Haunted attractions that will push you to the edge of your sanity is the tagline that greets you on the Pennhurst Asylum website. Like other asylums-turned-amusement centers, Pennhurst’s marketing focuses on the horror of its history. The ghosts haunting the place, waiting to terrify you, are supposed to be those of the people once admitted there. The website includes pictures of performers as ghostly patients in straightjackets, monstrous hospital staff performing lobotomies, and many a stereotypical image of mostly female patients looking crazed—messy hair, dirty faces, wild facial expressions. Last year, USA Today readers voted Pennhurst one of the country’s best haunted attractions.

When I ended up at a psych ward myself, it was just past midnight in the beginning of September. As two nurses took inventory of my naked body, noting my two tattoos and the scar on my right lower leg, my hair was still wet from my attempt to drown myself in Lake Michigan. Still, I had been hesitant to agree to inpatient treatment.

Part of the reason was my lack of health insurance, but when the admissions nurse removed financial concerns as a reason, I realized I was also afraid.  My brain flashed to the images of psych wards in pop culture that are laced with stigma and fear. And then there’s the decades of documentation showing how real mental-illness patients have been kept in unsanitary, unsafe, and abusive conditions, especially at state-run facilities like Illinois’ Choate Mental Health and Development Center.

Because I’m white and live in one of the gayborhoods of Chicago’s Northside, privilege shaped my experience. I knew I was unlikely to be mistreated at the private hospital where I’d been taken. We each had our own room. The staff wore Pride stickers to show their gender and sexual identities, and the office had a large Pride flag. “If you’re going to be hospitalized, this is the place to be,” the admissions nurse reassured me. Private facilities are radically different from state-run ones. Still, urban legends don’t make such distinctions.

Finally, I nodded. I’d be admitted. She said she’d get the paperwork. Another nurse took me to my room.

“One last question,” he said after he’d gotten me set up. “Are you hearing or seeing anyone that no one else can?”

I shook my head, and he smiled as he left. But I was hearing a voice in my head, just not the kind he was asking for. It was more of an earworm—a line from a movie that kept repeating itself. It was a woman saying, “I can fix it. I can fix it.” Her desperate voice was familiar but I couldn’t quite place it, as though the dialogue was a ghost in my memory. The line, both ominous and consoling, stayed with me throughout my five days in the hospital, the mystery of its origin a way to keep myself occupied during my many hours of rest.

A few days after getting out of the psych ward, morbid curiosity led me to look up haunted houses that have an asylum spin. In addition to Pennhurst, in 2016, Knott’s Berry Farm in California opened a haunted VR attraction called “FearVR: 5150”—a reference to California’s code for involuntary psychiatric commitment—that they begrudgingly shut down after just five days due to protests by mental health advocates.

As I scrolled, I realized that as much as they horrify me in the bad way, these attractions also horrify me in the alluring, macabre way the season intends. As Leila Taylor says of so-called “ruin porn” in Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul: “I know the smell of exploitation, and that they ignore the people who live and work and play there, that they romanticize poverty and economic decay, but I keep looking.”

I kept looking, too, because haunted spectacle can be a portal to understanding. That’s also why I’ll admit to wanting to go to Pennhurst—though I want to see the daytime tours about the asylum’s history. You can’t have a ghost without a person who was once alive. A specter of their lived experience remains under the gory makeup.

That tension also made me think of Floria Sigismondi’s 2020 film The Turning, part of my yearly Halloween rotation of ghost story movies. (As a Halloween lover, Halloween Eve starts for me in September.) I turned it on.  

The movie is adapted from the Henry James story “The Turn of the Screw,” about a governess who is haunted by the ghosts of her predecessor and another former employee while caring for two siblings in a secluded estate. It moves the story from the 1840s to 1994, but for most of the film the plot follows James’ story, seeming to make the narrative choice that ghosts are real.

Then there’s a twist.

Near the end, the narrative switches from the perspective of Kate, the governess, to a more omniscient view. We see her disheveled, her hair messy, her eyes red and wide, like the stereotypical crazed women in the pictures on Pennhurst’s site. We realize that Kate is the only one seeing ghosts—because she is mentally ill. She wants Flora, the child she takes care of, to say she is also seeing ghosts. But Flora continues to deny seeing any, even as Kate shakes her by the shoulders and the ceramic doll she is holding drops to the floor.

“I’ll fix her,” Kate says, crying and rushing to pick up the broken pieces of the doll.

There it was. I’ll fix her.

I paused the movie. I had misremembered the line as “I’ll fix it,” but it was Kate I’d been hearing in the hospital. I felt a sense of relief at identifying the voice that had brought me a reassurance that I still wanted to live during those five long days. Knowing that the line came from a character struggling with mental illness made me feel less alone.

During the 1930s, critics and scholars debated whether the governess in James’ story was seeing actual ghosts, or if they were a projection of her madness. If Kate’s psych nurse had asked her whether she was hearing or seeing anyone that no one else could, unlike me, she would have said yes. But one answer doesn’t preclude the other: She can be seeing ghosts and be having difficulty with her mental health.

The fuzziness of that boundary is part of what makes me hold Halloween so dear. Many connect the origins of Halloween to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, which is believed to have marked the loosening of the veil between the spirit world and the corporeal one. Being in the psych ward felt like being in this area between worlds. We were ghosts: I knew the rest of the world was there, and many people knew where I was, but we couldn’t communicate with each other. During the 15 minutes of computer time I had each day, rushing onto Instagram felt like using a Ouija board—calling the spirits of friends to me and my spirit to them.

This year, even more than usual, I celebrate the way Halloween honors the space between the two planes of existence—a reality that psych ward patients, and many others, live with daily. Though exploitative haunted houses and other popular culture offerings might suggest otherwise, mental health patients are real people who experience not only illness but also joy and desire.

I think back to the karaoke night we had on the ward. Most participated. Even individuals who didn’t speak or engage with the rest of us because of their psychosis sang. They became present, even if it was just for the few minutes of the song. It feels odd to say we had fun in the psych ward, but we did.

Erasing the stigma around mental illness and psych wards won’t happen all at once. But I’d like to propose a new Halloween tradition to help us on our way: that when we look for the ghosts around us, we pay attention not only to the ghosts’ cries, but to their songs too.

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We think the ghosts will come to us as we sit in Kaitlyn’s car, once our car, on top of the man-made hill that houses the only mausoleum in Woodlawn Cemetery. Small blue orbs dot the landscape. Ghost hunting shows often cite orbs as a sign of a haunting. But these are just battery-operated lamps that families have left next to their dead’s gravestones.

We figure this spot under the tree is a good place to hide from the few cars that might drive by in the night, going from Urbana to Champaign or vice versa. I turn the ignition off.

“Now what?” Kaitlyn sighs. Our ghost hunting inexperience is evident.

Three months ago, I had stood in our kitchen, now my kitchen, and said: I’m gay. At first, I had said I would find a new place because she had loved the garden in the backyard. But she wanted to go because she didn’t want to be in a house haunted by our former togetherness.

