All language subtitles for The Frightening Pagan History of Halloween ¦ Full Special (English)

[music playing]

NARRATOR: It's coming.

There's no escape.

On Halloween, the veil between this world and the next

will lift, and then all hell breaks loose.

People have been scaring each other for as long

as there's been a Halloween, but how long is that?

Where does it come from, and why do we put on disguises

and carve Jack o' lanterns?

To indulge our darkest fears, unlocking the secrets

of Halloween means discovering how it all

began thousands of years ago.

So lock the doors, dim the lights,

and don't be scared as we dig up the real story of Halloween.

[thunder rumbles]

How can you describe Halloween without sounding insane?

Masked children come to our doors and threaten us.

In return, we give them candy.

But why?

Why do we carve faces into fruit then light candles inside them,

and why do we adorn our homes with coffins and tombstones?

The truth is, we take great pleasure in scaring ourselves

to death.

Halloween is about being someone else.

It's about getting outside your own skin,

and I think we tolerate it because we know it's one night.

NARRATOR: This impulse to confront our fears of life

and of death and make sport of them, it's ancient,

and so are our treasured Halloween traditions.

When did Halloween begin?

Its ancient origins go back to the old Celtic calendar,

and the old Celtic tribes divided the year

between a light half and a dark half

and Samhain, their ancient holiday,

was a precursor to our Halloween that was

the beginning of the dark half.

NARRATOR: Thousands of years ago,

the Celts, one of Europe's early tribes,

celebrated their Samhain harvest festival

with bonfires on the night of October 31st

to welcome the new year.

For ancient peoples, harvest was a matter of life and death.

If crops fail, people starved.

Death was always close.

STEVEN GILLON: The harvest time could be a scary time.

The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting longer.

There may or may not be enough food

to last through the winter, so I think

this is where this nightmarish quality possibly comes from.

It's a bit of a warning.

It's going to get cold and dark, gather together, come home,

and don't send anybody out alone in the dark.

NARRATOR: But the Celts believe there was even more to Samhain.

What marks Samhain in this transition from light to dark

was that time and space became permeable, flexible,

and so that spirits that, not only of the dead,

but of the past or of other realities

could wander into our reality, and humans could wander out

and get lost in the other world as well.

The veil between life and death was at its thinnest,

and the living and the dead could commingle,

and that's at the root of all the Halloween celebrations.

NARRATOR: Stories persist of people on Samhain

night getting trapped in the other world

and of the dead appearing among the living.

But the truth is, we know precious little about Samhain.

We can only guess that their bonfires likely

drew one familiar Halloween icon, a thing familiar,

yet frightening to many.

The bat.

Before there was electricity, the only way you would have

seen a bat would have been by the firelight, and in fact,

you probably would have seen it around the fire

because bats eat insects and insects are attracted

to the light.

NARRATOR: Bats come out at night,

and nighttime was scary time.

So if bats are the best and baddest part of your Halloween,

you might just credit ancient people like the Celts,

and they weren't the only ancient culture

with creepy traditions.

Others also looked to their dead.

Many, many cultures set aside a day or a couple of days

to ritually celebrate and recognize the dead.

An interesting thing is that you find a lot of them

about the same time period, especially

in agricultural societies, because if you think about it,

in the spring things come up out of the ground,

they're very green.

You harvest in the middle of the summer, and towards the fall

and when it gets towards winter, things die.

NARRATOR: But how did these ancient traditions

survive into our modern era?

In Western culture, they were preserved by, of all people,

Christians.

In a bizarre twist of history, as Christianity spread,

it adopted and reimagined Pagan folk ways

rather than try to stamp them out.

This made it easier to convert Pagans.

A key Pagan festival destined to get a Christian makeover

was Lemuria, when celebrants placated the dead, culminating

on May 13th.

Of all the different days that they have in the Roman calendar

to celebrate the dead, it was the spookiest.

So on the Lemuria, what are called the larvae, the ghosts

of the departed, would come up and haunt people.

NARRATOR: To quell the dead, Pagan Romans

poured milk onto their graves or offered them little cakes,

but the church co-opted Lemuria in 609 AD,

turning May 13th into All Saints Day,

a day to honor the most holy of dead Christians.

Setting aside this day was an attempt

to Christianize this very Pagan festival,

and yet, at the same time, what it did was it

kept a lot of the same things going.

