The Disney-Adultification of Halloween

Desire Digest 0010: why Halloween (and maybe every holiday) feels different now

Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.

Photo by Steven Weeks on Unsplash

Happy Halloween. It’s probably a bit of a loss to publish on a Friday afternoon in general, nevermind one that’s also a holiday. But I was inspired today! So, here I am. I love this holiday. I am overwhelmed by the holiday. I still don’t know exactly what I’m going to wear tonight on this holiday. Anyway…

The problem with nostalgia is that it makes an unreliable narrator out of you. Was Halloween always like this? Did it always feel this way? Or is that feeling of disappointment the natural shift of no longer being a child? Are your memories of how it all was before even correct?

The past is incandescent; the present is LED. Nothing feels as warm, as inviting, as natural as it did “before.” Halloween has become a prominent focal point for this, as have holidays writ large. I feel it myself, wondering why the excitement for a season I’ve always loved isn’t rising to what it used to be. I buy what few decorations I can justify storing in my apartment, play spooky movies in the background, even do Halloween-y paint-by-numbers crafts. I am still enjoying myself, to be sure, but something about it just isn’t the same.

Part of this feeling surely just is me: I’m older, and Halloween isn’t targeted toward me anymore. Of course the kid stuff isn’t as fun for me now that I’m not a kid and also don’t have any of my own yet. But that isn’t exactly what’s going on: everywhere are opportunities for me, a childless adult, to engage in the record-breaking $13.1 billion Halloween economy, from elaborate parties to endless TJMaxx merchandise hitting the shelves in early August to curated horror movies on every streaming platform. And lately, it has felt more and more that Halloween has little to do with children, at all.

The Disney Adult Effect

There are obviously many events that are still geared to children alone. Trick or treating (don’t even get me started on trunk or treating) is still exclusively for them. As they should be! But still, there are spaces — like Disney — that are targeted toward children on paper yet finding plenty of money from adults without them.

I actually went to Disney World in October, surrounded by children and adults alike. Little did I feel that the experience was in any way spoiled by the much-maligned “Disney Adult,” i.e. usually childless adults who spend much of their time and money on the juvenile fantasy universe of Disney. I’ve always had sympathy for the Disney Adult — its an expansive ecosystem of rich narrative and myth, centered in a beautiful, walkable physical space. It is an accessible world of meaning at a time when people are searching for it.

My sense, though, is that Halloween is being given the same treatment. We’re adopting something for kids because we similarly crave meaning and revelry and tradition. What works about Disney is that it is a rigidly, carefully designed thing, from its merchandise to its films to its parks. There is no element of it that hasn’t been intentionally crafted from the top down. Halloween, for better or worse, does not have this. And so instead, Halloween-inclined adults look for this structure elsewhere — and they’ve found it in horror.

The Commercial Horror Element

Please allow me to sound like Joyce Carol Oates for a minute.

Horror is now the fastest rising film genre, with its market share having doubled between 2013 and 2023. One of the top-selling franchises at Spirit Halloween this year is the Terrifier trilogy. These movies feature Art the Clown, a sadistic supernatural killer who continuously finds new and unique ways to torture and slaughter his victims. In one, he breaks and tears a young woman’s limbs, removes her scalp and cuts out chunks of flesh for her back before dousing her open wounds in bleach and salt, all while she’s still alive. In another, he sodomizes a man with a chainsaw. I only know these details by reading about them and having watched select clips — even as someone whose favorite genre is horror, these movies are far too much for me to witness at feature length. And yet, all this extreme gore has made Art the Clown not only a cult horror icon but a mainstream figure in Halloween.

