . . If you don’t want to have a really terrifying experience, don’t see Halloween.’⁴² Genre movie expert Kim Newman praised the film’s ‘eerie jack-o’-lantern mood’, and suggested that Halloween started the first exploitation cinema trend to deal primarily with women.⁴³ And slasher scholar Adam Rockoff, in his comprehensive overview Going to Pieces, had this to say:

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Halloween. Many of the conventions which have become staples of the slasher – the subjective camera, the Final Girl, the significant date setting – were either pioneered or perfected in the film.⁴⁴

There were occasional mentions of Halloween inserted into other films during the 1970s – most curiously, perhaps, in William Friedkin’s adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1973), which includes one unexplained shot of laughing trick or treaters rushing past the camera – but it took Carpenter’s film to prove just how effective using Halloween extensively could be, and other films began to follow suit. Surely one of the oddest Halloween films (and one of the oddest sequels) ever was 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which completely dispensed with the character of masked killer Michael Myers and focused instead on a mysterious Irish mask manufacturer named Conal Cochran (played by Dan O’Herlihy). Cochran, as it turns out, is actually an ancient Celt who intends to offer up America’s children on 31 October as a huge Samhain sacrifice, and the film’s finale implies that he has succeeded. Halloween III is probably notable today only for being the first horror movie to focus on Samhain.

Japanese programme book cover for Halloween.

Another film in 1982 certainly enjoyed far more box-office success, and made fine use of Halloween: Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. Much of the film’s action takes place on Halloween, and Spielberg ably uses the day to help set a tone of magic and wonder. E.T. not only became one of the most beloved films of all time but even transformed an existing candy into a new Halloween favourite: Reese’s Pieces, small bite-sized candies with a peanut butter-flavoured interior that the young hero Elliott feeds to the diminutive alien at one point.

One of the few mentions of Halloween in the entire body of Stephen King’s work appeared in the film Silver Bullet (1985), which had a screenplay adapted by King from his book Cycle of the Werewolf and included a significant change from the book: a werewolf slaying that had been set on New Year’s Eve was moved to Halloween for the film version. Hollywood, it seems, is always ready to capitalize on Halloween, especially considering its rising global popularity. King, on the other hand, has made little use of it other-wise, with only a few brief mentions appearing in works such as the short story ‘Jerusalem’s Lot’ and the final volume of the Dark Tower series.

It wasn’t until 1993, however, that Halloween was finally awarded what many fans consider the ultimate Halloween movie: Tim Burton’s stop-motion animated The Nightmare Before Christmas. If Carpenter’s Halloween had given the festival licence to explore its sinister side sixteen years earlier, Nightmare returned some of the sense of magic to 31 October. Burton first sketched the idea out as a poem while he was working as an animator at Disney; then, in 1990, after he’d directed two hit films (Batman and Edward Scissor -hands), Disney agreed to finance a feature film. Burton, who had also designed the characters, decided on stop-motion animation as the best way of bringing his drawings to life, and he hired animator Henry Selick to direct; he also worked out the film’s songs and basic story with composer Danny Elfman before turning over the screenwriting to Caroline Thompson. Nightmare is the story of Jack Skellington, the elegant Pumpkin King of Halloweentown, who stumbles on Christmas one day and tries to recreate Halloween in its image. Burton, who grew up in the quiet Los Angeles suburb of Burbank, has had a lifelong love affair with holidays and festivals, especially Halloween:

when you grow up in a blank environment, any form of ritual, like a holiday, gives you a sense of place . . . [holidays] were very much a grounding or a way to experience seasons, because in California you don’t get any. So at least you could walk in the supermarket aisles and see the Halloween display and the fall leaves . . . To me, Halloween has always been the most fun night of the year. It’s where rules are dropped and you can be anything at all. Fantasy rules. It’s only scary in a funny way. Nobody’s out to really scare anybody else to death. They’re out to delight people with their scariness, which is what Halloween is all about and what Nightmare is all about.45