The Christianized version of Lemuria

was such a success that church leaders made a decision that

eventually gave rise to Halloween.

They moved all saints, or Hallows day, to November 1st

to drain the life out of Pagan Samhain.

Because Samhain fell on the night of October 31st

before All Hallows day on November 1st,

people started calling someone All Hallows evening,

the evening before All Hallows Day.

This shortened into All Hallows Even,

and finally, into Halloween.

And then, to be safe, the church went one step further,

adding a holiday to honor, not just saints,

but everyday Christians.

November 2nd became All Souls Day, a church sanctioned

holiday to honor the departed.

This is real important for Halloween,

because this is where Halloween gets its association

with dead souls, death, and the supernatural again.

NARRATOR: So thank the church for inspiring the creepy

essentials of Halloween, but wait, there's more.

The church also helped establish the tradition

of trick or treating--

sort of.

It all started during the Middle Ages on All Souls

Day when priests told Christians to pray for souls trapped

between heaven and hell in another world they called

purgatory.

Purgatory was not a pleasant place.

It's not hell, it's not as bad as hell is,

but it's still probably pretty fiery.

Souls are suffering there.

Luckily, there is something that you could do.

You could offer up prayers for them.

NARRATOR: How did souls get out of purgatory?

According to the church, if enough prayers were offered,

a soul would fly up into heaven.

This led to a medieval custom that

bears more than a striking resemblance

to our modern trick or treat.

Children would go souling, begging

for soul cakes, spiced cakes filled with raisins.

In return for these treats, the beggars

would offer up prayers for souls trapped in purgatory.

While this forerunner to trick or treat

became a preoccupation for medieval Christians,

so did another future essential of Halloween.

Witches.

It made perfect sense for people in medieval times

to believe that there were demons and witches,

and if there were demons in which they were

responsible for bad things in the world,

it made sense that you hunt them down and you kill them.

That was their world view.

NARRATOR: A witch panic in the 16th century

helped establish the look of the character that,

for many, epitomizes Halloween.

Almost always women, witches were

seen as in league with Satan.

They were probably the healers who had cures and folklore

and passed down orally through generations, and at some point,

that becomes very suspicious for whatever reason

to the religious people around them,

and a lot of the symbols that were associated

with these women, who probably often lived alone,

may have been somewhat eccentric, of course,

end up becoming associated with witches.

NARRATOR: Over time, as more and more women were accused

of witchcraft, their practical kitchen tools

acquired sinister dimensions and became model Halloween icons.

Even something as mundane as a broom

became an instrument of evil, as well as handy transportation.

Another accessory in every witches lair

was perfect for brewing devilish potions, the caldron.

Caldrons become very popular.

Again, it was something that every household

had in medieval ages.

It was your basic cooking implement.

NARRATOR: The pointed witch's hat

was a variation on a medieval country woman's hat,

and of course, the mysterious lurking killer

with the glowing eyes, the cat.

It's not surprising that cats are associated with witches

and Halloween.

Cats can be a little enigmatic.

You don't really know what's going on in their head.

Also, they used to hang out near the hearth and by the brooms,

so they became associated with witchcraft and with Halloween.

NARRATOR: Black cats and witches, graveyards and ghosts.

The spooky elements of America's great Gothic holiday

were taking shape.

These ghoulish icons would soon make their way

to the new world, where they'd helped create the extravaganza

we know today.

Bonfires, worshipping the dead, begging for treats.

The elements of our modern Halloween

were haunting Europe at the dawn of the 17th century,

but they hadn't yet collected into a spooky, secular holiday.

History would now start consolidating them

and give life to an odd celebration of death.

It's a death that makes this holiday.

Whether it's the threat of death if there is a bad harvest.

The end of one order or the beginning of a new.

This idea of the endless cycle of life and death and renewal

is part of a lot of holidays, not just Halloween.

NARRATOR: This period saw the continued influence of one

of Halloween's most colorful icons, the mask.

It often appeared in tandem with another Halloween tradition.

Destructiveness.

Rowdy beggars at All Hallows Eve also

guzzled their share of alcohol and demands for food and drink

became more threatening.

Masks helped hide their identities.

These boundaries between the living and the dead

and between society's rules and anarchy

were tested as day turned to night on All Hallows' Eve.

