Halloween gore decor is frightening children to the core – while adults embrace the fear
During my morning walk in Queens, I come across a front door covered in bloody handprints.
As I continue down the block, I encounter a robot in a black cape that shrieks like a terrified child when I walk by.
Next, there’s a house with a half of a bloodied torso hanging out a window, a black plastic body bag hanging from a tree, and a severed foot in the garden.
Have a Happy Halloween!
It’s clear that Halloween has evolved into a holiday embracing death and demons (and for some parents, the terror of Milk Duds). Nowadays, it can feel more like “It’s the Mutilated Corpse, Charlie Brown.”
So how did we arrive at this point?
“It started with the pumpkins,” explained Nancy McDermott, author of “The Problem with Parenting.”
She elaborated that as kids, they used to carve primitive faces with serrated knives on pumpkins. However, as more elaborate carving tools were used, exquisite pumpkins became the norm, leading to a feeling of “Why should I even try?”
As adults became more involved in their kids’ lives, every aspect of the holiday became more professionalized: parties, costumes, decorations.
What was once a day for ghosts and gumdrops transformed into an $11 billion extravaganza, second only to Christmas.
While professionalization can account for the rising expenditures, it doesn’t explain the increase in gore.
“Gone are the days of the 12-foot skeleton,” remarked Aneisha McMillan, marketing director at the Halloween & Costume Association.
“Now people are having to up their game, so skeletons are moving, or crazy moaning, or screaming.”
Blame it on the media. (Never a bad idea.)
“Despite the fact that I live and breathe this year-round,” McMillan said, “I got talked into seeing the latest ‘Saw’ movie and I literally thought I was going to be sick. They’re sawing someone’s arm off and your whole chair’s shaking — I had to go wait in the lobby.”
For Millennials raised on splatter movies, it’s like growing up on squeeze pouches of smack. More extreme content is constantly needed.
That may explain why, at the Halloween Adventure store in Manhattan, “We have this animatronic girl where half of her head pops off and her mouth pops off — they kind of separate from each other,” said Mystic, the general manager.
She stocks another breed of animatronic, too: “You walk past and it lunges at you.”
Some shoppers get so startled, she said, they wheel around and punch it.
Perhaps decoration inflation just reflects today’s cultural extremism — especially what we’re exposed to online.
The algorithms of the Internet are designed to keep us glued to our screens as long as possible. To do so, platforms serve up ever-more radical content — stunts, shocks, hate — to keep us angry and engaged.
So the severed foot in the garden? It’s just sort of the Internet of the lawn.
To get a sunnier view, I called Brian Blair, owner of the Pumpkin Pulp horror supply company.
“I don’t think it’s anything to be alarmed about — it’s a way to blow off steam,” he said cheerfully.
Phew! So what’s selling briskly this year?
“The slaughtered pig mask,” he replied. “It looks like a pig’s head has been cut off. It’s very popular.”
Well. I did ask.
“It’s just that there are no more boundaries,” offered a 35-year-old mom in Springfield, NJ, who responded to my “What’s going on?” query on X. She asked for anonymity as she described the street she accidentally took her kids down the other day.
“There’s three houses. One has a monster holding a child by the ankles. House #2 has like six Freddy Kreugers with knives. And the third house has really detailed gory zombies with pockmarks on their faces.
“My oldest kid is six and he started having nightmares.”
Great.
We already give kids almost no independence.
We barely let them walk to school, play outside, or run errands on their own. This is making them depressed and anxious like nobody’s business. (It’s also the culture I fight day and night.)
Then, on the one day of the year we let them roam, they’re lunged at by monsters dripping blood.
If we wanted to terrify kids into spending the rest of their childhoods inside on the couch, this would be a great way to do it.
Bonus: More zombies.
Lenore Skenazy is president of the nonprofit Let Grow promoting childhood independence, and founder of the Free-Range Kids movement.