Indeed, The Nightmare Before Christmas is appealing thanks to both its good-natured tone and its design, which perfectly encapsulates Halloween and horror iconography, albeit in a playful way. The film spawned a torrent of merchandising, and collectors snapped up everything from action figures to limited-edition ceramic recreations of scenes from the film. In fact, Nightmare’s merchandising remains one of the few cases in which initial demand actually exceeded the amount of available material. Although the film achieved only minor box office success on its original U.S. theatrical release, foreign releases (especially in Japan) and American re-releases – including a 3D release in 2006 and ‘Sing-Along’ releases in which the audience is encouraged to accompany the onscreen songs – have proven popular since. The film scored with critics: Roger Ebert weighed in positively again, calling it ‘a feast for the eyes and the imagination’.⁴⁶ Time magazine critic Richard Corliss noted (with inadvertent irony, perhaps, given Halloween’s coming move into other global cultures), ‘Nightmare can be viewed as a parable of cultural imperialism, of the futility of imposing one’s entertainment values on another society.’47

The Nightmare Before Christmas also spun off in one other interesting direction: in 2001, Disneyland redressed the Haunted Mansion attraction with Nightmare characters for the Halloween/Christmas season, calling it ‘Haunted Mansion Holiday’. The remodelled ride, which featured characters from the film (including Jack Skellington, Sally and the ghost dog Zero) and a new original soundtrack, was such a hit that it became a yearly attraction. It has even given rise to ‘Haunted Mansion Holiday’ merchandise sold throughout the park.

One other film released directly to DVD in 2009 after Warner Bros opted not to release it theatrically found favour with both horror and Halloween fans: Michael Dougherty’s Trick ’r Treat took the form of a 1970s-era anthology film, interweaving four stories set in a small town on Halloween night. The film incorporates many of the key elements of the modern Halloween celebration, including (of course) trick or treat, costume parties, urban legends, jack-o’-lantern carving and yard decorating, and was praised by such reviewers as Variety’s Joe Leydon, who suggested it would become a ‘Halloween perennial’.⁴⁸ Although darker (the film was rated ‘R’ in the USA) and bloodier than The Nightmare Before Christmas, Trick ’r Treat was popular with many of the fans of that film for capturing Halloween in both its art direction and storyline. One horror film website raved that it ‘feels not just like a series of independent stories set on Halloween, but a complete picture of what makes this holiday so beloved, so dangerous, and so much damn fun . . . an instant Halloween classic’.⁴⁹

The Art of Halloween

Given how Halloween lovers respond to the festival’s visual tropes, it’s perhaps surprising that Halloween has seldom appeared in either the fine arts or the more recent venue of graphic novels. A wealth of nineteenth-century engravings from books and magazines notwithstanding, Halloween’s appearances in the world of fine art were few, most notable being Daniel Maclise’s Snap-apple Night of 1833, and several works by the quintessential American painter Norman Rockwell, especially his Saturday Evening Post cover of 1920 showing a young girl draped in a sheet and holding up a jack-o’-lantern while an older man in a business suit reacts in exaggerated shock. Halloween has been more popular with the latest generation of pop artists, who have gathered together for an annual exhibit of Halloween art in Chicago, and have also created online galleries at such websites as halloweenartexhibit.com. Petaluma, a small town in Northern California, has been hosting the ‘Halloween and Vine’ Halloween art show since 1996. This juried art show also offers collectors the chance to buy original art ranging from paintings to dolls to surreal papier mâché figures, and takes place for only one day each year. Hundreds of collectors fly in for the show, coming to spend thousands of dollars each on the exclusive, oneof-a-kind works. These buyers frequently hold large collections of vintage Halloween memorabilia as well and cite both nostalgia and the company of fellow collectors as assets. ‘There’s a real camaraderie among all these people who love Halloween – they get it’, notes Halloween artist Scott Smith of Rucus Studio.⁵⁰

Daniel Maclise, Snap-apple Night, 1833, oil on canvas.

Little Old Witch, a contemporary Halloween art figure by Scott Smith / Rucus Studio.

Graphic novel representations of Halloween have been limited almost exclusively to the lesser-known series and publishers, with one major exception: Batman: The Long Halloween, originally published in a series of thirteen comic books between 1996 and 1997. Sadly, despite the title, The Long Halloween makes very little use of the day itself, focusing instead on a mysterious killer named ‘Holiday’. The lack of Halloween references in other superhero comics might suggest that a festival in which wearing a costume as a form of empowerment has no place in a genre wherein costumes are routinely linked to characters who are already powerful.