In Britain, they got into some very particular forms that

involved dressing in costumes and going house

to house to present these little plays,

and at the end of the performance,

they would be rewarded with food and sometimes money.

NARRATOR: Was this trick or treat?

Not quite, but the resemblance was there.

In 17th century England, many of these customs

survived only in rural areas, but they would soon turn up

in the city streets, thanks to a prokaryotic terrorist

named Guy Fawkes.

On November 5th, 1605, Fawkes tried

to blow up London's house of lords

with 36 kegs of gunpowder.

Guy Fawkes was tried, found guilty, and hanged.

And according to legend, his body

was then drawn and quartered and the pieces

were thrown into a fire.

NARRATOR: The next year on the anniversary of the failed plot

and every year that followed, the children of London

mocked the memory of Guy Fawkes by causing chaos

in the streets, parading, begging, and building bonfires.

Today, all over England, this is called Guy Fawkes Day,

or bonfire night.

A Guy Fawkes Day fell on November 5th, which

is very close to Halloween, so a lot

of the energy that was focused on Halloween

shifted toward Guy Fawkes Day.

NARRATOR: While it wasn't our Halloween yet,

it had all the signs children and adults alike taking

advantage of the darkness and letting loose,

but would this Pagan form of celebration

make its way across the Atlantic to disrupt

the sanctuary of the new world?

Not if colonial Puritans had their way.

The Puritan worldview was very much informed by the Bible,

and in the Bible, you do find, not only god, but the devil,

demons, angels, the whole spread of supernatural beings.

This is really what their focus on.

Pernicious evil forces.

NARRATOR: For the Puritans of New England,

the supernatural was a dark, menacing force, not

a harmless superstition worthy of inspiring a holiday.

Despite their efforts to kill the Halloween tradition

before it took hold, there were a few Guy Fawkes celebrations

that made their way to the shores of America.

Other settlers tolerated or even embraced the traditions that

threatened the Puritans, and seeds

were planted for the holiday that would morph

into our American Halloween.

You find snippets here and there.

People celebrating or having a costume party or something,

but it's very difficult to actually pin

that to something we would call a capital H Halloween.

For example, there's an 1833 description of a Halloween, not

even so much a party, but just a small gathering where they told

ghost stories around a fire.

NARRATOR: But now, one more spooky standby.

The image of a spirit or ghost would

join witches and skeletons in a macabre Halloween dance.

By the mid 19th century, America was primed for a much darker

holiday.

Having endured four long years of civil war

that ended in 1865 with over a half million dead.

There were so many unclaimed, unknown dead bodies

that the Civil War left behind that this country was obsessed

with them, and mostly, it was that so many of these soldiers

died unknown.

We don't know what happened to them,

so there was a huge sense of they could come back.

Maybe they're not dead.

It makes perfect sense that people would tell more ghost

stories.

And the very first Halloween ghost stories

were about people coming back home.

NARRATOR: It's at this time that America's Halloween story

really begins.

After the Civil War when Scots and Irish immigrants

brought their rural, old world Halloween customs with them,

they helped to establish even more American Halloween

traditions.

For the Scots, it was a little bit of a scarier night.

Until fairly late, we're still talking about the appearance

of bogies on Halloween.

NARRATOR: Bogies, or Boogie Men, we're amorphous,

pestering ghosts that plagued children, hiding under beds

or tapping on windows or lurking by a gate or turnstile.

There was a belief that there was a bogie on every style,

which meant on Halloween night, you could cross any gate

and there might be something sitting there waiting

to get you.

NARRATOR: Halloween's signature symbol, the Jack o' lantern,

also began as a European tradition,

but the prototype wasn't carved from a pumpkin.

There is a great legend about a character named Jack

o' lantern.

And Jack was a troublemaker, but he was so bad he even

managed to get himself thrown out of hell, which is not

an easy thing to do.

But the devil did decide to have pity on him

and scooped up an ember from the fires of hell

and gave it to him.

So Jack takes the ember and he puts it inside a hollowed out

turnip, and he walks around and that becomes the legend of Jack

o' lantern.

NARRATOR: In one age old European practice,

children would carve their own Jack o' lantern out of turnips

and light them with candles.

