For many years, the Malibu Feed Bin heralded the arrival of Halloween with a display of pumpkins for sale. This year, the corner of Topanga Canyon Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway hosts only a utilitarian assortment of trailers used as temporary office space for the department of Water and Power, and a chainlink fence that encloses not a festive pumpkin patch but a motley assortment of heavy equipment and trucks. The Feed Bin Halloween pumpkin tradition, like so many things in our lives, was turned to dust on January 7, 2025 when the Palisades Fire swept away the Feed Bin and everything else in its path.
The people who bought pumpkins here will buy them somewhere else. In a few years, only old timers will remember. Still, Halloween is a resilient holiday. Its traditions, big and small, change all of the time. Before people carved pumpkins they used turnips. This year, plastic jack-o-lanterns and a host of other oddments, from ten-foot-tall skeletons, to life-sized animatronic zombies, are anticipated to generate as much as 13 billion dollars in revenue.
If a cultural anthropologist in the far future, sifting through the detritus of 21st century America came upon a cache of Halloween costumes, they might easily come away with the impression that this holiday involved the veneration of movie and comic book characters. When did Halloween start to incorporate a pantheon of cartoon princesses, mutant reptiles, movie monsters, and super heroes? And what did those things displace?
The origins of Halloween are surprisingly hard to pin down. Many believe that the deepest roots of Halloween connect to Samhain, an autumnal day of the dead in Ireland, Scotland, and throughout other parts of Celtic Britain, but other parts of Europe also have traditions that link the season between the autumn harvest and midwinter with the dead. Some of the elements that survive from these ancient observances include bonfires, lanterns, masks, and offerings for the spirits of the dead.
Those ancient holy days were important enough to motivate the Catholic Church in the eighth century to establish its own holidays concerning the dead: All Saints Eve on October 31, the Feast of All Saints on November 1, and All Souls Day, on November 2. All Saints Eve, or All Hallow Tide—Hallowe’en—was intended to be a time to remember and honor saints, martyrs and all good Christian souls. The Octave, or week, of “Allhallowtide” ends with Saint Martin’s Day, on November 11, a feast day that takes place at the same time as another important pagan holiday, the one marked the start of winter in pre-Christian Rome.
The church didn’t succeed in replacing the older traditions but it did absorb some of them. Going door-to-door to beg for bread for the souls of the dead is the precursor of trick-or-treating but it is also thought to have its roots in the pre-Christian tradition of making offerings to the dead following harvest. This practice, now with a Christian aspect, was widespread throughout much of Europe from the medieval period right through the early twentieth century.
In parts of England children received soul cakes—flat, sweet biscuits flavored with spices, when spices were available. In Italy, small cakes or cookies called fave dei mort (beans of the dead), or ossa dei morti (bones of the dead) are distributed, a tradition that originated in Roman times. In Portugal, sweet yeast rolls called Pão-por-Deus (the bread of God) are baked and distributed, and in Spain, pan de ánimas (bread of souls) is made and blessed and left as offerings for the dead.
In Mexico, this tradition is present as pan de muerto (bread for the dead) but here the tradition melds Catholic practices with ancient Central American traditions that evolved long before the arrival of the Spanish.
The Halloween celebrated in America today was brought to this country by Irish and Scottish immigrants in the nineteenth century. It must have come as a shock to the puritanical inhabitants of New England, but the traditions eventually took root in even that stony and unyielding soil.
The Irish are credited with bringing the jack-o-lantern with them. Ireland has a long tradition of Halloween bonfires and carved turnip lanterns. Pumpkins, larger than turnips and already hollow inside, offered more scope for the imagination, but turnip lanterns remain part of St Martin’s Eve traditions throughout much of Europe, including Holland, Germany and Switzerland.
The Halloween tradition of pranks and misrule is documented in Scottish tradition in 1780, by poet John Mayne, who lamented that “fearfu’ pranks ensue,” but his contemporary, Robert Burns chronicles a very different kind of Halloween in his eponymous poem that describes courting couples celebrating the holiday with a bonfire and various divinatory games to tell the future. People still bob for apples at Halloween parties, although the fortune-telling aspect of the game has been largely forgotten.
It’s not clear when costumes became part of Halloween, but masked mummers are traditional at New Year’s throughout Great Britain, and masked and costumed dancers are traditionally part of New Year and Carnival festivities throughout Europe. Some are humorous, others terrifying, most have their origins in ancient, pre-Christian history.
Some researchers suggest Halloween costumes may also derive in part from the Dance Macabre, a sort of skeleton-themed rave party that was all the rage in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Europe, when the Black Death was a reminder that death was waiting for everyone. Echos of the Dance Macabre can be found right now in every big box store, among the plastic skeletons.
Jack-o-lanterns, candy, costumes and pranks were the highlight of Halloween in Los Angeles in the early years of the twentieth century. The October 30, 1910 Los Angeles Herald featured letters from readers recounting the previous year’s Halloween activities. They describe carving jack-o-lanterns, making ghost costumes out of sheets to scare the neighbors, and cooking homemade candy like taffy. One young writer recounts getting into trouble for dressing like a ghost and chasing the younger children in her neighborhood, other accounts involve “pranks” that today would probably result in vandalism and assault and battery charges: removing gates and signs and tripping people with rope strung across the sidewalk.
That was before the advent of the motion picture industry. In just a few years, Hollywood was going to reshape Halloween.
Dracula, the most famous literary vampire, was created by Irish novelist Bram Stoker in 1897. In 1922, German filmmaker F. W. Murnau brought Dracula to life in his unauthorized adaptation of the novel Nosferatu. The audience was mesmerized. The most iconic depiction of the famous vampire was created by actor Bela Lugosi for the 1927 authorized stage production of the novel, and immortalized on screen in 1931, in the film directed by Tod Browning. Lugosi’s cape, widow’s peak and pointy teeth have been turning up on neighborhood trick-or-treaters ever since, but Dracula wasn’t the first to make the jump from film persona to Halloween costume. Cartoon characters Popeye and Olive Oyl, Mickey Mouse and Little Orphan Annie were among the first commercially available costumes.
In the 1950s, when TV first became ubiquitous, a costume maker named Ben Cooper began buying licenses for popular shows in addition to movie and comic book character licenses and mass produced cheap, plastic costumes that consisted of a mask and a plastic tunic.
For more than forty years children sweated their way through Halloween festivities dressed as Batman, Spiderman, Darth Vader, and even the eternally popular Dracula. Some of Cooper’s more daring efforts included the monster from Alien and President Richard Nixon. Cooper entered the Halloween costume market in the 1930s. By the 1960s, the company had cornered the market on Halloween costumes in the US. In 1988 the Ben Cooper Company filed for bankruptcy, but movie and TV characters, comic book heroes and villains, Disney princesses, and pop stars remained popular.
This year, when a dozen KPop Demon Hunters and Labubus appear on the doorstep demanding treats, their presence isn’t just a nod to pop culture, or even to the traditions of the modern American version of Halloween. It is part of a tradition that extends deep into the past, a modern dance macabre, a reminder not that death is imminent but that fame is fleeting—except perhaps for Dracula, the count really has proved to be immortal. Beneath the plastic skeletons and disposable costumes there is still an echo of otherness in the lengthening shadows and growing cold: a time when the world of the living comes closer to that of the dead.
This is the season where, in the words of writer Ray Bradbury, “the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and mid-nights stay.”
