I was not at home this year to witness the annual cultural festival we have come to call Halloween. Hence I was not treated to the sight of places like Derry overrun by thousands of people blind drunk and dressed up mainly as Elvis. The choice of Elvis has always struck me as problematic. True, not all of his musical output was top drawer but most of it was well short of horrific. And the Elvis option also seems somewhat lazy when there are truly horrific and scary monsters out there in the form of Margaret Thatcher, Sarah Palin and George Bush.
The choice of Elvis suggests that we don't really want to be scared just dress up for a while as someone else and behave in a way not normally associated with us. This gives a lie to the recent research reported in a range of newspapers that women have become the prominent consumers of horror and appear to want a more vicious form of horror movie than we have been accustomed to. Now this might just be like the stereotype of taking drugs so the more you see the more you want to go further but it must at least mean that more women than men are watching horror. (I presume by the way that this is unmarried women since those who are married will have more than enough horror to do them.)
The world splits itself I believe into those who like comedy and those who like horror although in the case of those 1930s Dracula type films or Ross/Brandt broadcasts the dividing line becomes somewhat blurred. And those who like comedy are happy to see someone slip on a banana skin provided they get up again and brush themselves down and go about their business. The horror freaks want them to fall on the banana skin but then they need them to fall onto a spike on the road while being run over by an eight-wheel truck as their four-year old daughter looks on in suitable traumatic fashion.
And unfortunately this is what has happened to Halloween. It has become more comedy than horror. This was brought home to me by the fact that on October 31 this year I was working in Africa. Now most African states do a good line in masks – most of them pretty scary and sinister – and they understand the idea that how one looks and sounds can have a major impact on outsiders. So it was something of a shock to find my hotel door being knocked by a group of children who invited me to 'trick or treat'.
My initial instinct was to want to sit them down and explain the dangers of American cultural imperialism but it was quickly apparent that they were more interested in food or money and had hence already bought into the American dream. Suffice to say that the sight of a small group of barely clothed children with no shoes going around doors asking for trick or treat was a less than edifying spectacle.
It also coincided with an argument I had with a friend of roughly my own age a few days earlier who insisted that when she was young she also had gone trick or treating. I do not think this is possible since the Americanism has only infiltrated since the USA overran our broadcasting system and children started talking about taking the trash out or informing us when asked how they are feeling that they are 'good' rather than 'feeling well thank you'.
And this is not just about nostalgia since times were not actually better then contrary to what most people think. It is about the fact that Halloween is probably the only cultural phenomenon other than Riverdance (Heaven help us!!) that Ireland has given the rest of the world and so we ought to be making sure it is not stolen from us. If anybody is going to make money from this horror business then it ought to be us. I had the good fortune to visit the Ballycolman Community Centre in Strabane to see their take on Halloween and they had it exactly right. The whole adult community had spent three months turning the centre into a truly scary maze and they were spending the entire week dressed up as real monsters scaring the pants off the young people from the area. A sort of community building through fright.
So I shall look forward to next year with the hope that I will once again find a coin in a pie, nearly drown dunking for fruit, break teeth on toffee apples and never see an Elvis. And if I am really lucky I'll be terrified some dark night, as only an old man can be, by a female expert in horror.