The first reference we have in the United States to Jack

o' lantern comes from Nathaniel Hawthorne,

and he's writing in twice told tales and he's describing

someone's very tattered coat full of holes,

and when you hold it up to the light,

it shines like a Jack o' lantern would.

NARRATOR: Americans improved on the Jack o' lantern tradition.

They substituted big round pumpkins for the old world's

hard little turnips, and Halloween finally

had its trademark.

Certainly by the time of the Civil War,

the expressive possibilities of pumpkin carving

were very well known that ghostly shrunken skull was

the turn up in the old country had really

blossomed into something else.

NARRATOR: Pumpkins are generally harvested around Halloween,

and kids realized Jack o' lanterns could

be a pranksters best weapon on Halloween night.

Kids figured out this great thing they could do.

They could take a pumpkin and you could hollow it out,

and you put a candle on it, and then you take that pumpkin

and you put it on a stick and you put a sheet over it,

and you'd parade around you put it

in front of a window or something,

and it's really a pretty scary picture.

NARRATOR: Jack o' lanterns soon became the face of Halloween,

but Scots and Irish immigrants also brought with them the more

rambunctious, stone throwing, prank playing, Halloween

revelry to America.

And on Halloween night, at the dawn of the 20th century,

there was a whole dark world of trouble

just waiting for American boys.

Halloween had been on a dark and scary journey from its origins

with the Celts centuries ago.

In the Middle Ages, it became a Christian holiday

honoring the dead.

But by the 16th century, it was turning

into a rowdy, kids celebration, marked by begging and pranks.

By the 1800s, Halloween had even moved into cities and towns

across America.

But the ghastly face of Halloween

was reimagined in gruesome shades of orange and black

at the turn of the 20th century.

For the first time, artists of the era

brought together all things scary

and linked them to Halloween.

Skeletons and spider webs, Jack o' lanterns and bats.

They established the look of Halloween

that we still use today.

Among these icons are white sheeted ghosts.

The sheet that a ghost wears derives from the winding sheet,

the shroud that corpses were traditionally

wrapped in before burial.

NARRATOR: And Jack o' lanterns.

The big grin still connotes the rictus of a death's head,

as does the triangular nose hole,

and even when it seems kind of jolly,

death is still lurking there in the imagery.

NARRATOR: Horned devils came from medieval depictions

of Satan, and witches from witch hunting hysteria that

swept through Europe and Puritan America.

Witches became very popular in the early part

of the 20th century, which is why they naturally

became linked to Halloween.

There's actually a change in the way we perceive witches.

The witches in the 19th century were old, they had big noses,

and there were warts.

And the witches in the 20th century

are actually kind of attractive.

It makes Halloween just a little,

not only scary, but also a little naughty.

NARRATOR: But even as Halloween was dressing its old customs

in new costumes, it was also creating new traditions.

Bad ones.

Was Halloween in the early 20th century getting out of hand?

To the dismay of authorities and property owners,

the answer was yes.

There was whatever you could think of.

There was a bunch of mischief.

Back in those days, people had buggies.

The bigger kids would try to take a buggy

and put it up on a haystack and there's about a half a dozen

guys and they just push and push it up the haystack.

It was a lot of fun.

Oh, we never did anything that was really destructive.

Mostly tricks.

NARRATOR: But for others, those tricks were more destructive.

Pranks, usually committed by adolescent boys,

plagued cities like Chicago and Philadelphia.

By the 1920s, Halloween in America

was turning into a crisis.

Tricks on Halloween night were out of hand.

The destructive pranks went beyond just smashing pumpkins.

Kids would take bars of soap, and they'd put them

on the rails for street cars so that the street cars would

derail people would actually get hurt.

They would take the steps in front of people's doors

and move them so when people walked outside,

they would fall over and get hurt.

They would set fires.

They would throw stones through windows.

I mean, this is really destructive stuff.

NARRATOR: In rural communities, pranksters took wagons apart

and reassembled them on roofs.

They removed gates on farm fences

so that animals could escape.

This particular prank was so popular that in some places,

the night before Halloween was called gate night.

In other cities, it was mischief night, or even hell night.

Halloween pranks during the Great Depression

may have been in part a product of the desperation of the time.

An excuse for troublemaking, but there was already trouble

everywhere, and many communities couldn't

afford to feed their own, much less clean up destructive

messes.

