Halloween, for me, will always be the smell of a turnip burning from the inside. I carried mine around on a piece of string, with a candle in it that slowly charred the flesh, and that smell is Halloween in a way a pumpkin never will be. I don't remember pumpkins at all in the UK in the 80s and 90s. We had turnips, and whatever costume you could manage, which was mainly black bin bags and Sellotape. Plastic witch fingers if you were lucky, and those glow-in-the-dark vampire teeth that rubbed your gums so raw the blood wasn't always fake.
Now every October the shops fill up with plastic skeletons and pumpkins with cheerful faces, and it strikes me that Halloween has gone the same way as Disney's fairy tales. All the shapes are still there. The witch, the bones, the lantern in the dark. But most of the meaning has been sanded off.
Which is odd, when you think about where it comes from. Halloween grew out of Samhain, the old Gaelic festival at the end of the harvest, when the year turned towards winter and the boundary between this world and the other one was said to be at its thinnest. People left food out for the dead, and carved lanterns, out of turnips, to keep away whatever might be wandering about. So my charred turnip on a string was actually a lot closer to the real thing than I realised at the time.
I wrote a while ago about how fairy tales were softened over time, and how much I think we lost when the endings were made happy. What I've been thinking about since is where all that darkness actually went. Because it didn't disappear. I think a lot of it ended up in horror.
I should say I've only really got into horror films recently, and I'm not good at them. I'm a screamer, much to the amusement of my partner, who now goes looking for films specifically to make me jump. Half the time I end up watching him watching the film rather than watching it myself. But even as a scaredy cat, I've noticed how many of the ones that really get under your skin go straight back to folklore.
The Blair Witch Project is still one of the scariest films I can think of, and you never actually see the witch. That's the point. It's a few people lost in the woods, some stick figures, some noises in the dark, and your own imagination does the rest. Which is exactly how the old stories worked. Nobody ever needed to describe what was in the forest. They just told you not to go in.
The Babadook does something similar. I'd assumed it came from Australian folklore, but the monster was actually invented for the film. It feels so much like it belongs to an old tale that it's easy to think otherwise. It starts as a creature in a children's picture book, and it turns into something much more uncomfortable, a story about grief and about a mother who is struggling. The monster is frightening, but what's really frightening is how worn down she is.
Then there's The Witch, set in seventeenth-century New England, which plays almost like a fairy tale told by people who were genuinely afraid of the woods, and The Wicker Man, which is still one of the strangest films ever made. The scariest things in all of these aren't really monsters. They're isolation, grief, the wrong bargain, the people you thought you could trust, and whatever your imagination puts in the gaps.
The Sea Witch. View the original.
When I painted the Little Mermaid series I went back to Hans Christian Andersen's original, and the sea witch in it is genuinely horrible. She lives in a house built from the white bones of shipwrecked people, surrounded by polyps that grab anything that comes near. There's nothing cute about her at all. And yet she isn't exactly the villain either. She tells the little mermaid the truth about what the bargain will cost. It's the mermaid who decides to pay it.
Double Edged Sword, the moment the bargain is made. View the original.
Which brings me to something I keep coming back to. Why are so many of the monsters women? Folklore is full of women who were turned into something terrible, often for reasons that look a lot like grief or rage or just being inconvenient. Lamia, in Greek myth, was a queen whose children were taken from her, and she became the thing that frightened other people's children at night. That's a horror story, but it's also a story about a mother.
Lamia. View the original.
And then there's the hag, the crone, the witch. She's almost always an older woman, past childbearing, living on her own, knowing things she shouldn't. A lot of the women actually accused of witchcraft fitted that description too. So I do wonder whether some of this is the patriarchy, if you want to call it that, quietly villainising women once they stop being young and useful in the ways they're expected to be. Menopausal women as hags. Wise women as dangerous ones. I don't think it's quite that simple, because the crone in older traditions could be powerful and respected as well as feared. But it's hard not to notice who ends up in the gingerbread house, and who gets burned at the end.
Some of the folklore that feels most like horror isn't even a story, it's a habit. Plenty of people still say good morning to a lone magpie, or count them under their breath. One for sorrow, two for joy. It's a little ritual for managing bad luck that most of us do half-jokingly, and it has survived for centuries. My painting One for Sorrow puts a white-eyed witch and a magpie together, joined by a chain of gold leaf, the bird and the woman bound up in the same bit of superstition.
One for Sorrow. View the original.
And then there's Morana, the Slavic goddess of winter and death. In parts of Eastern Europe people still make a straw figure of her at the end of winter and burn it or throw it into a river, to send the cold season away. It's the kind of scene that would fit straight into a folk horror film, but for the people doing it, it's just spring. I painted her in October a few years ago, as the leaves were coming down. It was a piece about the seasons changing, which is maybe what a lot of this so-called scary stuff is really about: the year turning, and the things we have to let go of.
Morana. View the original.
So I don't really mind the plastic skeletons. They're fun, and Halloween is allowed to be fun. I had my bin bag and my bleeding gums, after all. But I do think it's worth remembering that underneath all of it is something quite old and quite serious. A time of year for thinking about the dark, about the people we've lost, and about the stories we tell to make those things bearable. Horror films seem to have worked that out. I'm not sure the shops have. And I'll probably still be watching it all from behind my hands.
If you're marking Samhain this year and want something a bit quieter than a pumpkin, I've made a small printable remembrance kit using One for Sorrow and The Moth. It's on my Etsy shop, along with the rest of my folklore work.