Over the remains of our marriage, we both wanted to create a celebration for our new friendship and a new tradition—one last ours. Inspired by the then-new show “Ghost Hunters,” we’d search out ghosts on Halloween, our shared favorite holiday. We decided to call it Wake the Dead.

Fog from the cold creeps up the windows. Silhouettes of the tree’s branches knock against the back window.

“What was that?” Kaitlyn whispers

“What was what?” I look around, afraid. The idea of seeing a ghost seemed fun, the increasing possibility as we sit in the dark cemetery, not so much.

“Thought I saw something moving across that way.” She points towards a row of graves.

I don’t see anything. Still, as the cold bleeds in through the vents, making everything feel even creepier, a thought whispers to me that we shouldn’t be there.

“Want to go?”

She nods. I drive as fast as I can on the twisty cemetery road in the dark. We go back to my apartment to eat pizza and watch a comedy. We laugh hard at anything slightly funny.

The author’s ceramic figurine in Chicago’s AIDS Garden—a place he believes is crowded with gay ghosts or ‘lavender apparitions.’ Courtesy of author.

Maybe we didn’t see anything because ghosts don’t hang out in cemeteries. According to Shane McClelland, co-founder of the Stonewall Columbus Ghost Hunters, they tend to return to places they associate with happiness or a place where they experienced trauma.

McClelland’s group hosts a YouTube show called “Queer Ghost Hunters.” In contrast to regular ghost hunting shows, all the investigators on “Queer Ghost Hunters” are queer, and the subjects of their investigations are queer ghosts.

I started watching Stonewall Columbus Ghost Hunters in April 2022, while researching my memoir about my relationship to ghosts. Like my queerness, ghosts have always been with me, even when I didn’t want to acknowledge them. I started to notice my father’s ghost standing behind me three years ago when I remembered that he had molested me. Those memories brought on PTSD, major depression, and generalized anxiety disorder. I stopped showering. I slept with the lights on. No matter where I went or what I did, he was there, his hand hovering above my left shoulder.

But just as ghosts can haunt places of pleasure or trauma, that “you are not alone” feeling can be scary or be a comfort. Like I once accepted being queer, I eventually accepted being haunted. My once-casual interest in ghosts has become a full-fledged fascination. Now, instead of fearing being haunted, I devote much of my free time to seeking queer ghosts and writing haunted memoir, a term I coined, about the lived experience of being haunted. Ghosts have led me to a community of others also welcoming ghosts into their lives.

I’ve found that queerness and ghosts go together in fundamental ways. For one, our lack of queer history is a haunting. Rather than camera-ready scares, the hunts on “Queer Ghost Hunters” are a vehicle for finding and sharing queer history. By seeking out our ghosts and telling their stories, we defy erasure.

But in “Queer Ghost Hunters”, the Stonewall Columbus Ghost Hunters focus their searches on places of trauma, like prisons and abandoned asylums. They don’t go anywhere the queer ghosts might have had fun. If we are to memorialize places of queer trauma—and I believe we should—we also need to memorialize places of queer joy. For me, the power of queer ghost hunting lies in the way that it offers a means to acknowledge the co-existence of loss and celebration in queer, haunted spaces.

AIDS Garden Chicago balances this coexistence. Built on the ruins of what used to be a cruising and queer gathering spot known as Belmont Rocks in one of the city’s gay-friendly northern neighborhoods, the garden’s site memorializes a joyful part of Chicago’s queer history. Chicago Reader described Belmont Rocks as “the rare spot where the queer community could mix and mingle in broad daylight all summer long” and “nothing short of a gay paradise.”

Opened this year, the AIDS Garden’s centerpiece is a 30-foot, green Keith Haring sculpture titled Self-Portrait. Its defiant, joyful figure has its left leg and arm raised, as if photographed mid step. The park that circles the sculpture has concrete walking paths, benches, and pink and orange flowers. Through QR codes, visitors can scan to hear a still-growing collection of stories from those who lived through the crisis years in Chicago, as well as stories about those who didn’t make it. Because not a lot of storytelling exists about the Midwest during the height of the AIDS epidemic, the park is vital in making space to witness queer history and lives.

The author’s ceramic ghost stands in front of a 30-foot Keith Haring sculpture at AIDS Garden Chicago. Coutesy of author.

On the day I visit, the garden is busy: Cinnamon fills the air from the churros being made by the nearby food stand; closer to the lake, the air smells of sweat and sunscreen. People picnic under the shade of the trees surrounding the garden, while others hurry by to get a spot on the grass close to the lake. Some sunbathe on the concrete lip between the garden and the lakefront walkways just like in the historical pictures of Belmont Rocks. All of it feels like a way of honoring the space—laughing, taking in the sun, being with friends by the lake, just like the ghosts who haunt this space did when they were alive. It is a communal space for the living and the dead where the feeling that you are not alone is a comfort.

I’ve brought my own ghost to the garden, a ceramic figurine. I lie on my stomach on the crisp summer grass right in front of the sculpture to get a picture of the two together. The garden, I imagine, must be crowded with gay ghosts—or “lavender apparitions,” this more delightful descriptor courtesy of the podcast History Is Gay’s Halloween episode featuring the Queer Ghost Hunters. Just as ghosts are evidence of history, lavender apparitions prove queer people have always existed—even when we didn’t have language for queerness, even when some try to make us vanish.

Wake the Dead was a one-time event. Kaitlyn started her own tradition the next year: a Halloween costume party. Eventually, we phased out of each other’s lives, and I moved out of central Illinois to find my new home in Chicago, a city that provides space for queer history, celebration. Here, through searching out queer ghosts, I’ve reclaimed the ghost for myself just as I have the feeling of being haunted—two things the frightened version of me hiding from ghosts in that car in Urbana-Champaign would not have thought possible.

My new home is also walking distance to a local gay beach on Lake Michigan. I walk along the sand-covered concrete ridge that separates the beach from the preserved prairie dunes, the tall yellow-green marram grass stretching out towards the dark gray-blue water, towards the lighthouse with the rainbow base, on one of the first warm days. The dunes are themselves an unofficial cemetery of those lost to settler genocide. As I sit on the beach, the Chicago wind picks up, and sand swirls in the wind as if it’s dancing. I try to record it on my phone, to document what feels magical. I know I won’t capture it, but that’s OK. I let myself enjoy this lavender apparition, enjoying movement after being frozen for the winter. A gay ghost, as in a happy one.

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Fear gets a bad rap. It’s a so-called negative emotion, one that supposedly stands between us and our dreams. It is certainly true that pure fear doesn’t feel good, but that is the whole point of the emotion. Fear tells us to get the hell out of Dodge because Dodge is a bad place. Fear evolved over millions of years to protect us from danger. So, yes, a feel-bad emotion, but also, and perhaps paradoxically, the engine in a whole range of pleasurable activities and behaviors—which inspire what we can call recreational fear.