LISA MORTON: The Halloween of 1933

was actually labeled black Halloween

in a lot of newspapers because of all of the destruction

that the cities incurred.

The kids were no longer just doing innocent silly things,

now they were smashing light bulbs,

they were setting fire to buildings,

they were smashing car windows.

NARRATOR: If Halloween were to survive,

it would have to change.

Schools and police departments and other civic groups

consciously and very actively promoted

the idea of taming Halloween.

And so they started to invent all sorts of things for kids

to do to divert them.

Town wide parties, costume contests, games,

everything that you can think of to get the kids away

from pulling tricks and into the light.

NARRATOR: Novelty companies like Dennison and Bystoll

helped out these civic efforts.

Dennison published a series of Halloween guides called "Bogie

Books" that suggested ways of turning Halloween from a prank

night into a party night.

Dennison was one of the first companies that

realized there was money to be made off on Halloween.

They started to put their own Halloween materials out

for retail sale in drugstores all over America.

NARRATOR: They also made masks and paper costumes.

This was a first.

It was the first time that costumes were specifically made

and marketed for Halloween.

Before that, costumes had all been homemade.

When I was a kid, there wasn't Halloween outfits

like you wear now.

So basically, you are your overalls or your jeans

or sloppy claws, but you didn't go downtown and buy

special outfit just for Halloween.

Just anything you know to make yourself a little conspicuous.

NARRATOR: Paper costumes were fancy and an improvement

on the homemade variety, but they had their drawbacks.

Unfortunately, a lot of that paper was flammable,

and I was surprised at how many newspaper clippings

I came across of costumes catching fire.

NARRATOR: Soon, other manufacturers

looking to tap into the kid market

for Halloween costumes began making more durable disguises.

Sears first box costumes came around 1930,

and then it went from there.

And the costumes came off of radio show characters

and the funny papers.

Costumes for parties, costumes for wild, town wide parties.

And for school parties and church parties,

Halloween was a big social occasion.

NARRATOR: Halloween parades also helped drag the holiday out

from the shadows and into the public arena.

Allentown, Pennsylvania may have had the first parade in 1905,

but others soon followed.

Toms River, New Jersey in 1919.

Anoka, Minnesota in 1920.

Anoka has held its parade every year since.

In fact, the city now bills itself the Halloween capital

of the world.

Each of these local efforts to tame Halloween worked,

to some extent, but what Halloween really needed

was a whole new tradition, and it would soon get one.

But this new tradition would prove

to be a variation on a very old Halloween theme.

Trick or treat.

That phrase still triggers cascades of candy

into plastic pumpkins and pillowcases across America

on the night of October 31st.

And though the custom goes back centuries,

the phrase, trick or treatment, is probably less than 100 years

old.

Trick or treatment is amazingly new.

People think trick or treat goes back for centuries,

and it doesn't.

Trick or treatment is actually less than eighty years old,

probably.

The term derives from pranking that was very

widespread and destructive in America in the 20th century,

and at some point, somebody came up with a brilliant idea

of buying off these pranksters.

NARRATOR: Homeowners bribed rowdy kids

with homemade treats, such as popcorn balls and candy apples

to avoid getting pranked or tricked.

In 1939, the phrase and the customer turned up in print.

Doris Hudson Moss published an article in American Home

magazine that talked about the success she had

having a Halloween open house for the kids

in her neighborhood.

She didn't get tricked, she gave them sweets, it all worked.

NARRATOR: With the new custom came new treats.

Not so much homemade goodies like popcorn balls,

now, kids got store bought, prepackaged candies.

Mars bars, Reese's Cups and good old Hershey's chocolate.

Candy finally killed the rowdy Halloween.

And now, the time was right for the reinvented holiday

to hit Hollywood.

[gibberish]

Hello, boys!

Trick or treat!

Thank you, Mr. Donald.

NARRATOR: Halloween was becoming a pop culture phenomenon.

A national festival attended by millions,

celebrating the joys of scavenging

for mass produced candy.

I loved Halloween when I was a kid.

I participated in, and I love the rituals of it.

I love the pranks of it.

I love the mischief of it.

I love going to houses and dressing up and getting candy,

and then there were parties, and it was just fantastic.

NARRATOR: Then, in 1966, Halloween found a home

where all pop culture ultimately goes, TV.

