How Halloween Is Celebrated Today

By Benedict Fisher

Halloween in modern, western society is a grisly yet anticipated spectacle. It's a spectacle because different communities, groups and individuals celebrate it differently. Since the nineties, people have relinquished aged beliefs about the supposed 'Satanism' of modern Halloween.

Why Celebrate Halloween?

Why do people celebrate Halloween, anyway? If we are to look at the Christian belief systems of today (we speak of many because the Christian religion is split into many sects and groups), the most feared component of the whole 'deal' is still death.

All the negative forces associated with living a human life like sickness, death, hunger and war all experience confluence in Halloween. The fear of these things might take different forms, but nonetheless, it's a way for people to take control of these elements without really touching them.

Horror-themed Costumes And Parties

This is why people love dressing up as spooky creatures during parties and watching scary movies during Halloween. They love the idea of controlling the otherwise uncontrollable forces in life, making them more acceptable and less scary.

People wear costumes representing ghosts, witches, ghouls, zombies, and historical characters to twist reality for a single night, making the misunderstood very human and very fun. It doesn't seem to matter if the inversions don't make sense.

Hollywood movies

Movies like the Chainsaw Texas Massacre, Saw, Saw II and Autopsy all play with the idea of people going beyond the pale of the normal to explore what it would be like to kill and to evade capture.

Showing these Hollywood movies that center on human emotions such as fear and terror have little overall effect on how people celebrate Halloween.

Instead of influencing the people, Hollywood actually does the opposite -- it NUMBS them to the issues behind Halloween. People no longer seem to care what they watch on the movie screen. This is why most of today's horror movies deal with gore -- it's the easiest way to scare people and look at death more seriously.

And the kids?

With all these scary get-ups consisting of ghouls and ghosts, how do your kids appreciate what is beyond the world we're living in? Kids usually don't get to experience personal loss, death or even horror, which makes Halloween look like a superficial commemoration.

Where the Yuletide season celebrates warmth and family, Halloween is celebrated close to the year's end where people are more enthusiastic in commemorating the unseen than what is normal.

Halloween is that time of the year where children get to ask "Do ghosts really exist?" The diversity of how Halloween is celebrated in every culture is incredible. Suspicions arising about existence of ghosts originated from Halloween itself. So, the question goes: Why celebrate it if it does not even exist?

In the end, the celebration of Halloween becomes an inverted mirror to Christianity itself. Everything that people don't know, or haven't seen, or can't see or understand within the world of Christianity is somehow explained by celebrations like Halloween. The phenomena are many and the explanations are a bit muddled.

Thus, the celebration of Halloween is a way of celebrating what can't be explained by the general concept of life, death, and in between.