Halloween by Murray Leeder

Author:Murray Leeder
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004020, Performing Arts/Film & Video/Guides & Reviews, PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

Conflating all pre-Christian religious practices with Satanism in a manner typical of the American religious right, Robertson indicates that Halloween is a space of danger, and that danger is precisely located in children dressing up and trying on different identities. The timing corresponded perfectly with paranoia stoked by deaths earlier in the month related to cyanide-tainted Tylenol capsules. Numerous jurisdictions banned trick or treating that year or imposed strict curfews, and candy sales fell by 20 per cent (Rogers, 2002: 20).

The influence of Halloween on the behaviour of children also fell under scrutiny. In 1974, a psychological experiment was done with school children showing that aggressive behaviour increased substantially when Halloween costumes were worn. Run by Scott C. Fraser, it involved having children playing games, some of which required aggression and some of which did not, both of which resulted in tokens that could be exchanged for gifts at the end of the party. The children played both while wearing costumes and without them. The researchers found that, ‘Aggression increased significantly as soon as the costumes were worn, more than doubling from the initial base level average. When the costumes were removed, aggression dropped well below the initial base rate’ (Zimbardo, 2004: 30). Even more interestingly, it was reported that, when costumed, the children ceased to care about winning the tokens, even though aggressive behaviour cost them rewards: ‘aggression had negative instrumental consequences on winning tokens…but that costs did not matter when the children were anonymous in their costumes’ (ibid.). The object of this experiment was to study the effect of anonymity on children’s aggression, and the Halloween regalia served merely as an opportunity to organically place the children in conditions of anonymity. One wonders, however, if the Halloween tradition presented a variable the experimenters did not consider. Were these fascinating results a consequence solely of anonymity itself, or rather a kind of anonymity specific to Halloween? It is a tantalising question – did the children act more aggressively because they wore costumes, or because they wore Halloween costumes? Halloween is a time ‘when children may play with identity, learning that they can use the mask as the facade of an alternative self’ (Paul, 2004: 321), so might it not be the case that the children in Fraser’s experiment were able to displace their aggressive behaviour on to alternate social personas that are licensed to act differently due to the holiday?

As much as masking is associated with anonymity, it surely reveals something at the same time as it conceals. Halloween is often constructed as a rare time when the anger and discontentment of children, and indeed their capacity for violence, may be demonstrated. This is the role played by Halloween in Vincente Minnelli’s classic musical Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), in which the Halloween sequence subtly works to complicate the film’s cosy and anodyne treatment of early-twentieth century middle class family life. Tootie Smith (Margaret O’Brien), the archetypical rascally younger sister with a morbid streak – she likes to

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