The Unnecessary Sadism in Halloween

It wasn't in my time, but there are people who remember a kinder, gentler Halloween.

Halloween was once far removed from it's pagan origins. Children dressed up as their favorite characters, and the scariest thing you saw on Halloween night was your next-door neighbor dressed as a wicked witch with green face paint. They walked, unaccompanied, door-to-door throughout their neighborhood. They were given apples and homemade cookies and other treats and could eat them without worry.

Many of us long for those days.

But a new trend started in the 1960s. With the onslaught of some truly gory movies, Halloween began to take on an unsettling edge. And in the 1970s, we began to hear of children getting razors and needles in apples, and poisoned or drug-laced treats. Suddenly we could no longer accept Mrs. Bunicetti's homemade cookies, and we had to trick-or-treat in packs or with an adult.

Haunted houses began to take a darker turn. No longer were there merely ghosts, goblins, and witches... now there were demons and demented serial killers, blood, and gore.

The costumes began to reflect this as well. Now the peaceful ritual of Grandma giving out candy was brought to a screeching halt when she opened the door to see a little ghost, a goblin, and... a bloody Freddy Krueger with entrails waiting on her doorstep.

"Oh buck up, it's a brave new world," you might say scornfully. "Who takes this stuff seriously, anyway?"

David Rudd of Texas Tech University actually sees such things as a benefit. "If exposed repeatedly to a fearsome stimulus, the brain will get used to it and no longer experience it as frightening. This is a key behind cognitive therapies for anxiety dysfunctions such as phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder, where a person's system overreacts to perceive something as threatening when it is not, Rudd said. When such cognitive therapies are combined with medicines, their success rate at improving symptoms "is 80 percent," he added," according to Pravda, the Russian government's news machine.

But this has a much more worrisome side to it. As David Rudd admits, we (as humans) grow used to such atrocities with repeated exposure. Is it any coincidence that we also have grown more inhumane?

According to The Disaster Center, "The United States Crime Index Rates Per 100,000 Inhabitants went from 1,887.2 in 1960 to 5,897.8 in 1991.

By 1991 the crime rate was 313% the 1960 crime rate.

In 1996 your risk of being a victim of a crime in the United States was 5.079%, and of a violent crime 0.634%. In 1960 these rates were 1.89% of being a victim of a crime and 0.161% of becoming victim of a violent crime."

I recently went to Bush Garden's Hallowscream, and I was very surprised to see how young some of the children were who were there, gleefully walking through haunted houses dripping with blood and gore. I have a friend who recently took his daughter (I didn't approve). You see, these weren't simply scary things to see: They all had a decided and studied sadism to them. In one venue, we saw people operating on someone who was awake (torture). In another, we saw someone dismembering a corpse in bloody glory. And these venues weren't the exception.

I took my own son to Zoo Boo, a haunted house adventure at our local zoo. There were some delightfully scary haunted houses without gore. We declined going through the one haunted house that did have it.

I am not calling for a Halloween removed of it's sadistic trappings. The horse is out of the barn, and there is no getting it back inside again. But I am calling for all parents to rethink what they are exposing their children to. If enough parents refuse to allow their children to participate in viewing gory movies or wearing viciously depraved costumes, the market would dry up.

And, perhaps if the sadism was reduced from Halloween, we might be surprised to see what Grandma would say is merely common sense: A reduction in crime statistics, too.