[Holidays] When Did Halloween Stop Being Scary?

It's the week before Halloween, and it's hard to come up with thematically appropriate blog entries in line with that. It's especially difficult given I'm not very good with scary things like horror movies, zombie-centric reality horror video games and sounds we hear in the middle of the night.


Halloween - by Guillermo Flores via Flickr.

But Halloween isn't scary at all these days. Halloween is actually mostly about sexy versions of different costumes that used to be scary. Instead of scary we now get cute. Instead of scary we get commercial, store-bought trinkets, plastic pumpkin baskets and perhaps a little make-up.

When we complain about the commercialization of holidays, the ones that usually come to mind are usually Christmas and Valentine's Day. Sure, it's bad that Hallmark has already altered space and time by creating so many days to celebrate with a thoughtful card, but we often forget that Halloween is totally not what it used to be.

Sure, I agree that kids shouldn't be too scared about things and they should be given a chance to celebrate the holiday. But apart from that, especially in the Philippines, we don't see much else beyond that. No adult-friendly scary events. No horror movie marathons at the movies. Nothing of that sort. Instead we're going to get a heck of a lot more fairy wings, cutesy devil horns and of course Plants Vs. Zombies style zombies, that clearly won't scare anyone.

Instead scary and gory is now politically inappropriate. Gory isn't safe. Monstrous is best left off network television. Instead we all want cheesy, happy, campy safe-for-TV-commercial brand costumes and cliches. It's sad really.

I'm not saying the holiday should only be about scaring folks. But it would nice if some parts of it were still scary for some of us beyond the thought of how much costumes are going to cost. Don't we deserve a little scaring every now and then?

Just a thought.