Sure, you might have been seeing kids dressed as Michael Myers for decades now, maybe even the occasional Jigsaw from the Saw franchise. In all likelihood, kids who are engaging with these characters on Halloween haven’t even seen the movies themselves. Terrifier is nevertheless something of a different beast — what began as an ultra low-budget indie gross-out has become an international phenomenon. Terrifier 3 beat out Joker 2 its opening week, and is moreover the first unrated film to hit the top of the North American box office. Its popularity represents a new shift in American appetites for shock. There’s been a century-plus of horror movies that appalled their audiences upon release that often now feel quaint in their scares. Maybe it is just the natural progression of fear that we’d have to see someone hung up by their ankles and split in half in order to get our kicks. Whatever, it’s fine.

The bigger issue here is that it doesn’t quite feel that there’s a balance between this extreme adult version of Halloween and a version that is a bit more kid friendly. Because again, Halloween is not all that much for kids anymore, probably because there aren’t even that many kids in general, anymore. In their absence, though, we’re all still looking for ways to hold on to some semblance of community and tradition to mark the passage of time. Without the actual ties that hold community and tradition together, though, our only outlet is the commercialized version available to us in stores. As Justin Lee wrote in his essay “The Death of Halloween” in the Catholic publication First Things, “Like spiders slurping the innards of a beetle, disenchantment and commercialization have bled it of meaning. And yet the carapace remains. Halloween’s history is a signal case of the process by which Western institutions descend into decadence.”

Now I don’t wish to attach quite so much meaning to it all. When I asked my readers yesterday via the subscriber chat what their feelings of Halloween were this year, many said it is better than ever.

“Not sure if it’s just my neighborhood but I feel like Halloween is WAY bigger than when I was a kid,” wrote Liam. “Not to be all ‘back in my day’ (I’m 26), but I seriously only ever remember getting dressed up on October 31st, maybe the 29th or 30th ONLY if Halloween fell on the weekend and I wanted to wear my costume to school.

I’ve noticed a lot more events leading up to the actual holiday where parents are bringing their kids in costume to ‘trick or treat’ block parties days before. Is this a Millennial thing? I can’t imagine my Gen X parents doing this for me and my siblings as kids - and they loved Halloween, block party, decor, big candy bars and all!”

Still just as many were less optimistic. But one reader, BD, put it well: “I rarely trust people’s negative feelings towards holidays since they so often seem to be a mirror for their own lives. If they think the magic is gone then they’ve lost it themselves. If they think it’s commercial then they’ve stopped putting in effort and started buying it.”

And Of Course, The Costumes

Costumes are still fun. There’s only so much gross-out terror the majority of us are capable of accomplishing through makeup, and so even the scariest of costumes still tends to lean camp. I was listening to a recent episode of Stavvy’s World (lol) where he and guest Ryan Sickler were discussing whether Halloween costumes have always been so sexy, and whether that is a bastardization of the holiday. I do not actually think costumes have gotten any sluttier in the last twenty years, at least. The lingerie-esque cat or nurse or angel costume has been on the shelves for as long as I remember. The market for these types of costumes is undoubtedly bigger in its selection, but I’m not sure it is any wider of a phenomenon or any more explicit than it’s been in recent memory.

But the costume world is more memeified. Dressing up as something that is only legible through a picture on Twitter is a meme unto itself. “I hate gay Halloween, what do you mean you’re…” has trended for the last several years, with (I guess mainly gay?) people ironically outdoing each other for how niche and online their costume can be. Sorry to be a downer about everything, but it is yet another example of how deeply many of us live for our phones. The costume has no purpose other than a post on your Instagram story. It’s not as though a non-meme costume escapes this, either: if it weren’t for the opportunity to show off our participation, plenty of people would probably just as soon stay in. And I’m no different! I will be posting my costume on social media tonight!

On a semi-tangential note, Grindr was kind enough to share some data on gay Halloween with me. According to their data, 61 percent of 1,100 respondents expect to have sex tonight. 41 percent would like their date to keep their costume on in the act. Meanwhile, 82 percent said they’ve been aroused by the thrill of a scare.

So, again, Halloween is certainly more adult. But, at very least, some of us are making the best of it.