Babies in Barbenheimer costumes; “yummy mummy” mini Colin the Caterpillars; pumpkin-flavoured, glow-in-the-dark lube and an email from your accountant laboriously joking about spooktacular self-assessment: Halloween these days feels tediously, tackily modern, when actually we’ve probably been scaring ourselves silly at this time of year since pre-history. It’s not like there was much else to fill the lengthening winter nights back then, except getting killed by Vikings, starvation or plague.
With that kind of worldview, it’s no surprise old-time Halloween was creepier than the current version. The Celtic Samhain end-of-harvest traditions from which it evolved proved impossible to sanitise entirely into the tidier Christian celebration of All Saints’ and All Souls’. It was variously a time of communion with the dead, divination, misrule, excess and fire (the word “bonfire” derives from “bone fire” – so wholesome). One early account in Nicholas Rogers’s history of Halloween describes it, highly specifically, as the season when “malignant birds emerged from the caves of Crogham to prey upon mankind, led by one monstrous three-headed vulture whose foul breath withered the crops”.