Once you start looking for it, you’ll find recreational fear everywhere. From a very early age, humans love being jump-scared by caregivers in the form of peek-a-boo, and being hurtled into the air (and caught). They get older and take great pleasure in chase play and hide-and-seek. They are drawn to scary stories about monsters and witches and ghosts. They perform daredevil tricks on playgrounds and race their bikes toward what, from a parent’s perspective, is certain and violent death. A little older and they get together for horror movie nights, stand patiently in line for roller coasters, and play horror video games. Indeed, most of us never quite lose our peculiar attraction to recreational fear—even if we eschew slasher flicks or dark crime shows brimming with murder, death, and gore.

So even though Dodge may be a bad place, we still keep visiting it, at least from the safe distance of play and make-believe. How come?

One hypothesis is that recreational fear is a form of play behavior, which is widespread in the animal kingdom and ubiquitous among humans. When an organism plays, it learns important skills and develops strategies for survival. Playfighting kittens train their ability to hold their own in a hostile encounter, but with little risk and low cost, compared to the real thing. Same with humans. When we play, we learn important things about the physical and social world, and about our own inner world. When we engage in recreational fear activities specifically, from peek-a-boo to horror movie watching, we play with fear, challenge our limits, and learn about our own physiological and psychological responses to stress. In other words, recreational fear might actually be good for us.

To investigate whether that is indeed the case and why, my colleagues and I have established the Recreational Fear Lab, a research center at Aarhus University, Denmark. We do lab studies, survey studies, and real-world empirical studies to understand this widespread but scientifically understudied psychological phenomenon.

The Recreational Fear Lab conducts investigations to understand the scientifically understudied phenomenon of fear—and why it might actually be good for us. Courtesy of author.

In one ambitious research project, led by my colleague Marc Malmdorf Andersen, we set out to investigate the experiences of guests at a very frightening haunted house—Dystopia Haunted House in Denmark. We mounted surveillance cameras in the house’s scariest rooms, strapped participants with heart rate monitors, and distributed a bunch of questionnaires. The surveillance footage allowed us to see how guests responded to frightening events, such as a chainsaw-wielding pig-man chasing them down a dark corridor. The heart rate monitors told us about their physiological responses to such events, and the questionnaires allowed us to understand how they felt about it all.

They told us they perceived their experiences as a kind of play, supporting our notion of recreational horror as a medium for playing with fear. But we also wanted to go deeper into the relationship between fear and enjoyment. You might think that relationship is linear—the more fear, the better. But when we plotted the actual relationship between fear and enjoyment, it looked like an upside-down U. In other words, when people go to a haunted attraction, they don’t want too little fear (which is boring), and they don’t want too much fear (which is unpleasant). What they want is to hit what we call the “sweet spot of fear.” That doesn’t just go for high-intensity haunted attractions either. When you hurtle a kid into the air, you don’t want it to be too tame or too wild; when teenagers joyride their bikes, they need just the right amount of tummy-tickling arousal; when you pick a horror movie on Netflix, you try to go for the one that sits just at the right point on the scare-o-meter.

So, there is pleasure to be had from these vicarious visits to Dodge, but are there any other benefits? In several past and ongoing studies of the psychological and social effects of engagement with recreational fear, we’ve seen it improve people’s ability to cope with stress and anxiety. For instance, one study—led by my colleague Coltan Scrivner—found that people who watch many horror movies exhibited better psychological resilience during the first COVID-19 lockdown than people who stay away from scary movies. Presumably, the horror hounds have trained their ability to regulate their own fear from playing with it. We know from another Dystopia Haunted House study that people actively use a range of coping strategies to regulate their fear levels in pursuit of the sweet spot, and it makes sense that we get better at using those strategies through practice.

You can think of recreational fear as a kind of mental jungle gym where you prepare for the real thing, or as a kind of fear inoculation. A small dose of fear galvanizes the organism for the big dose that life throws at it sooner or later. So even though fear itself may be unpleasant, recreational fear is not only fun—it may be good for us. My colleagues and I even have preliminary results to suggest that some people with mental health issues, such as anxiety disorder and depression, get relief from recreational horror. Maybe it’s about escaping anhedonia—emotional flatlining—momentarily, and maybe it’s about playing with troublesome emotions in a controllable context. For fear to be fun, you need to feel not only that the levels are just-so, but that you are in relative control of the experience.

With research findings such as these in mind, we should maybe think twice about shielding kids and young people too zealously from playful forms of fear. They’ll end up in Dodge sooner or later, and they will be better equipped if they’ve at least pretended to be there before.

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On the other hand, horror seems an ideal forum to take on a world increasingly full of anti-immigrant rhetoric, authoritarian leaders, and a peculiar brand of billionaire populism that’s taken hold everywhere from Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro has been christened “the Trump of the tropics,” to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, where his party has dismantled the constitution. And it’s lurched from the shadows in the United States with President Trump’s chilling refusal to agree to a peaceful transfer of power.

So it’s not that surprising that some of the most interesting cultural work, in the U.S. and internationally, is emerging in the horror genre, which is ready to respond to the politics of wounded rage that propel the new authoritarians. Horror can directly address violence, employ rather sneaky satire, and force conversations about racism, classism, and the meaning of democracy in an era of vast chasms of social power. Audiences expect a horror film to rattle them, and they sometimes find their worldview taking a bumpy ride in the turbulence. But horror films have just as often served to legitimize the chaos on which right-wing populisms thrive. Audiences have left theaters or turned off their screens feeling the same sense of vertigo they get from the nightly news.

The roller coaster ride probably serves as the most frequent metaphor for a horror flick’s effect on us. While it’s true horror films may offer an adrenaline jolt, from their very beginnings they’ve also carried deeply political messages. The horror tradition of the 1920s, born largely from German Expressionism’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu, engaged directly with the death toll and mental trauma of World War I.

Beginning in the 1960s, George Romero invented the modern zombie genre in a trilogy that successfully parodied American materialism, searingly castigated racism, and even portrayed the American army as dangerously predatory amid Reagan-era cinematic celebrations of testosterone-fueled military fantasies. Legendary horror directors John Carpenter and Larry Cohen made parables of American inequality and consumerism in cult classics like 1985’s The Stuff and 1988’s They Live. In a recent interview for a Shudder TV documentary, Carpenter explicitly said he made the film to satire the country’s “unrestrained capitalism.”

It’s the genre’s longstanding willingness to deal with the grotesqueries of our nightmares that gives writers and directors the chance to autopsy our current age of real-world horror—and capture it with frightening precision. As Victoria McCollum, the editor of Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear, puts it, horror has a “uniquely sensitive relationship to points of cultural tension and conflict.” McCollum, who is a professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Ulster, told me she thinks of the years since 2016 as roiling with such political turmoil that audiences, and filmmakers, have naturally made connections between the nightmares on screen and in real life.

