Halloween highlights a great divide between children and adults. For children, it is pure magic. Implicit in all the medieval mumbo jumbo about ghosts and witches is the belief in second chances. It suggests, and almost promises, that just behind the mundane curtain of suburbs and strip malls lies a much richer world where anything is possible. Kids adore this fantasy, which is why Harry Potter was such a phenomenal success. He crossed and re-crossed the barrier between the dull quotidian and a through-the-looking-glass world that was incredibly rich and exciting. Even his school was interesting. It’s an escape fantasy of the very best kind, and we all need those.
Adults know, but would prefer not to remember, that just behind the mundane curtain of suburbs and strip malls lies another world that is exactly the same, and so ad infinitum. There is no magic train waiting to take us to a different and more interesting station. Halloween, like any other fantasy, offers a temporary distraction, with its gruesome imagery and occult pagan rituals. It gives us permission to visit the fascinating but forbidden world of death and horror, which we never talk about in polite company.
We like to be frightened, just a little. There is a whole industry devoted to horror movies, and a whole literature devoted to ghosts, haunted houses, witches, zombies, werewolves, and other phenomena that do not exist and have never existed. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein launched the whole horror genre in 1818, and horror stories have never been out of style, all the way down to Stephen King in the present day.
Yet there should be enough death and horror in the real world to satisfy the most ghoulish taste. People rush to the scene of any traffic accident or natural disaster, hoping to see something nasty. Dreadful wars are going on everywhere, and being filmed in detail for comfortable home consumption. No television murder mystery is complete without a scene in the morgue. And this morbid taste is nothing new. After the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, thousands of British tourists flocked to the battlefield in Belgium to see what gruesome souvenirs they could pick up from the corpses. Crypts and tombs and torture chambers have always been popular with tourists. Pompei, where dozens of ancient Romans lie mummified in Volcanic ash, is the most popular tourist attraction in Italy, closely followed by the Colosseum in Rome, which was a kind of theater of death.
It all comes under the heading of entertainment, like Halloween itself. In the modern, sophisticated, scientific 21st century, we seem to have much the same tastes in horror that people had in the nineteenth, or the fourteenth, or the fourth century BC, when ancient Greek authors wrote some truly ghastly plays that were very popular. It sounds suspiciously like a part of human nature.
On Halloween, we take several steps backward towards the Dark Ages. Voltaire, the great eighteenth-century rationalist philosopher, confidently expected that superstition - "That infamous thing" as he called it - would soon vanish, and that humanity would move into a golden age of reason and science. How disappointed he would be to see us now, still captivated by some of the oldest and silliest superstitions and magical beliefs, and preparing to celebrate All Hallows Eve, the Eve of Witches.
