Primeval terror (since 1929)

The 1950s and early '60s were the Golden Age of trick or treating, but no sooner had the new tradition taken hold than commentators were bemoaning the loss of inventive tricking and condemning the soliciting of candy as "a rehearsal for consumership without a rationale," to quote one sociologist. Still, Halloween pranks never entirely vanished and that's not necessarily a good thing. Rogers, one of those academics who is always hoping to find something "transgressive" or "subversive" to laud, describes seasons of misrule as a time when "flagrant violations of community norms might be addressed" and "rough justice" meted out. A friend of mine who grew up in a racially mixed urban neighborhood in the 1970s testifies that his Halloween often involved a lot of roughness and precious little justice. Asked what he associates with the holiday -- which he hates -- he says, "Eggs. Eggs and fear."

It was really only in the 1960s and '70s that macabre stories and films became firmly attached to Halloween. Until then, for example, movie studios didn't make a point of releasing their horror or monster films around Oct. 31. Skal, whose book excels at outlining the popular blossoming of Halloween over the past 60 years, observes that "Frankenstein" premiered on Thanksgiving in 1931. By the early 1960s, Universal had learned the advantage of tying in their franchised characters -- Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the Mummy and the Wolf Man -- to Halloween, but the holiday itself didn't appear very often in films until John Carpenter's groundbreaking "Halloween" initiated the slasher film genre.

In the 1970s, the scary side of Halloween also reemerged with reports of candy tampering and widespread, media-fueled paranoia about razors in apples and other sadistic "tricks." These turned out to be urban legends. The sole documented fatality from candy-poisoning was an 8-year-old killed by his own father, who was trying to collect on a life insurance policy. Likewise, the rise of Halloween celebrations in America's gay districts, with their fantabulous costumes and sybaritic processions, were soon troubled by visits from belligerent gay bashers looking for their own sinister notion of a good time.

Both Rogers and Skal decry the recent taming of Halloween by such domestic mavens as Martha Stewart, whose television program and magazine each October are packed with recipes for spider-shaped cupcakes, instructions for crafting ghostly party decorations and tips on elaborately rigging out your ordinarily impeccable house as an equally impressive haunted mansion. Skal rails against Halloween Martha-style as a holiday "Perfectly Under Control," her monogrammed jack-o'-lantern an example of "boomerish narcissism" and "a pure embodiment of self-celebration with no connection whatsoever to any known form of communal holiday observance." The modern history of Halloween seems to swing back and forth this way, from charming fun to violent chaos. It's the most bipolar of all holidays.

The most original parts of Skal's book concern the history of haunted houses -- not the literally haunted kind, but the ones concocted to amuse one's friends and neighbors. Using an Angeleno horror movie buff named Bob Burns as an example, Skal traces the evolution of "yard haunters," the Halloween equivalent of those people who erect elaborate Christmas light displays. One Rochelle Santopaulo, who founded the Halloween Global Alliance and edits its magazine, Happy Halloween, says yard haunters are a cross-country folk-art phenomenon, but most of them had no idea that other Americans shared their peculiar passion until Santopaulo informed them they were part of a nationwide "movement."

Another sort of haunted house, the kind that invites paying customers to walk through a maze of spooky and grisly scenes, began in the 1970s as fund-raising devices for charities like the Jaycees and quickly spawned a profession. Who knew there was an entire trade magazine, Haunted Attraction, devoted to this subject? According to Skal, it's "a glossy quarterly magazine" with articles explaining how to convincingly simulate severed heads and ads offering "full haunted-house environments for resale," complete with such interior props as "Fireplace, Piano, Living Wall, Dancing Ghost, Canopy Bed with Body, Storm Window, Kitchen Cabinet, Stove, Refrigerator, Meat Locker, Dining Table with Chairs, Metal Cage, Boiler and Pipes, Lab Tables and Bodies, 8-foot Mechanical Spider, Sacrifice Table with Body, Volcano and Pneumatic Devil."

There's something about this practical list of bogus nightmares (I'd like to get a look at that "Living Wall") that strikes me as quintessentially Halloween. Armed with this kit, anyone can take an ordinary, new house and convert it into a scary, fake "old" house -- just as the sequels to the slasher film "Halloween" cobbled together a bunch of ersatz legends about Samhain to explain the murderous rampaging of its masked villain -- or, for that matter, as we disguise our suburban homes as "Tudor" cottages and decorate them with new furniture that's been "distressed" to make it look old, or buy new jeans deftly faded to make them look worn. Halloween looks ancient, primal even, despite its relative youth. And that may be the most American thing about it of all.

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