More appropriate was a three-book series put out by Tokyopop called I Luv Halloween which was released in three volumes from 2005 to 2007 and collected into an ‘Ultimate Edition’ in one volume in 2008. Written by Keith Giffen with art by Benjamin Roman, this English-language manga series chronicles the adventures of pre-adolescent trick or treaters who take on zombies, aliens and a murderous baby sister while trying to trick or treat; it pokes irreverent fun at Halloween, and was described by Publisher’s Weekly as a ‘black comedy that reads as if Quentin Tarantino and Tim Burton had collaborated on a Halloween heist story’.51 Tokyopop and Menfond Electronic Arts also created a series of animated online shorts based on I Luv Halloween.

If Halloween has languished in some art forms, such is certainly not the case with folk art. Although the term ‘folk art’ can be difficult to define, it typically refers to work by untrained, non-professional artists; it is usually distinguished from crafts, in which the creator follows pre-existing instructions, and should also not include deliberate reproductions of existing work. Folk art is also often regional, although the Internet has given folk artists a worldwide venue in which to display and sell their goods through collective sites like ebay or etsy.com, or through smaller or personal websites. Traditional, vintage Halloween folk art is rare, considering that much of it was produced from cheap materials and was intended only for seasonal use; true folk art may also take the form of what folklorist Jack Santino calls assemblage, essentially a yard display of carefully grouped items like scarecrows or harvest figures, jack-o’-lanterns, other seasonal harvest byproducts like hay bales or Indian corn, and paper decorations and hanging ghosts. Pamela Apkarian-Russell’s Castle Halloween Museum includes a wing dedicated to folk art, with an emphasis on specific artists like Bethany Lowe and Debbee Thibault and on the peculiar medium of Southern face jugs, large ceramic jugs modelled to look like ghastly faces.

Contemporary Halloween yard decorations.

Monster Mashes and Thrillers: Halloween Music

Halloween may not have a standard repertoire of carols à la Christmas, but music has been associated with the festival throughout its history. In the distant past, souling was often performed with songs, and sometimes the soulers were accompanied by musicians. A description from 1910 notes:

Three middle-aged men; with a concertina, have just been souling here. They began well but ended with very bad verses about ale and strong beer which, they said, was all of which they came.52

That same report noted that the melody was ‘undoubtedly pre-Reformation and is cast in the style of the church music of the period’.⁵³ In 1886 a correspondent from Chester described the souling song as being nearly identical to ‘part of a march of which Handel claimed the authorship’, and even suggested that Handel had taken his work from the souling song.⁵⁴ For the most part, the souling songs were delivered by children rather than adults. The Grülacks, guisers who visited houses in Shetland at Halloween, were sometimes accompanied by a fiddler who played while they danced with the girls in the household, and the Manx sang the traditional ‘Hop-tu-naa’ ballad at Halloween. Music was central to both Irish and Scottish Halloween celebrations, which usually ended with dancing. One description of a nineteenth-century Irish Halloween party notes that the musical performances were the climax of the evening:

At last came the crowning delight of the evening, the Halloween jig. This was a reel in which everyone joined, and there was nothing short of ecstasy in the tumult of stamping feet, snapping fingers, happy laughter, mingling with the wild music of Larry O’Hara’s pipes, and the frantic screams – for they were nothing else – from the fiddle of the great musician, One-eyed Murtagh.55

Somehow the music didn’t export to American Halloween celebrations, and there’s little mention of singing or dancing in connection with nineteenth-century parties in the US (although these do also seem to have been mainly held for children). By the early twentieth century, popular music did offer up a few seasonal songs, bearing titles like ‘Jack O’ Lantern Rag’ and ‘Hallowe’en Frolic’; today, these songs are remembered more for the beguiling graphics on their sheet music than for their musical qualities. The Halloween party guides of the 1920s and ’30s often created Halloween songs intended to be sung to existing tunes – ‘On Halloween’, for example, was set to ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ and included this chorus:

Goodness gracious, how we ran!
      Goodness gracious, granny;
I never knew that clumsy boys
      With feet could be so handy.⁵⁶