Over the past five years, a covey of American horror films has forced all manner of American attitudes down under a hot light for interrogation. Robert Eggers’s The VVitch, set in New England in 1630, proved to be less a period piece and more a feminist parable about the inherent silliness of male toxicity and the possibilities of liberation. Ari Aster jokingly called his terrifying Hereditary “a family drama,” but it uses a grandmother’s haunting and possession to tell a story of something rotting beneath the floorboards of upper-middle-class privilege and a supernatural question mark added to the American dream. And Jordan Peele’s 2019 Us may be the ultimate American statement about class and privilege in an era when the most vituperative nationalism also has a relationship to the vast growth in American, and global, wealth inequality. The entire story of a literally underground world of “the tethered”—soulless doppelgangers of regular Americans—works as a bleak metaphor for the pressures of class and the original sin of systemic racism. Some of the film’s most terrifying moments emerge when the sunny banalities of middle-class life are forcefully shattered by the tethered, unleashed by the American dream turned American nightmare.

Horror has long been able to critique the culture that produces it because, and not in spite of, the fact that it has not always been taken seriously. Horror films can play the bad kid in the back of the class, able to test the limits and mock authority in ways more reputable genres can’t manage. Of course, occasionally this also means that the creators of horror use their bumptious latitude to see how many sick jokes they can tell their audience before they laugh, become ill, or perhaps both. In the U.S., this has meant that the horror tradition sometimes drifts into political know-nothing-ism. Take the seventh season of Ryan Murphy’s long-running hit American Horror Story, which attempted to parody the era of Trump but became something more like a primary source that future historians can use to puzzle over the chaos and confusion of the era. The series features members of the alt-right dressing up as ghastly clowns and embarking on homicidal rampages. But the liberals, including the same-sex couple at the center of the season, are so triggered by the events of 2016 that they, well, dress up as clowns and go on homicidal rampages. The confused mess the season becomes leaves audiences with a message not too dissimilar from Trump’s infamous claim that “there were very fine people on both sides” after white supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, to face counter-protesters.

Horror, of course, is a global phenomenon, and the U.S. has neither a monopoly nor does the best work in the genre. Japan probably has become the best known for its tales of paranormal terror, both because of the inherent genius of films like Ringu and Ju-On and Hollywood’s propensity to remake them for American and global audiences. Nigeria, Mexico, France, and Australia are known for films that frighten while leaving audiences thoughtful as well as spooked. Take The Babadook, the 2014 Australian film by Jennifer Kent offers a meditation on loneliness and the meaning of monstrosity, as well as just being a real damn scary movie about motherhood. Indeed, it’s complex enough to achieve all this while becoming an important film (and a meme) for the LGBTQ+ community, with the monster as an outsider who wants to tell his story becoming a symbol and a costume for Pride Day celebrations across the country.

South Korean cinema, in particular, has long offered an impressive counterpoint to the idea that horror has to spiral into political nihilism. Park Ki-hyung, Bong Joon-ho, and Park Chan-wook are just a few examples of Korean filmmakers who have made horror socially relevant. Much of Korean horror, even older films, are particularly suited to our political moment.

South Korea has a decades-long history of repressive regimes bringing the country massive economic development at the expense of very basic civil liberties. Once the doors of censorship creaked open ever so slightly, horror made its death rattle heard in the political arena. Park’s 1998 Whispering Corridors is at once a ghost tale set at a strict boarding school with a potent subtext about the dangers of an authoritarian environment. Premiering in the aftermath of a national general strike and student protests against government repression and maleficence, its social commentary was hard to miss.

Bong’s Parasite has, of course, garnered the most international attention for using an increasingly horrific scenario to expose the social and psychological wounds of upper class wealth and working class immiseration on neo-liberal Korea. But it was his breakout film The Host, 14 years before his historic Oscar wins, that first showed Bong’s obsession with social class and its effects on marginalized people. The family at the center of the film barely hangs on to some sense of status at their tiny, riverside snack bar. And this implicit critique of Korea’s adoption of America’s free-wheeling economics is just the start. The film goes on to become one of the best “creature features” ever made, with references to the country’s efforts to create a participatory democracy and an American military base dumping the toxins that create an imaginatively terrifying monster.

The global renaissance of horror signals that we are all having bad dreams, or think we are living in one. To paraphrase the late Wes Craven, a master of horror for half a century: People don’t go to horror films to be frightened—they are already frightened, and the horror film restages their anxieties.

It is all the more complicated as audiences bring along different varieties of fears to sit beside them in the dark. Horror can produce a contemplative iconography of death, and the best of the genre points us to ponder the cruelties of human experience. Fear can also become incendiary, burning off a high-octane surge of inchoate rage. It’s a dangerous alchemy. But directors from Peele to Bong to Kent have become arcane masters of transmuting unseeable darkness into a bleak, but vibrant, midnight sun.

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Because animals face predatory risks that can’t be fully eliminated, it’s essential that they learn to live with fear, and develop strategies to respond correctly. Overcompensate, you miss out on resources and may starve. Undercompensate, a predator abruptly ends your life. For instance, the animals I study—marmots—flee to the safety of their burrows when a coyote is around. But how long should they remain hidden away, unable to find food? Life is about managing tradeoffs. So when does, and how should, fear motivate change?

In humans, fear motivates change best when the threat is simple to understand, actions have a direct impact on the outcome, and the potential outcome is viscerally repulsive; disgust is a powerful motivator. Consider public health officials’ campaigns against methamphetamine abuse in the early 2000s. Because meth is so highly addictive, informational campaigns had limited success. Enter Tom Siebel, a software millionaire on a mission with a brilliant idea: Instead of peppering users with statistics, show them pictures of “meth-mouth,” the severe dental decay associated with meth abuse. Starting in 2005, Siebel paid for highway billboards in Montana that showed close-ups of a woman’s face with rotten teeth with text that read: “YOU’LL NEVER WORRY ABOUT LIPSTICK ON YOUR TEETH AGAIN.” He continued his fear- and disgust-driven campaign with a series of short television and internet commercials that showed unsuspecting users their horrible futures. The campaign worked. High school meth use went down 45 percent in two years, compared to an average of just 7.8 percent annually previously.

Fear most successfully leads to immediate responses. It doesn’t work as an agent of change over longer periods, because animals habituate—they stop responding to non-threatening stimuli over time. Indeed, designing habituation-proof stimuli to scare away “problem animals” and reduce human-wildlife conflict is a compelling challenge. The plastic owl above the outdoor urban park dining area works at deterring pigeon traffic for a just few days before the birds realize it’s harmless and start appreciating its utility as an object that helps protect them from the wind. People tend to tune out, too. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security began estimating terrorism threat levels and communicating them to the American public. The color-coded system reported elevated red or orange levels of risk over an extended period of months. An analysis I did showed that the unchanging high threat levels produced the opposite of the desired response—people stopped seeking out information on how to prepare for terrorist threats. Americans habituated to the government’s warnings. We’re experiencing habituation to warnings about coronavirus threats now.

