Unspooked.

There was a time when Halloween was scary. Well, as scary as a load of old made up rubbish can be. But those days are long gone. Gangs of feral children no longer seem to roam the streets at night (as I’m fairly sure they did in my youth) with very little of an agenda other than making the lives of fragile pensioners and the mentally compromised even more miserable with a magical blend of eggs, flour and the occasional burning paper bag filled with dog dirt. The art of trick or treating as blatant vandalism has been rescued and sanitised by sensible parents who walk through the neighbourhood with their adorable sprogs, clutching buckets of Haribo and wearing 100% non-recyclable costumes that by the time the next Halloween comes will likely be troubling the collective lungs of a particularly unfortunate pod of humpback whales, somewhere off the coast of Alaska. And now that we’ve reached the relative sanity of November 1st who knows how much money and time will have been wasted on this annual ‘celebration’ of all things spooky, creepy and downright not-very-terrifying-at-all? Personally, I thought I couldn’t care less about Halloween and yet here I am on the day after Halloween, writing about it. Again.

It is the not-so-subtle shift of Halloween into just another huge excuse to freely piss cash and plastic up the wall (see Easter, Valentine’s Day et al) that means I now no longer dread it but merely roll my eyes at it, like a bad joke told by someone so unfunny they may as well go right ahead and ruin a good one instead. Ultimately, the softening of this time of year suits me fine because I am essentially a very soft person. Oh, I know I may rant and rave, dismiss and criticise, scorn and rebuke, but in reality I am almost squidgy and easily knocked off track by the meaner things in life; my true bitterness is a smokescreen, my misery is for much of the time only skin deep. And that’s why what has replaced the Halloween of old is far easier to swallow, if not always to digest. Now that the pumpkins come with benevolent smiles they’re barely any scarier than plump stuffed easy peelers. The ghosts are friendly and the sweets are sugar-sick, artificial orange. The bats are fluffy and goofy-cheeked and the vampires are more likely to stroke my hair than suck on my bloody neck. As for the zombies, well, they’re just as easy to leave as they are to take. Truly, the sight of Michael Gove wearing only oven gloves would be scarier than what we now have to put up with in the dying days of October.

And of all those it is the humble pumpkin that has become chief in command of the Heeresgruppe Halloween. Pumpkins here, pumpkins there, pumpkins pretty much everywhere. In windows and on shelves, as decoration and as playful emoji. There have been fresh pumpkins for sale in my local shops for what feels like months, though we all know they won’t last five minutes once they’ve been ceremonially gutted and turned into a rather limp excuse for a lamp, the carcass left to rot in the bin or the back garden; all that water, all that waste. The spin-offs are manifold and mostly unrelated. A spiced pumpkin Halloween chai latte tastes nothing of pumpkin and uncannily very like a regular chai latte, while the suspiciously hued Mr Kipling’s Halloween Fancy tastes of enough sugar to dissolve your enamel and not enough of much else. There are Halloween tortillas shaped like bats and flavoured with cheese and chilli, cakes that look like mummies and nut assortments in shades of burnt ochre that may have been carefully shat out through the colon of an un-dead palm civet, Asian style. There is nothing to fear anymore, and that’s all very nice indeed.

This extends to horror as well, though perhaps that becomes milder with age and the across the board saturation of violence on screen. In the last couple of weeks I have lazily watched two horror films – ‘The Omen II’ and ‘Friday the 13th Part II’ – which, when combined contain all the bone chilling horror of being pecked on the knee by a modestly proportioned butterfly. ‘The Omen II’ is no more scary than a cheese sandwich, but is at least leant a stupendous touch of class by that ravaged poster boy from the 50’s, William Holden, who looks twenty years older than he was but still rocks a cardigan like few others could then, and ever fewer can now. On the other hand ‘Friday the 13th Part II’ is plain ridiculous, using an almost identically unfeasible plot as it’s prequel (and indeed its sequel) and containing what I suspect the cast thought looked like acting; though you’d see better thespian chops at a notably poor Cub Scout production of Hamlet. But this is how horror should be, not just sadism and intestines like ‘The Terrifier’, which isn’t horror at all, merely horrific; and there is definitely a distinction between the two.

As I seek to wrap up this needless exploration of not much about nothing I have the first episode of ‘Hammer House Of Horror’ on ITVX gently baking away in the background, you know, for inspiration and atmosphere (when you start typing in ‘Hammer’ it automatically assumes you’re looking for Alison Hammond, but you don’t need to look for her these days because she seems to be everywhere, all the fucking time). It’s creaky and dated and far too loud, but is also comfortable and nicely daft and has the distinct advantage of featuring Jon Finch (who should have been bigger, who could have been our answer to golden Holden, until bad luck got in the way). I like this sort of crap now and I have a begrudging, yet growing fondness for the new, warm, friendly version of Halloween, a time of year that used to make my teeth itch and added another layer of graft for my blood pressure monitor to deal with. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad it’s over now but I’d like to thank the spirits and sprites and creaking coffin lids who have made Halloween almost cuddly and welcome in 2025. And I suppose we shouldn’t forget that Halloween is the last big beast to stand in the way before Christmas slides fully over the horizon and thoroughly pounds everything into submission, because let’s face it – Bonfire Night and Remembrance Day won’t offer any sort of resistance at all. Enjoy the fireworks and silence while they last – true horror is on its way.

G B Burton. 01.11.2025