Halloween stature zoomed off the charts when America went trick

or treating with Charlie Brown.

The whole idea the great pumpkin of course,

came from the comic strip when Sparky Schulz decided that it

would be very funny if one of the kids

got his holidays mixed up, and so that's how Linus ends up

in the pumpkin patch every year.

Who are you writing to, Linus?

This is the time of year to write the great pumpkin.

On Halloween night, the great pumpkin

rises out of his pumpkin patch and flies

through the air with his bag of toys for all the children.

You must be crazy.

When are you going to stop believing in something that

isn't true?

When you stop believing in that fella with the red suit

and the white beard.

NARRATOR: Television, and America's most popular

comic strip had given Halloween its unofficial seal

of approval.

The holiday had never in its entire history

been so mainstream, but Halloween themed cartoons

aimed at kids were one thing, a movie for adults with Halloween

as its theme was another.

Nobody had ever tried it before.

That is until director John Carpenter took a stab at it

in 1978 with the classic "Halloween."

The idea of recalling my film "Halloween"

came from the distributor.

And when he said it, I thought, you know,

he's absolutely right.

There's never been really a Halloween themed film.

It's one of those eye openers.

Wow, why didn't I think of that years ago?

What a great idea.

NARRATOR: Carpenter's $325,000 film

would spawn a franchise grossing more than $500 million.

It broke new ground, elevating the horror film

from B movie status to respected genre

and completely by accident.

The film would also redefine our attitudes

about Halloween masks.

It started when the wardrobe budget forced the crew

to create a mask for the villain, Michael Myers,

for next to nothing.

The production designer ran up to Burt Wheeler's Magic Shop

on Hollywood Boulevard and bought this Captain Kirk

from Star Trek mask, which didn't look anything

like William Shatner, just this strange face, elongated face.

But it was spray painted and fixed up a little bit.

It was distorted, which is perfect.

It's kind of written that way in the script as wearing a face.

NARRATOR: The bargain basement mask and the villain behind it

soon became another Halloween icon.

Michael Myers, still, even though the original movie

came out in 1978, it still remains one of the most popular

Halloween characters of all time.

This idea of the mask as a stalker, menacing young people

at Halloween.

It shifted the focus of Halloween

away from ghosts and goblins to human villainy.

NARRATOR: But this nondescript mask did much more than that.

It helped to redefine the limits of what a Halloween mask could

be, and it ushered in a new face of Halloween.

One for a new Millennium.

For hundreds of years, masks and costumes

have been a way for partiers to disguise themselves.

And now, it's a multi-million dollar business.

One Halloween themed store, Burbank California's Halloween

Town is so popular it's open 12 months of the year,

satisfying customers need for disguise.

We've had this business for 10 years now,

and we really wanted to make it special so we decided to open

a year round permanent store with ultimate spooky shopping

environment it really puts people in the mood

to shop for Halloween.

NARRATOR: Halloween stuff is all over the store.

But the heart of Halloween town's business is masks.

We have dozens of masks.

We have the best zombies you can find.

The best clowns.

Masks and disguises have always

been great ways to let you off the hook in terms

of your behavior.

With an acting out kind of holiday like Halloween,

of course, it's perfect.

When I was a kid, I loved masks, but usually all

you can find at the local stores were crappy,

plastic flimsy masks that lost their shape,

but as time went on, they've really

evolved into an art form, where there's a lot of time spent

in the sculpting in the painting,

and now it's to the point where you

can get an expensive high end mask that almost rivals movie

quality.

NARRATOR: And Wayne Toth would know.

He's a special effects artist for major motion pictures.

We have a lot of customers that like higher end

stuff or high quality stuff, so we go out

of our way to get that.

We have high end costumes, fancy jackets,

and all kinds of accessories you really couldn't find anywhere

else.

We try and make it so, no matter what you're looking for,

you can find it here.

NARRATOR: Today's upscale masks and costumes

are a far cry from the generic devils, witches, skeletons,

and ghosts of the 1960s, but that's

the decade when the Halloween wardrobe began to change.

Hollywood started to influence what kids wore, transforming

them into their favorite TV and movie characters.

Today, that trend has escalated to an obsession.

Film franchises like "Nightmare on Elm Street," "Scream,"

and "Halloween" are inspiring growing legions of kids

to dress to kill.

