Halloween is satanic. (Just not for the reasons you think.)
Celebrating Halloween in your twenties is essentially participating in a night where all manifestation is permissible and self-idolatry reigns supreme. Halloween is “satanic” the same way that manifesting is “satanic”. Stay with me now. The yearly discourse around Halloween tends to be pretty repetitive. Halloween is certainly not Christian or, it as Christian as early Christian pagans were Christian. Make of that what you will. But when I think about the satanic quality of contemporary Halloween, and I’m talking specifically about Halloween for young, mostly childless adults because Halloween for children is actually much closer to the original Celtic festival of Samhain, I don’t actually think it’s that helpful to look at the historical context. Rather, I am reminded of another moment of discourse I saw a while ago on the platform formerly known as Twitter about “manifesting” from @RRR0BYN. “‘Manifesting’ is just asking demons for what you want and the wild thing is they will give it to you a lot of the time, especially if there’s some form of idolatry or worship being offered in exchange.’”
A costume is like a joke, in that there is always a grain of truth. And these days our Halloween costumes are becoming a little too true, a little too on the nose. In the wake of the rise of Kibbe typing, we’ve gotten good at channeling our bodies and our subconscious impulses into cinematic tropes, our cultural idols. On Halloween we open ourselves to these tropes, we tell ourselves there is a plot being written for us, we don’t ask by whom. We aren’t responsible, just characters in costume.
Like many other aspects of our culture, Halloween has become mostly for the girls and the gays. Straight guys have two options: appear to indulge in your shadow-self, dress as Patrick Bateman (and face absolute ridicule), or submit to your girlfriend’s Moonrise Kingdom couple’s costume. The real role of straight men on Halloween is as the temporary victim or star of the female fantasy of sexual triangulation. Outside of the realm of true coupling, single friends create pseudo relationships, in order to openly and acceptably play with the messy and taboo sexual dynamics that usually exist under the social surface. Halloween is a paradox, in which putting on a costume allows people to act with naked abandon. It’s a little more complicated than the classic Mean Girls “Halloween is the one night of the year where a girl can dress like a total slut” line, but only barely.
Girls will look for Betty to their Veronica, the Cassie to their Maddy. It’s all about Black Swan and Mulholland Drive. The call to mirror another woman has an inherently Sapphic quality. The blonde/brunette dichotomy, of course, enhances the appeal, as this dichotomy extends beyond actual hair color into a sort of quintessential feminine duality, an extension of the Madonna/Whore complex. Halloween ritualistically normalizes the opportunity for women to “innocently'' participate in this latent desire for triangulation, typically with a susceptible male victim, because– let’s face it– most men are susceptible to this kind of behavior. Men might not know it, but on Halloween they are all dressed as Archie. And while many women have participated in this kind of dynamic outside of Halloween, those who usually would not feel drawn into this realm of subtle manipulation, are more ready and willing. Even if it’s a little wrong, a little demonic, it’s permissible, it’s just a costume after all, a good excuse for some run-of-the-mill perversion.
Add a gay guy into the mix and you're looking at the James Franco to your Spring Breakers. And this too is a fitting role that openly acknowledges the true social function of a gay guy within a group of girls. He allows them to safely sexualize themselves, creating a protective layer between his gorgeous friends in neon bikini tops and creepy guys at the club. When you allow yourself a night (or a weekend) to openly acknowledge a power dynamic like this, the dynamic briefly intensifies, both men and women feel the presence of fear, see the reality in which their gender roles must still play out.
And thus, Halloween functions as a ritualistic outlet for our more socially unacceptable desires because it’s brief, negating any personal responsibility for the effects of our make-believe. The demons might give you what you want for the duration of Halloween, but ultimately we know that we cannot continue this self-idolatry. We do it on Halloween because we know we cannot expose ourselves and ask for what we shouldn’t for the rest of the year. We’re in our twenties after all. We barely even know what we actually want.
Juliette Jeffers is an essayist, poet, and lifestyle columnist for Delude Magazine.