There are other costs to maintaining a fearful state for too long. For snowshoe hares, the mere exposure to predators, or predatory cues, can increase production of stress hormones and shift individuals into “survival” mode, directing energy away from growth and reproduction and toward defense. Snowshoe hare populations increase and decrease over time, driven by the population of their main predator, the lynx. As lynx populations increase, hare populations decrease until there are not enough hares to feed the lynx, resulting in a dramatic crash of the lynx population and a rebound for the hares. Researchers have found that hares have higher stress hormone levels at the peak of the lynx population cycle. In another study, the mere proximity of a dog walking by an enclosure containing pregnant female hares resulted in higher stress hormone levels in the dams and their offspring. Importantly, stressed dams produced fewer offspring. In a follow-up study, researchers found that the effects of stress hormones on reproductive success persisted through generations: The offspring of stressed mothers themselves were relatively more stressed and had fewer babies.

Complex problems are, in part, so defined because causality isn’t obvious. Solving complex problems requires something more than the simple, direct, fear-based motivators we see in the animal world. This is certainly true of the pandemic. As we learn more about it, we may think we are better able to manage the risks we’re exposed to. To some extent we are. The risk of transmission and infection is reduced by wearing masks, physically distancing, and minimizing time spent in closed spaces with others. However, none of these actions totally eliminates the risk of getting infected—which makes giving up on any one of them very tempting.

When passive restraint systems like airbags in cars were first introduced, some people stopped putting on their seat belts because they assumed that they would be safe. In reality, it takes both tools together to increase your odds of surviving a bad accident by keeping you in the car, where you typically are safer. Studies of taxi drivers showed that they drove faster on wet surfaces when antilock brakes were first introduced because they could do so and still arrive reasonably safely, shaving precious driving minutes off each ride. However, driving faster on wet streets, even with anti-lock brake technology, is never a great idea: There was no net reduction in car accidents.

Marmots vary in how fast they can run away from threats. It turns out that marmots who are slower than average spend relatively less time looking around when they are foraging. By doing so they reduce the time they are away from the safety of their burrows, thus compensating for risk. But another way to view this variation is that animals who are better able to escape spend more time looking around while foraging and thus increase their exposure to risk. Perhaps marmots, like taxi drivers, accept a certain level of risk when the possibility of reward beckons.

At a very immediate level, our sadness at losing the chance to scare one another this Halloween could reflect our belief that we are in control of our risk of infection. And this has important insights for our response to a global pandemic. Responding to the pandemic is a marathon, not a sprint. It will require constant vigilance and behavioral changes for more than the foreseeable future. As new drugs and vaccines are introduced, we should be extra vigilant of our perceived safety. Risks are cumulative, and the more you accept, the greater the likelihood that they will eventually catch up to you. Tragically, this was a message illustrated by the recent outbreak in the White House, and at a macro level, by the recent spikes we are seeing worldwide. Protective measures that increase our perceptions of safety (in the White House’s case, rapid testing and everywhere else, the success of social distancing in the summer months) encourage us to take more risks and are thus, counterintuitively, risky.

Some people view the warnings about coronavirus as the boy who cried wolf. After all, they themselves have not gotten sick, and most people who get COVID-19 don’t die. But this is the wrong way to interpret what we see around us. We all have different risks based on what we do, various pre-existing conditions, and our age. According to the CDC, if infected, I am at least four times more likely to be hospitalized and 30 times more likely to die than most of the undergraduates I teach. We know many people experience longer-lasting negative health effects from the virus. I also know that it’s not just my health at stake but also the health of others who may have even higher mortality risks. Taken together, this leads me to think that all of us—my students and myself included—are morally obligated to continue to take the coronavirus threat seriously.

Halloween illustrates the joy associated with celebrating our fears by allowing us to express one of our most primordial emotions. When we do so, we should embrace our fears and remember that we are descended from a long line of successful ancestors, dating back millions of years, who got their risk assessments right. They neither over-reacted, nor under-reacted to environmental threats; they figured out how to successfully live with them. I suggest that this Halloween we commit to making multimedia costumes that can scare, via Zoom, from afar. Meanwhile, let’s look forward to a time, hopefully not too far in the future, where we are surrounded, in person, with scary costumes, boos, and screams of both fear and joy.

The post Is It Possible to Be Just Terrified Enough This COVID Halloween? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The wind kicks up, and branches click like skeletal finger bones. You make it home, run inside, wedge a chair against the door, and strain to listen. There’s a sharp rap at the window and when you turn, terrified, it’s there leering at you—a glowing, disembodied head with a deep black hole where its mouth should be.

It’s just a scooped-out pumpkin, nicked from a field by some local boys and lit from the inside with the stub of a candle. But it has spooked you. When you look again, it’s gone.

Halloween in early 19th-century America was a night for pranks, tricks, illusions, and anarchy. Jack-o’-lanterns dangled from the ends of sticks, and teens jumped out from behind walls to terrorize smaller kids. Like the pumpkin patches and pageants that kids love today, it was all in good fun—but then, over time, it wasn’t.

As America modernized and urbanized, mischief turned to mayhem and eventually incited a movement to quell what the mid-20th-century press called the “Halloween problem”—and to make the holiday a safer diversion for youngsters. If it weren’t for the tricks of the past, there’d be no treats today.

Halloween was born nearly 2,000 years ago in the Celtic countries of northwestern Europe. November 1 was the right time for it—the date cut the agricultural year in two. It was Samhain, summer’s end, the beginning of the dangerous season of darkness and cold—which according to folklore, created a rift in reality that set spirits free, both good and bad. Those spirits were to blame for the creepy things—people lost in fairy mounds, dangerous creatures that emerged from the mist—that happened at that time of year.

Immigrants from Ireland and Scotland brought their Halloween superstitions to America in the 18th and 19th centuries, and their youngsters—our great- and great-great grandfathers—became the first American masterminds of mischief. Kids strung ropes across sidewalks to trip people in the dark, tied the doorknobs of opposing apartments together, mowed down shrubs, upset swill barrels, rattled or soaped windows, and, once, filled the streets of Catalina Island with boats. Pranksters coated chapel seats with molasses in 1887, exploded pipe bombs for kicks in 1888, and smeared the walls of new houses with black paint in 1891. Two hundred boys in Washington, D.C., used bags of flour to attack well-dressed folks on streetcars in 1894.

Teens used to terrorize smaller children on Halloween. Image courtesy of The New York Public Library.

In this era, when Americans generally lived in small communities and better knew their neighbors, it was often the local grouch who was the brunt of Halloween mischief. The children would cause trouble and the adults would just smile guiltily to themselves, amused by rocking chairs engineered onto rooftops, or pigs set free from sties. But when early 20th-century Americans moved into crowded urban centers—full of big city problems like poverty, segregation, and unemployment—pranking took on a new edge. Kids pulled fire alarms, threw bricks through shop windows, and painted obscenities on the principal’s home. They struck out blindly against property owners, adults, and authority in general. They begged for money or sweets, and threatened vandalism if they didn’t receive them.