To wear the mask of the killer the ghost of the skeleton

it gives a kid a sense of a lot of power and also of safety

because the monster can't get you if you are

the monster for that moment.

NARRATOR: Crazed killer masks are just

part of Halloween's evolving taste in costumes.

The only rule now is that there are no rules.

Masks take their inspiration from pop culture, religion,

politics, you name it, and a growing number of faces

behind them belongs, not to kids, but adults.

Halloween has become a huge adult activity,

and I don't think that was the case 50, 60 years ago.

But it's been, again, a specific day set aside where you can be

somebody that you normally aren't.

You can get behind a mask, you can wear clothes

you would never wear during the rest of the year,

and people enjoy it.

NARRATOR: Truth is, our 21st century Halloween

is as much a holiday for adults as it is a holiday for kids.

You get those children who are now grown up,

and they become very nostalgic for Halloween.

So Halloween shifts again, starts

to become more of an adult holiday.

NARRATOR: Halloween businesses now

cater to anyone who wants to get into the spirit of the holiday,

with parties and Halloween themed

venues such as haunted houses.

50 years ago, when you were too old to trick or treat,

you probably had to stay home and hand out candy.

There was nothing else for you to do.

Now, there is a vast and imaginative haunted house

industry just for you, and there's

something like 4,000 haunted houses in the United States

every year.

[screaming]

I loved haunted houses.

They fascinated me.

They terrified me as a kid.

NARRATOR: But haunted houses aren't the only place

to find adults getting out on Halloween.

In places like New York city's Greenwich Village Halloween

Parade and West Hollywood's Halloween Carnival,

the holiday takes a walk on the wild and naughty side.

Of course the gay Halloween parade

is now a big fixture in San Francisco and Los Angeles,

and of course, a big part of the New York, celebration.

But it's this idea of turning the world on its head

and being who you aren't or would like to be.

Again, it's that procurial, American obsession with self

transformation, and that's the thing, I think,

that really ignited Halloween in America.

NARRATOR: This sexually liberated Halloween sometimes

crosses the line from adults to adults only.

If you look at the costumes that are sold to adults

these days, the costumes for women

are all borderline prostitute costumes, you know?

The sexy nurse, the sexy maid, the sexy anything.

NARRATOR: Now, grown ups are taking it one step further.

They stock up on specially packaged Halloween novelty

candy and join their children going door to door on Halloween

night.

These trick or treaters of the 1970s and '80s

now seize the opportunity to relive their childhood

Halloween's, dressing in full costume,

supposedly to keep a watchful eye on their kids.

And just as Halloween has scared kids for years,

Halloween scares parents, too.

They fear sending their kids out unsupervised

into a hostile world full of poisoned candy and razor

blade riddled apples, but they really shouldn't be.

I grew up hearing about razor blades in apples myself,

and it's clearly what we would call a contemporary legend.

Another term as urban legend.

There is a great societal unease about this idea

that we're telling our kids to go take candy from strangers,

so there's a lot of stories about razor blades and candy

apples and these sorts of things, and parents every year

get very very worried about it.

Did razor blades and apples ever happen?

I believe there are a couple of cases,

but of course, you can ask, which came first?

The story or the actions.

NARRATOR: Razor blades in apples, Jack o' lanterns, soul

cakes.

They make up the legends, the texture of the Halloween

we know.

Today, Halloween wears many masks.

It's a day for adults to push their boundaries a little.

Clearly, a lot of women want to have a very sexy side

of them, and it's only on Halloween

that they bring it out, maybe, you know,

they could do a little more often.

NARRATOR: Yet, Halloween still remains the domain of kids.

When you're a kid, you had one night a year

where you were in charge.

You got to dress up, you got to be something that you usually

weren't, and you kind of even got

paid for the privilege of this.

It was an amazing holiday.

Halloween doesn't like to have its energies tamed.

You know, the rebellious aspect it's going to pop up somewhere.

NARRATOR: Look close enough, and you

will see that Halloween is a showcase of everything

the human race fears.

Through the centuries, we've learned

to live with what scares us most,

and now, on October the 31st, we turn our fears into fire.

So beware of haunted houses and creaking doors,

billowing sheets, and full moons,

and don't be surprised if a smiling Jack o' lantern wishes

you happy Halloween!

[laughter]