Later in the century, Halloween music consisted mostly of any horror or science fiction-themed popular song (‘Witch Doctor’, ‘I Put a Spell on You’, and ‘Purple People Eater’ have all been favourites) until 1962, when a novelty song by an unsuccessful actor hit #1 on the Billboard charts and virtually became Halloween’s official anthem: ‘Monster Mash’ by Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett and the Crypt-kicker Five. Inspired in equal part by the ‘Monster Culture’ of the early 1960s and the ‘Mashed Potato’ dance craze (which was set off by Dee Dee Sharp’s hit ‘Mashed Potato Time’ of 1962), ‘Monster Mash’ tells the story – in Pickett’s droll impression of Boris Karloff – of a mad scientist whose creation leads an army of monsters in a new dance sensation. The song spent two weeks in October 1962 atop the Billboard charts, and became a perennial Halloween favourite, later covered by artist ranging from Mannheim Steamroller to The Smashing Pumpkins to Karloff himself, in a performance on the music show Shindig in 1965.

In 1983, ‘Monster Mash’ was nearly dethroned by the song behind a fourteen-minute-long music video: Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’. The video, which was directed by John Landis and features Jackson dancing with legions of zombies after turning into one himself, is considered the most influential music video ever made, the first time the then-nascent form of music video was really married to the short film; but ‘Thriller’ – both the song and the video – became equally well-known as a new Halloween favourite. ‘Thriller’ is an ode to horror movies, and the irresistible combination of music and monsters was tailor-made for Halloween. ‘Thriller’ not only found the top spot on Halloween party mix tapes, it also became a costume favourite (Jackson’s distinctive red jacket from the video was copied endlessly) and dance groups still perform the video’s choreography in Halloween parades every year. Even in Ukraine’s largest city, Kiev, where pumpkins are associated more with a tradition of turning down suitors than making jack-o’-lanterns, Halloween has been celebrated by masses of ‘Thriller’ fans performing the dance moves on a main street, with videos of the event appearing shortly thereafter on such websites as YouTube.57

The most recent major contribution to the library of Halloween music comes from The Nightmare Before Christmas. The first major song presented in Tim Burton’s film is ‘This is Halloween’, composed by Danny Elfman and describing how the ghoulish residents of Halloweentown view their holiday. ‘This is Halloween’ was also made popular in a cover version by Marilyn Manson.

Halloween Culture

Manson, in his persona as a Goth rocker, ultimately raises the question of whether Halloween has influenced Goth style and music. And in what other ways has it fed into popular culture, rather than vice versa? Halloween expert Lesley Bannatyne refers to the recent cross-pollination of counter-culture movements with Halloween as the ‘Halloweening of America’,58 and suggests that everything from the rise of interest in paranormal investigations over the last ten years to Goth music and fashion to the nationwide fascination with zombies has arisen partly out of Halloween, rather than the other way around.

Horror film scholars have suggested that horror proliferates during conservative political administrations – consider the rise of giant mutant films during the 1950s, or slasher movies during the Reagan era. Is it a coincidence, then, that Halloween’s popularity exploded during the first decade of the twenty-first century, when George W. Bush was in office? Now, with divisive politics and an uncertain economy looming over the American landscape, Halloween is becoming both more openly horrific, with increasingly violent and realistic haunted attractions, and extending its influence, both around the globe and throughout the year. In 2011, there were haunted attractions opened on other festivals – Sinister Pointe in Brea, California, for example, now offers themed hauntings at Christmas and Valentine’s Day – and there is a trend toward year-round haunted attractions. In discussing the increasing length of time these attractions are staying open to accommodate consumer demand, the president of a haunters’ association calls haunted attractions a ‘subculture movement’,⁵⁹ a description that could almost be applied to Halloween in general.

Aggressive retailing may have started the globalization of Halloween, but in many areas – South Africa, Russia, Hong Kong – it’s been embraced equally by subcultures who see it as a form of artistic expression. Raves, sports events, makeup schools, costumers, organic growers and social networks have all helped disseminate Halloween culture around the world. The festival’s visual motifs – grinning jack-o’-lanterns and skeletal faces – have been integrated and re-purposed into everything from mall decorations to region-specific greeting cards.

Halloween has endured centuries of political and religious criticism, economic downturns, real terror and attempts to ban it even as it’s been adopted by new generations and movements. It has repeatedly been resurrected and modified to be celebrated anew, and it is now enjoyed by much of the world. The celebration’s playful use of frightening ideas and images seems to hold an appeal that transcends nations and eras, and that speaks of a universal human need to mock and transform death and darkness – even as winter approaches.

1912 postcard.