Some grown-ups began to fight back. Newspapers in the early 20th century reported incidents of homeowners firing buckshot at pranksters who were only 11 or 12 years old. “Letting the air out of tires isn’t fun anymore,” wrote the Superintendent of Schools of Rochester, New York in a newspaper editorial in 1942, as U.S. participation in World War II was escalating. “It’s sabotage. Soaping windows isn’t fun this year. Your government needs soaps and greases for the war … Even ringing doorbells has lost its appeal because it may mean disturbing the sleep of a tired war worker who needs his rest.” That same year, the Chicago City Council voted to abolish Halloween and instead institute a “Conservation Day” on October 31. (Implementation got kicked to the mayor, who doesn’t appear to have done much about it.)

The effort to restrain and recast the holiday continued after World War II, as adults moved Halloween celebrations indoors and away from destructive tricks, and gave the holiday over to younger and younger children. The Senate Judiciary Committee under President Truman recommended Halloween be repurposed as “Youth Honor Day” in 1950, hoping that communities would celebrate and cultivate the moral fiber of children. The House of Representatives, sidetracked by the Korean War, neglected to act on the motion, but there were communities that took it up: On October 31, 1955 in Ocala, Florida, a Youth Honor Day king and queen were crowned at a massive party sponsored by the local Moose Lodge. As late as 1962, New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. wanted to change Halloween to UNICEF Day, to shift the emphasis of the night to charity.

Of course, the real solution was already gaining in practice by that time. Since there were children already out demanding sweets or money, why not turn it into it a constructive tradition? Teach them how to politely ask for sweets from neighbors, and urge adults to have treats at the ready. The first magazine articles detailing “trick or treat” in the United States appeared in The American Home in the late 1930s. Radio programs aimed at children, such as The Baby Snooks Show, and TV shows aimed at families, like The Jack Benny Program, put the idea of trick-or-treating in front of a national audience. The 1952 Donald Duck cartoon Trick or Treat reached millions via movie screens and TV. It featured the antics of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, who, with the help of Witch Hazel’s potions, get Uncle Donald to give them candy instead of the explosives he first pops into their treat bags.

The transition could be slow. On one episode of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, costumed kids come to the door, and Ozzie and Harriet are baffled. But food companies—Beatrice Foods, Borden, National Biscuit Company—quickly took notice and got into the candy business, and even tobacco companies like Philip Morris jumped in. Halloween candy and costume profits hit $300 million in 1965 and kept rising. Trick-or-treating—child-oriented and ideal for the emerging suburbs that housed a generation of Baby Boomers—became synonymous with Halloween. Reckless behavior was muted, and porch lights welcomed costumed kids coast to coast.

Today, trick or treat has more variants: trunk or treat, where kids go car-to-car in a parking lot asking for candy; and trick or treat for UNICEF, where youngsters collect money for charity along with their treats. Few children, especially young ones, have an inkling of what mischief was once possible.

For those nostalgic about the old days of Halloween mischief, all is not lost. Query the MIT police about the dissected-and-reassembled police car placed atop the Great Dome on the college’s Cambridge campus in 1994. Or ask the New York City pranksters who decorated a Lexington Avenue subway car as a haunted house in 2008. There’s even an annual Naked Pumpkin Run in Boulder, Colorado.

The modern Halloween prank—be it spectacle, internet joke, entertainment, or clever subversion—is a treat in disguise, an offering that’s usually as much fun for the tricked as it is for the trickster. Halloween is still seen as a day to cause mischief, to mock authority, and make the haves give to the have-nots—or at least shine a light on the fact that they should. For that, Americans can thank the long line of pranksters who came before us.

The post When Halloween Mischief Turned to Mayhem appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I debated for a minute whether “Uncle Albert,” a “groundbreaker” zombie that jerks out after visitors step on a pressure-triggered mat, should make an appearance this year. But who was I kidding? He gets the most screams, so of course, he was joining this year’s graveyard scene!

I’m an artist and potter, not a professional haunter, but I love to do up my own house in Folsom, California, for Hallowe’en. (I use the old-fashioned spelling to remind myself of the origins of “All Hallows Even,” the first name for the holiday.) And I enjoy helping others make creepy scenes as well, via my segment, “The Charmed Pot,” on the monthly podcast, Hauntcast, and, most recently by teaching a class at the ScareLA convention.

What are the lessons you’d learn in Hallowe’en 101 so that you can scare other people’s children on October 31?

First, haunt with what you know.
I love to use monsters because my own love for Hallowe’en began in the ’70s, a “golden age” for monsters. Kids around me in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley were wearing masks of skeletons and the Creature from the Black Lagoon made by the Collegeville costume company. Most of us owned the vinyl record of Disney’s Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House, and we’d listen to Alfred Hitchcock, Vincent Price, and Boris Karloff narrate creepy urban legends and ghost stories on their own storybook LPs.

When I was in my mid-teens, my dad became a visual effects coordinator on feature films such as Dune and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I was able to go onto working movie sets and was floored by the whole process, from model-making to the mechanics of how to “make it go.” While we only carved a single pumpkin with a goofy face for our Hallowe’en decor at my childhood home, observing all this movie inspiration and attention to detail have shaped my Hallowe’en approach.

After my husband and I moved to Folsom, 20 miles east of Sacramento in the foothills of the Sierras, eight years ago, I upped my game. I now had a house to decorate–and more disposable income, so the single grinning jack-o’-lantern was joined by leering pumpkins, a string of eyeball lights, a 450-watt, hand-triggered fog machine.

The Internet is scary useful.
Hallowe’en is huge on the Internet, full of ideas that can fuel experimentation. I’ve found sites for how to make tombstones out of insulation foam purchased at Home Depot (safety tip: always wear a respirator when carving tombstones, or you’ll be hacking nasty pink gobs from your lungs for the foreseeable future). I’ve learned about the best juice for the fog machine (Froggy’s Fog, for instance, is made from pharmaceutical grade chemicals). I made Stewie, my first prop, as the son of The Grumble created by a haunter named Spooky Blue. I made a “Beloved” tombstone from a tutorial by Terra Lair. If I had questions, I asked online forums like Haunt Forum and Halloween Forum.

A yard is a great canvas for telling a story.
Yard displays can be as simple as a mass of carved pumpkins, or as complex as a full light and sound show with animatronic and pneumatic props and projection effects. The key is to tell a story. For example: the bride waiting for her beloved, who will never return; Lizzy Borden and her murdered family; the miner perpetually searching for a vein of gold; a hitchhiker who asks for a ride home. And while there’s nothing wrong with what I call the “Heinz 57” haunt—where people throw together a bunch of scary props bought at the local Hallowe’en store in the spirit of the 57 varieties of Heinz products—a story can keep you and your haunt focused, avoiding a cluttered, disparate mess.

One master of storytelling is a guy who calls himself Pumpkinrot. His themes include Scarecrow Catacomb and the Swamp Foetus. He builds his props around each year’s idea, paying close attention to assaulting all the senses: eerie lighting, crunching leaves, clove-scented candles, toasted pumpkin smells. The Davis Graveyard, House Bloodthorn, and The House at Haunted Hill also inspire me.

