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Halloween in modern, western society is a grisly yet anticipated spectacle. It's a spectacle because different communities, groups and individuals celebrate it differently. Since the nineties, people have relinquished aged beliefs about the supposed 'Satanism' of modern Halloween.

Why Halloween?

Why do people celebrate Halloween, anyway? If we are to look at the Christian belief systems of today (we speak of many because the Christian religion is split into many sects and groups), the most feared component of the whole 'deal' is still death.

All the negative forces associated with living a human life like sickness, death, hunger and war all experience confluence in Halloween. The fear of these things might take different forms, but nonetheless, it's a way for people to take control of these elements without really touching them.

Costumes and horror parties

This is the reason why people often watch scary Hollywood releases during the Halloween season, and why children wear costumes in school parties. It's a way for people to confront seemingly uncontrollable forces, to make these forces less frightening.

By wearing costumes of ghouls, ghosts and historical personalities (generals, submarine commanders, firefighters) reality is turned on its head and rendered more human, no matter how inconsistent the inversion seems to be.

Hollywood movies

Movies like the Chainsaw Texas Massacre, Saw, Saw II and Autopsy all play with the idea of people going beyond the pale of the normal to explore what it would be like to kill and to evade capture.

For some reason, the appearance of Hollywood versions of what is frightening and what should be feared has had little effect on how people generally celebrate Halloween.

So what was the effect of Hollywood on people? Unfortunately, it seems that Hollywood has had a numbing effect on people. People simply no longer care what they see; that's why the most recent horror flicks focus more on gore to lead people out of their seeming passivity in the face of death and horror.

And the kids?

How do kids appreciate death, ghosts and the world beyond our world? For individuals who are not yet teenagers, or who have not yet experienced personal loss, death or horror, Halloween appears to be a purely superficial celebration.

Unlike the Yuletide season, which is often associated with warmth and family, Halloween seems to be that 'spark' near the end of the year when people were allowed to be keener to the unseen than normal.

It is in this period of the year that younger children ask, "are there really ghosts?" The answer to this question varies from culture to culture; and the suspicion that there are ghosts comes from the celebration of Halloween itself. Why celebrate something if it's not real?

In the end, the celebration of Halloween becomes an inverted mirror to Christianity itself. Everything that people don't know, or haven't seen, or can't see or understand within the world of Christianity is somehow explained by celebrations like Halloween. The phenomena are many and the explanations are a bit muddled.

Nevertheless, it's still a way of taking stock of what cannot be explained fully by dominant conceptions of life, death and what lies between.