NPR: Boo! Halloween Makes My Kid Cry

Boo! Halloween Makes My Kid Cry

Photos by Tricia McKinney

For the past couple of weeks, I've been trying to articulate something that both my husband and I had noticed--that Halloween decorations are much scarier and more disgusting than the ones we remember from childhood. It's not so much that we're squeamish. But our young daughter is so freaked out by the gory zombie our next-door neighbors put by their front door that we now avoid walking that way. And I am becoming well-practiced in the art of diversion whenever we drive by one well-decorated lawn.

But I've been searching for evidence that it's not just oversensitivity on my daughter's part, experts to tell me there's a real trend here, that people are increasingly going for gore in their front yards just like they're going for really disgusting, twisted horror films like the Saw series. I called the National Retail Federation and a spokesperson told me that Americans are spending more on Halloween displays and putting them up for a longer period of time than ever before, but he couldn't provide any figures on the sales of gory displays versus your garden variety happy skeleton and friendly-looking spider ones.

Now the Washington Post has published the very story I've been looking for.

In it, one expert links the new goriness trend back to the 1978 slasher flick Halloween, saying "Until that movie, Halloween was never associated with violence in such a huge way. It cemented a relationship that hadn't existed before." I'm not sure I buy that entirely--the holiday has always been all about the dead. But then again, I've seen a lot of Michael Myers costumes over the years, followed by Jason hockey masks, then Freddy Krueger razor gloves, then the Scream killer masks, and so on and so on and so on, so it does make sense that eventually all the gore would spill over onto people's front lawns. Literally.

Also hitting close to home: a child development expert quoted in the article saying, "Scary and gory images can cause a good deal of distress in young children, particularly those who are already somewhat anxious." But I already figured that out last year when my then three-year-old daughter had a complete meltdown while we were trick-or-treating on one particularly over-decorated block.

Now I'm hunting for a new article, one full of parenting tips to help me navigate my imaginative little kid through the increasingly lengthy, increasingly gory Halloween season.

Tricia McKinney

1:45 PM ET | 10-25-2007 | permalink

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