Once you have a story, you need a mood.
The right mood makes your victims’ lizard brains feel uneasy. I have small children who come to my house, so I try to stay away from blood and gore and concentrate on a creepy atmosphere. Lighting, sound, and a thick and creeping fog are characters in my haunt as much as Stewie is. At my display this year, visitors hear the constant sound of a grave being dug and the dirt dropping onto the lid of a coffin. By the time Uncle Albert roars and jumps out at them, they’re ready to scream!

Lighting is particularly important for mood. Blue or cool lighting makes your props and shadows appear farther away. Red or warm lighting makes props seem closer. And, as Robert Brown wrote in a lighting tutorial I return to over and over, haunt lighting is as much about creating shadows as it is about lighting your significant props. So this year, I wanted the blue of a cold night to wash over the tombstones. At the same time, I lit Stewie, who is closest to the house, from below in red, giving him a sinister, demonic look while creating a massive Stewie shadow that reached to the top of the roof.

Safety cannot be emphasized enough.
If you build a walk-through, you must be aware of tripping hazards and fire safety. You also must plan for a panicked victim to swat at your walk-through or run through it when he or she bumps into it. Make certain power cords are taped down or in an area where the public can’t get wrapped up in them. Do not skimp on the cost of potentially dangerous items, like pneumatic cylinders or fog juice. You don’t want to use a screen-door cylinder that isn’t designed to deal with the weight of a heavy prop and you don’t want to get sued for an asthma attack or worse.

That said, I don’t want my display–which I expand each year–to feel too safe. I want my neighbors to experience the kind of creepy Hallowe’en that I remember from before it was sanitized. A lot of people here now do a “trunk or treat” in a church parking lot, where children go from trunk to trunk to get candy because it’s “safer” than trick or treating house to house. There are often bouncy houses in these parking lots, which, let’s face it, make Hallowe’en easier for tired parents.

That’s too bad. Hallowe’en should be like the opening of the animated film based on Ray Bradbury’s book, The Halloween Tree, all shivery and delightful. When I see people drive slowly by my house to take in the scene, and hear the shrieks of trick-or-treaters, it makes all the hours, money, and mashed fingers worth it.

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As the art director for the “Scare Zones” at Universal Studios Hollywood’s Halloween Horror Nights, I oversee the zombies and ghouls that overtake sections of the park every October. I was just 18 when I started working at Universal. In the fall of 1980, I graduated from high school in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles and was trying to find a job. My sister heard the theme park was hiring so I went in for an interview. Later that same day, I was being fitted for a costume for a full-time job playing the Phantom of the Opera.

It was a perfect job for me: I grew up on horror movies and made haunted houses in backyards and basements with my childhood friends. Over time, my character resumé grew to include the Wolfman, a mummy, and my crowning achievement, Beetlejuice. That was a speaking part, which meant no rubber mask and a pay bump. Life was good.

During this same period, I was trying to write the next Great American Novel. By the time I hit my 30s, I realized I wasn’t Steinbeck or Kerouac. I sold a few bad low-budget horror scripts that I knew would never be made into bad low-budget horror movies.

But I was getting promotions at Universal. I took off the mask and put on a tie to become a talent supervisor, which basically meant I got to babysit the Phantom and his friends. The park was growing and so were the creative opportunities. I started building props for the performers and created a few small street shows. At the time, we had a lot of classic Hollywood look-alike performers. So my job could involve finding a giant rubber fish for “Laurel and Hardy” or enlisting park guests to do a screen test with “Humphrey Bogart.”

A seed for my current work was first planted in 1996 when I saw an Ed Kienholz exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art downtown. Kienholz was an installation and assemblage sculptor who took found objects—car parts, broken dolls, damaged furniture—and reassembled them into works of art. He relied on a screw gun, not a paintbrush. That was a concept I could wrap my hands around. So I started to create my own assemblage work. The mixed-media artists Lee Bontecou and George Herms (with whom I took a class at the late, great art school that the Chouinard Foundation ran for a time in South Pasadena) also inspired me.

I took classes in stained glass, welding, and screen-printing. I added printed text and old photographs into some of the pieces. My goal was to tell stories with visual art as I had with the written word and, especially, to connect with an audience the way that only a good story can.

By the early 2000s, I was a part of a small department at Universal called Entertainment Production that creates special displays and events in the park. No event is more special than our annual Halloween Horror Nights, where I have the opportunity to scare up to thousands of people a night.

In addition to the usual rides, weekend nights in October feature mazes based on movies or TV shows, such as The Walking Dead, Alien vs. Predator, and An American Werewolf in London. There are also five Scare Zones that act as “warm ups” to the mazes. These productions go well beyond the bedroom-sheet ghosts, tin-foil robots, and toilet-paper mummies my friends used to set up at our houses to spook our parents. Universal’s Scare Zones are dimly lit, fog-filled streets overrun with actors (or “Scare-actors” as we call them) who have one job and one job only: to scare the crap out of you. And it’s my job to ensure that happens.

That’s where the dead bodies come in.

In mid-May or so, I meet with the event’s creative director and the head art director to hash out ideas. They oversee the creative content for all the mazes as well as the Walking Dead Scare Zone. As with the mazes, our first options are films or television shows related to the studio, which is one reason why New York Street has been overrun for the last two years by crazed mobs inspired by the Purge films. Occasionally our marketing department plays a role in the process: Halloween fans got to vote on a theme for our French Village Street this year. Sometimes I’ll do Internet searches on the history of London, disasters, notorious criminals, or ghost stories to get ideas. This year, the overwhelming favorite zone was an idea I pitched: “Dark Christmas.” Evil elves, Krampus (the half-goat demon who frightens children into being nice), and a scary Santa Claus all run amok down our version of London’s Baker Street.

Over the years, New York Street has been infested by mutant soldiers, radioactive zombies, and killer clowns. French Street has been consumed by the plague, sideshow freaks, witches, and killer clowns with a French twist (harlequins with hatchets). Baker Street has hosted Jack the Ripper, zombies inspired by the cult film Shaun of the Dead, and demonic toys like a man in a bloody rabbit costume wielding a chainsaw. As they say in the Industry, the bunny was a real crowd-pleaser.

In the lead-up to Halloween, dozens of craftspeople build sets, design costumes, and create props in a vast warehouse not far from the studio. If we can’t build something ourselves, we buy it from specialty vendors, many of whom we encounter every year at the TransWorld’s Halloween Convention. The four-day trade show has hundreds of exhibitors selling everything from simple plastic masks to animatronic creatures that cost thousands of dollars.

The author backstage with friends

I typically work on a much smaller scale. My budget is tight so I reuse a lot of stuff year after year. For example, I once repurposed some killer clowns into zombie hookers. Some of our dead bodies are brand new, but we also have “veteran” bodies held together with tape and hot glue. There is nothing you can’t accomplish with a screw gun, a roll of gaff tape, and a bag of zip ties.

