Time to take back the night

It’s Halloween and I for one am having no trouble at all finding things to be scared about. Admittedly, I tend to flip out over things like fruit suspended in Jell-O, men with comb-overs or a new Madonna movie. But this year there’s plenty of actual scary stuff to satisfy the appetite for fear lurking in even the most well-balanced among us.

Not scared yet? You obviously skipped the front section of this newspaper and its accounts of mad bombers, concealed snipers and creative accountants. Compared with the house of horrors in hard news, the cartoon ghouls and fun-house goblins back here in Calendar are so many fluffy puppies. With war looming, terrorists striking and the stock market quaking, a holiday based on fear feels if not frivolous, then at least redundant. You might expect, then, that Halloween would be waning, that sober heads would be prevailing, that we’d be shying away from gruesome masquerades and frivolous spectacles.

Quite the opposite. Talk to party organizers, costume makers and those who sell candy, pumpkins and those lawn displays designed to scare the pants off neighborhood children and you find that people are reveling in Halloween with as much enthusiasm and abandon as ever.

Halloween spending is expected to hit $6.9 billion this year -- $2 billion of that on candy alone, according to the National Retail Federation. In Southern California, more than 350,000 revelers are expected at the West Hollywood Halloween Carnaval, while turnstiles are spinning at the five local theme parks offering fright fests. Halloween fever is especially acute in Southern California, a region that rarely passes up the chance to show off, dress up and go to extremes. Exhibit A: One Irvine mail-order company is busy marketing such items as an 11-foot-tall, $35,000 ogre that will greet your trick-or-treaters with a terrifying growl and thundering fart.

Beyond the obvious question of why anyone would pay the price of a tricked-out Volvo to stink up the front porch, the thing that’s puzzling is more basic: Why are so many of us compelled to whoop it up during such uncertain times? The appeal to kids is obvious, one best summarized in a two-word directive: Get candy. But what about the grown-ups? What do we get out of Halloween?

For most of us, the appeal is all about escapism. On this one night, all of us can act like kids, act out secret fantasies and shed our everyday selves. This annual license to bend rules of propriety has been the heart of the holiday since North Americans began marking the day 100 or so years ago. And although the holiday has changed dramatically since then -- for one thing, kids today are no longer encouraged to go out and smash windows as they once were -- Halloween still works mainly as a mechanism to release whatever we normally keep pent up.

“People want to have fun and be silly,” says Michael Kern, an actor, activist and coordinator of the Carnaval costume party, which has grown from a mostly gay event to become the center ring of the Los Angeles area’s Halloween circus.

The impulse to primp, party and parade may even be heightened by the sort of free-floating anxiety brought on by reports of terrorism, recession and random violence. Last year, seven weeks after the World Trade Center attacks, an estimated 50,000 more people showed up for the annual street festival than had attended the year before. This year, in the aftermath of a series of attacks on gay men that has left West Hollywood stunned, an even bigger crowd is expected.

“Tragedy and terrorism are nothing new to the gay community,” Kern says. “And we’ve learned the value of responding in force with frivolity and silliness. It’s how we survive.”

Elsewhere, of course, the holiday is less about platform shoes and feather boas than flesh-eating zombies and knife-wielding maniacs. For most, Halloween is an opportunity to scream our heads off at the Multiplex, freak show or haunted house. That’s a whole lot of hollering, representing a reservoir of fear born out of something far deeper than the brief shock of being startled by so many simulated homicides.

The real source of those screams is the everyday fear we all experience being alive in a world of death, disease, public speaking and dentistry. We’re all afraid, year round and deep down. The question is, what do we do with that fear? Do we bury it in our guts and let it harden into bitterness, spite or an intense desire to throttle that idiot swerving in traffic while chatting on his cell phone? As we drift off to sleep, do we curl up in a fetal position and quietly blubber it away?

Given the alternatives, maybe it’s not such a bad thing that so many of us dress up our fear in crazy costumes, splatter it with stage blood and turn it into a moneymaking spectacle. You might even call that patriotic.

That was definitely a take-home message from Halloween 2001. With the shock of the World Trade Center attack still fresh, Halloween revelry was a lot less gory but no less enthusiastic. In Greenwich Village, a few blocks from the still-smoldering ruins of ground zero, the annual street fair was recast as a celebration of “Phoenix Rising From the Ashes.” All across the country, after fears of anthrax-laced lollipops and shopping mall bombings led some to suggest a suspension of trick-or-treating, Halloween’s defenders came out in full force. Kids shelved their Spider-Man masks in favor of firefighter helmets, sales of Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty outfits boomed, and calls to repeal Halloween were considered tantamount to admitting defeat to the terrorists. “They can mess up the Postal Service,” the governor of Maine declared, “but they’d better stay away from trick-or-treating.”

“People repossessed Halloween as an American institution,” says historian Nick Rogers, whose book “Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night” was published this month by Oxford University Press. “Of course, Halloween has never been endorsed that way -- it’s not an official government holiday. But the response last year shows how much it does mean. It’s the one night a year when people can flout political correctness and let off steam.”

Although some revelers held back last year, it feels absolutely right to go all out now, says Andrew Cosby, creator of UPN’s “Haunted” and a self-proclaimed “total Halloween geek.”

