Why Are We So Eager for Halloween to Arrive?
Halloween seems to arrive earlier every year. The more interesting question is why so many of us are happy to let it.
By Jack Malacat
By late summer, the first signs are already creeping in. Plastic skeletons appear in stores and horror movies resurface in streaming queues while the weather still feels stubbornly like summer. Every year somebody complains that Halloween is starting too early, and they may have a point. What’s harder to dismiss is how relieved a lot of people seem when it begins.
October 31 itself lasts only a few hours, yet people spend weeks building toward it. They put the decorations up in September and start the horror movies long before anyone needs a costume. Whatever they’re looking forward to seems to live in the season around the holiday, the stretch of time when ordinary life is allowed to look and feel a little different.
Part of that difference is permission to play. Children get plenty of room for costumes and make-believe, but adulthood gradually narrows how much of that is acceptable. The urge itself doesn’t seem to go anywhere. The psychologist René Proyer has proposed a model of adult playfulness with four distinct forms. One of them, which he calls whimsical playfulness, describes people who notice and enjoy unusual things, which is close to a portrait of the neighbor with a graveyard on the front lawn. Halloween gives that impulse an unusually public stage. For a few weeks, the graveyard and the vampire costume require no explanation, and the odd little worlds we built as kids become acceptable again.
Adulthood also teaches us which interests are easier to keep private. A fascination with death and the macabre can still make people uneasy outside the right setting, even though it’s far from rare. Coltan Scrivner, a behavioral scientist who developed a scale for measuring morbid curiosity, has said that most people who take it land somewhere in the moderate range. The pull toward dangerous or disturbing subjects is common, and people mostly differ in degree. Halloween changes the setting around that curiosity. The same skull that might seem morbid in March becomes seasonal decor in October, and the person drawn to darker subjects all year finds the culture meeting them halfway for once.
For a few weeks, that produces an odd kind of equality. The longtime collector of oddities and the neighbor buying a first plastic skeleton end up speaking the same visual language, and someone who watches horror year-round is sitting through the same movies as someone who only bothers in October. Nobody has to explain why they’re there.
For one season, weirdness loses some of its social cost.
Researchers noticed costumes doing this kind of social work decades ago. Between 1978 and 1982, Kimberly Miller and her colleagues surveyed more than 1,200 students at two colleges about Halloween. They found that dressing in costume was tied to how the students saw their own identity and the roles they felt free to play. The permission wasn’t evenly distributed, though. Women in the sample were less likely than men to say their costume gave them a new identity or let them play a different role, which suggests that the freedom to step outside your usual self may depend partly on who you are. Those surveys are more than forty years old, and it would be interesting to know whether the gap has narrowed.
What a costume does to the person wearing it is also harder to predict than it sounds. In a 2020 field experiment, a team of economists gave trick-or-treaters a simple honesty game. When children were reminded of their costumes, the ones dressed as heroes lied more and the ones dressed as villains lied less. The researchers offered two possible explanations: the heroes may have felt they had moral credit to spend, or the villains may have felt watched. These were children, and it would be a stretch to read much into it about adults. It does complicate the tidy idea that a costume just releases whatever its wearer was holding back.
Seen in that light, seasonal creep looks like an attempt to stretch the window. A small 2024 pilot study by Dina Smith-Glaviana and Delaney Shields, based on 62 survey responses, points in the same direction. Its participants described the calendar as something that limited or expanded how openly they could show their enthusiasm for Halloween through what they wore. The authors connected this to earlier research showing that people choose subtler forms of dress where self-expression is more restricted. If the calendar decides how much enthusiasm is acceptable, moving the season earlier buys more weeks in which ordinary expectations loosen enough to make room for parts of ourselves that spend most of the year tucked away.
The odder part is how many adults seem to need a designated season before they feel free to be playful or a little morbid without apologizing for it. If we’re this eager to get there, ordinary life may leave less room for those parts of us than we like to admit. Halloween gives them a month in the open. The rest of the year, we ask them to behave.
About the Author
Jack Malacat is the creator of Venom Haus and the editor of The Venom Haus Archives, a one-man publication made possible with the help of AI. When he isn’t designing games or dreaming up new products, he’s here, chasing questions about the darker side of being human. He thinks the internet has enough AI slop, and he wants to show what these tools can do in the right hands, with the sources to back it up.
Sources and Further Reading
René T. Proyer, “A New Structural Model for the Study of Adult Playfulness: Assessment and Exploration of an Understudied Individual Differences Variable,” Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 108, 2017, pp. 113–122.
Proposes a model of adult playfulness with four components (other-directed, lighthearted, intellectual, and whimsical) and a questionnaire for measuring them. It is a useful starting point for anyone curious about playfulness as a lasting trait in grown-ups.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886916311886
Coltan Scrivner, “The Psychology of Morbid Curiosity: Development and Initial Validation of the Morbid Curiosity Scale,” Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 183, 2021, article 111139.
Introduces a 24-item scale for measuring morbid curiosity and examines how the trait relates to personality. It treats an interest in dangerous or disturbing subjects as an ordinary individual difference worth studying in its own right.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886921005183
Coltan Scrivner, interviewed by Kim Mills, Speaking of Psychology, American Psychological Association.
A conversation about why people are drawn to horror, true crime, and other dark subjects. Scrivner discusses his research and argues that morbid curiosity is far more ordinary than it is often assumed to be.
https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/morbid-curiosity
Kimberly A. Miller, Cynthia R. Jasper, and Donald R. Hill, “Costume and the Perception of Identity and Role,” Perceptual and Motor Skills, vol. 72, no. 3, 1991, pp. 807–813.
A survey of 1,253 college students at two schools, conducted between 1978 and 1982. It found significant associations between wearing a Halloween costume and how students perceived their identity and the roles available to them, with notable differences between men and women.
https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.1991.72.3.807
Dina Smith-Glaviana and Delaney Shields, “Fashion Countdown to Halloween: A Study of Dress Practices within Halloween Consumer Culture,” International Textile and Apparel Association Annual Conference Proceedings, vol. 80, no. 1, 2024.
An exploratory pilot study based on 62 survey responses about when people begin wearing subtle and explicit Halloween fashion. The authors suggest that timing deserves study as part of the social context shaping how people present themselves.
https://doi.org/10.31274/itaa.17484
Shanshan Zhang, Matthew Gomies, Narek Bejanyan, Zhou Fang, Jason Justo, Li-Hsin Lin, Rainita Narender, and Joshua Tasoff, “Trick for a Treat: The Effect of Costume, Identity, and Peers on Norm Violations,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, vol. 179, 2020, pp. 460–474.
A field experiment with trick-or-treaters testing whether costumes change honesty. Its most surprising result is that reminding children of their costumes made heroes lie more and villains lie less, a reminder that what a costume does to its wearer is less predictable than it looks.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2020.09.004