I often work high-art or folk-art flourishes into the designs. The concept that received the most audience votes for French Street this year was “Mask-A-Raid”: a horde of cannibals masquerading as French aristocrats. I arranged French aristocrats at a massive table laden with fruits, vegetables, and human body parts in the spirit of 17th century Dutch still-life paintings and the grotesque tableaux of contemporary photographer Joel-Peter Witkin. A string quartet of skeletons is playing violins and cellos behind them.

In 2010, I created a Scare Zone inspired by the Mexican folk legend “La Llorona,” the “Weeping Woman” who is searching for her dead children. I created two large backlit metal silhouettes mounted on wagons based on the Dios de los Muertos illustrations by Jose Posada. A few years later, I converted them into an altar that was featured in a Dios de los Muertos festival at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach.

Being the Scare Zone art director allows me the luxury of making stuff just because it’s cool.
But viewers move on after they see something to the next fright. I try for the opposite with the mixed-media art I create in my spare time so that viewers will linger and wonder about the story I’m telling with vintage photographs, an old desk, and scrap metal.

This year’s Halloween event is winding down. All I do now is periodically walk through to check for damage and readjust the lights. I can relax until November when it all gets packed up for next year. I plan to use the downtime to start a new piece for a possible gallery show next month.

For some reason, all of my ideas involve dead bodies.

The post My Job Is to Scare the Crap Out of You appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We meet them at the door-way, on the stair,
Along the passages they come and go,
Impalpable impressions on the air,
A sense of something moving to and fro.

There are more guests at table than the hosts
Invited; the illuminated hall
Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts,
As silent as the pictures on the wall.

The stranger at my fireside cannot see
The forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear;
He but perceives what is; while unto me
All that has been is visible and clear.

We have no title-deeds to house or lands;
Owners and occupants of earlier dates
From graves forgotten stretch their dusty hands,
And hold in mortmain still their old estates.

The spirit-world around this world of sense
Floats like an atmosphere, and everywhere
Wafts through these earthly mists and vapours dense
A vital breath of more ethereal air.

Our little lives are kept in equipoise
By opposite attractions and desires;
The struggle of the instinct that enjoys,
And the more noble instinct that aspires.

These perturbations, this perpetual jar
Of earthly wants and aspirations high,
Come from the influence of an unseen star
An undiscovered planet in our sky.

And as the moon from some dark gate of cloud
Throws o’er the sea a floating bridge of light,
Across whose trembling planks our fancies crowd
Into the realm of mystery and night,—

So from the world of spirits there descends
A bridge of light, connecting it with this,
O’er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends,
Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss.

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Around Halloween, people get especially interested in things vampiric and, by extension, horrific. This is when retro cable channels trot out the lineup of old horror movies, at least one of which (Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula) is the reason why we still see children (and adults) wearing fangs and black opera capes as they go from house to house. Can my field explain the phenomenon?

To me, Halloween comes down to two things: bargaining and rule-breaking.

Start with the first. Today, Halloween has devolved into a soft protection racket: Give me the candy, or your house gets egged. (Eggs, by the way, are often used symbolically to suggest fecundity and beginnings, so their intentional waste is a kind of sacrifice, in the way that burning the first fruits of the harvest was an investment in the possibility of guaranteed plenty.) It’s a fairly tame sort of exchange— especially nowadays, when throwing eggs is no longer really part of the equation. But if we look at similar house-hopping, treat-giving rituals in places like Eastern Europe, we can see that this facet of Halloween involves something that used to be rawer and more urgent.

In August 1994, in preparation for dissertation research, I traveled with lexicographer Sabina Pavlova to Shiroka Laka, a small Bulgarian village in the Rhodope Mountains, about 30 miles north of the Greek border. During our visit, we were invited into an atelier where animal skins (goat, sheep, bear) were being treated as part of the process of making costumes for an upcoming mountain festival known as Pesponedelnik (“cur Monday”) which occurs in early March and involves villages from all around the Rhodope Mountains. On this day, men (only) from nearby villages gather in the town square wearing these animal costumes and act out symbolic agrarian skits featuring symbolic plowing and sowing. (See my photographs from 2010, or this recent video.) Across Europe, variations of this agrarian ritual are linked obliquely to what we know as Halloween, during which property owners would sacrifice the harvest’s first fruits to demon-like pre-Christian divinities in exchange for plenitude and avoidance of climatic catastrophe. Sometimes, this involved giving baked sweets to children going from door to door with songs of praise or blessing—during Christmas (Bulgarian koleda), for instance. Symbolically, it was an obligatory exchange between the terranean and the subterranean: Those who lived and depended on the earth showed their respect for its generative power (and fear of its power to starve them) by acknowledging what they had been given and offering up some of it.

Today in the developed world, where animals and vegetation for consumption are manufactured out of sight and in abundance, Halloween no longer exerts so strong a sense of obligation. It has instead become a kind of theater, a temporal space in which a person is allowed to take on an alternate guise to express a personal dream (ballerina, princess, cowboy) or personal fear (skeleton, pirate, witch, ghost). Sometimes we take elaborate spins into the purely artificial or symbolic (box of cigarettes, condom). But we don’t do it out of a desire to connect with the earth.

So if the “bargaining” part of Halloween has been rendered harmless, what about the other aspect of the day, rule-breaking? Like April Fool’s Day, a European ritual that traditionally granted commoners a temporary license to play tricks on the powerful, Halloween is a time when we are allowed briefly to subvert the “natural order,” only to reinforce it by obligingly returning to “normal” the following day. Halloween lets us exhibit an alternate self or give people a fright—sometimes by donning fangs.

Much like April Fool’s Day, though, Halloween is getting increasingly circumscribed. April Fool’s pranks have gotten much milder over the years. Likewise, socially permissible Halloween costumes have decreased in number. Just this year, the actress Julianne Hough was forced to apologize for going to a Halloween party as a black TV character, Crazy Eyes from the show Orange Is the New Black, even though Crazy Eyes herself is a caricature. You’re also unlikely to see any neo-Nazi costumes now, since the threat still remains too close for comfort. I suspect that this subtle repression—really, just an anxious decrease in tolerance for violation of our remaining taboos—tends to rise and fall in concert with swings in social paranoia. Maybe the more firearms we accumulate, the less willing we are to tolerate transgressive looks or behaviors. (It’s worth a study, at least.)

So if Halloween is about bargaining and rule-breaking, what do these things have to do with one another? Well, judging by the core symbology of Halloween: death. Knowing we do not control hungry natural forces that can wipe us out willy-nilly, we try, desperately, to work out a deal with the fearsome creatures—the vampires, the zombies, the Miley Cyruses (wearing less and less of a costume each year)—that come knocking. The awful animals and the dead and the undead that appear on our doorsteps only one night per solar cycle are in fact demanding not Snickers, but awe. Give them what they want … or else.

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