In years past, Cosby has dressed as a robot made of scraps from Home Depot, a mutant plant that oozed glow-in-the-dark fluid and a Ghostbuster armed with a fully functional proton pack. (I have no idea what that is, but Cosby sounded so excited describing it, it must do something really cool.) He took a post-9/11 breather last year, but this week he’s the host of a costume party to premiere his latest creation: an exact replica of a bionic Bigfoot costume that first appeared in 1976 on ABC’s superhero series “The Six Million Dollar Man,” and returned three or four more times over the run of the series. He’s even created an accessory only a mechanical Sasquatch could love: a Styrofoam boulder.

“I go way overboard,” he says. “I love having a costume that makes people say, ‘Oh my God, how much time did you spend on that?’ ”

Cosby’s handcrafted creations are positively subtle compared with a new breed of contraptions that make your precious little jack-o’-lantern look plain pathetic. Irvine mail-order company Smarthome, which normally sells gadgets like light dimmers and surveillance cameras, this year is rushing to fill orders from a new catalog of “Extreme Halloween” items, according to the company’s marketing vice president, Matt Dean. Among the products are a Car Thru Wall prop that simulates “a deadly accident” (cost: $4,999) and a life-size Attack Alligator that lunges and snaps at unsuspecting trick-or-treaters (cost: $13,999.99).

Although it’s tempting to sneer at anyone who would buy an Attack Alligator, few of us could resist stopping by the homes of those who do. I’d steer clear of the simulated car crash, however, a little too much reality, thanks very much. So are, for that matter, most of the menacing or violent costumes and props that pop up at this time of year.

At Hollywood Toys & Costumes, the first thing you see when you enter is a floor-to-ceiling tunnel lined with rubber masks molded into every imaginable mutation, mutilation and injury. Security guard Jimmy Donner says kids often erupt in crying fits when they spot the display of scars, scowls and warts. But then a funny thing happens. “Those same kids go running around looking for the most gruesome costume they can find,” he says.

That same jittery air is a thick fog over Knott’s Scary Farm, where visitors pay $42 each to witness a bloody parade of impalements, decapitations and even a close-up disembowelment. This ranks on my personal list of Things I’d Like to Do somewhere between a trip to the DMV and an appointment with the proctologist, but I’m apparently part of a freakish minority. Attendance tops 25,000 on the nights before Halloween, and park officials claim that 4.6 million people have submitted themselves since the event began 30 years ago.

The patriotic observance of 2001 was only the latest shift, Rogers says, in a holiday that has been in flux since the turn of the century, when North Americans first imported the Irish and Scottish celebration of All Hallows Eve (which itself was a hodgepodge of ancient pagan customs and Christian observances of All Souls’ Day). At first, Rogers says, Halloween was mainly an opportunity for boys to engage in what was widely viewed as healthy mischief; it was common, Rogers says, for boys to celebrate by derailing streetcars, opening up fire hydrants and tipping over outhouses. The practice of trick-or-treating took off in the 1940s essentially as a way to mollify the marauders with candy, he says. There’s a debate about who created it, Rogers says, but it was part of a larger effort to tone down the raucousness -- the U.S. Senate even considered changing the name of the holiday to Youth Honor Day and having adolescents pledge to behave themselves.

The name change died, but the effort worked, recasting a night of pranks and destruction into an occasion when normal rules of order are reversed, with children making demands and adults acting like children. And while crowds thinned during 1970s tampering scares (amplified by urban myths of razor blades in apples and angel dust in candy bars), trick-or-treating remains the centerpiece of the holiday. Ask anyone about Halloween and most often you’ll hear a story about some childhood adventure -- sometimes scary, sometimes humiliating, always memorable.

For me, the mere mention of Halloween instantly evokes a memory of being shoved to the sidewalk and having my bag snatched by a kid in a full Smurf costume. (But that was the fiercest, most muscular Smurf you ever saw.) My wife has the scariest Halloween memory of all: Her mother dressed her in billowy pants, a gold vest and handfuls of gaudy jewelry, then sent her off to a Beverly Hills costume parade with instructions to tell everyone she was a Bulgarian. She still carries the scars.

For an adult, it’s hard to appreciate the childhood thrill and shock of Halloween. A reminder of this primal appeal came five years ago when we took some out-of-town friends to a haunted house held by a group of local art pranksters called the Cacophony Society. Our friends were visiting from their home near Sonoma, where they share an idyllic country life collecting vintage wine and growing organic vegetables.

Stepping inside, I thought we had just made a horrible mistake. There was a fellow in a blood-drenched butcher’s smock who laughed hysterically while taking swipes at a side of meat with a chainsaw. On the walls were pages torn from fat-fetish porn magazines. Exiting the room involved negotiating our way through a curtain of beef tongues.

It got weirder from there. By the time it was over, we’d been flashed by a busty woman in a Mother Teresa costume, been offered pieces of Spam sushi and witnessed a guy in surgical blues use a vacuum cleaner to remove the guts from a man on a gurney.

Back on the sidewalk outside, my friend the earth mother looked up from a pattern of blood splattered on her blouse and smiled brightly. “That sure was more interesting than the Getty Center,” she said.

I can’t explain why all of us weren’t more horrified, but I think it had to do with the fact that, in the end, no matter what’s going on in the world, we’re all just a little stranger, less tasteful and just plain badder on Halloween. So I say bring it on, all of it, from ax-wielding zombies to Attack Alligators.

That Smurf who stole my candy, though -- that was just wrong.