Halloween is a crass American import – I’ll never indulge it

From the villages of Powys to the townhouses of Kensington, the world around us is quickly turning orange and black. Even though Halloween comes at the end of the month, many postcodes (some seemingly en masse) decide to start decorating their streets and houses before September has properly been put to rest. Traditionally – and certainly for as long as I can remember – the biggest celebration of the season was always Bonfire Night, 5 November, when we celebrated the fact that Guy Fawkes was unsuccessful in blowing up King James. Even though it was an extraordinary public denunciation of Catholicism, it was still a very British tradition, and one that increasingly seems marginalised because of Halloween. Personally, I still love going to firework displays, love seeing Catherine Wheels lighting up our neighbourhood and watching young kids playing – wide-eyed and full of wonder – with sparklers. But good luck trying to find a public bonfire these days, as most people seem far happier draping their door frames or front lawns in synthetic cobwebs and oversized bats. Like many, I have come to dislike Halloween, annoyed at the creepy and creeping way it has invaded our lives, an American import that is now almost as popular over here as it is over there. The figures bear this out. In a survey carried out in March by the market researcher IGD, 36 per cent of people said they planned to celebrate Halloween this year, a 10 per cent rise on 2025. The Avon Valley Adventure Park near Bath told the BBC that Halloween activities now generate around a third of the site’s annual income. Its owner, Doug Douglas, said in terms of sales, it’s even surpassed Christmas. David Gaze, who runs the Chaplins fancy dress shop in Bristol, said more people now celebrate Halloween than New Year’s Eve (although I still see enough people dressing up as drunken imbeciles). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this activity is largely driven by the generation for whom Halloween horror movies are more significant than Guy Fawkes. A YouGov poll from last year said 10 per cent of people aged 18-24 spend between £100 and £200 on Halloween, rather than two per cent of those aged 45-54. I find this horrific in both sense of the word. Halloween is a celebration of the dead, and yet it’s become a collective fashion freak show, with everyone from tiny kids to overgrown adults dressing up as Marvel characters, cartoons or TV celebrities, complete with accessorised breasts (are you Lily Munster, Morticia Addams or Kim Kardashian?), stovepipe hats and gargantuan teeth (have you come as Dracula, Edward Scissorhands or Nick Cave?) and increasingly sophisticated face masks. Some friends of mine start planning the following year’s celebrations before the current one has even finished, carefully commissioning extravagant outfits and trying to imagine even more novel ways to present devils on horseback as severed fingers. Shorts For the entire month of October, large swathes of the country look like an American imperialist theme park, with smug, overdressed middle-class kids roaming the streets begging for money and sweets, and adults who should know better spending more money on their personal outfits and celebrations than they do at Christmas. And it is so unbelievably competitive, as every Yummy Mummy from Fulham to Wandsworth attempts to outdo their neighbours. Residents of Phillimore Gardens, near High Street Kensington, say they spend more than £2,000 a year on Halloween decorations (for reference, the average cost of a funeral is now approximately double that). A few weeks ago, I walked down a street in Notting Hill that looked as though it was a movie set. It even had a selection of ghoulish floodlights, throwing spooky shapes onto the pavement and casting scary shadows. Halloween has started to affect other parts of life, too, and other parts of the calendar. So many things have been infected by mission creep, from extravagances like the Met Gala to horror films and pub culture. The Met Gala was already a pretty ludicrous event, but in the last few years it has started to resemble a mad kind of fancy-dress hen party, with fashion designers, influencers and celebrities dressing up in increasingly stupid outfits. If aliens decided to land in midtown Manhattan, rather than in the wilds of Nevada (like they usually do), and if they rashly decided to gatecrash the Met Gala, I wouldn’t be surprised if they immediately ran back to their spaceships as fast as their little green legs could carry them. Many of outfits on display at the Met Gala these days look as though they were created by a modern reincarnation of Victor Frankenstein (or at the very least, an opportunist costumier with their tongue firmly in their cheek), determined to make the famous look as ridiculous as possible. And succeeding. The same goes for modern horror movies, too, which now all look as though they were made simply in order to be released on 31 October. Even better if the actors look like Johnny Depp or Linda Blair. Or the creepy kid in The Omen. Perhaps the most egregious example of Halloween’s attempts to co-opt British culture is the pub takeover, where you’re not allowed to go for a quiet pint of Butty Bach unless you look like one of the victims from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Friday the 13th. “You coming for a drink, Dave?” “Sure, hold on, I’ve just got to strap myself into my Hannibal Lecter outfit. You haven’t seen my jumpsuit anywhere, have you?” Me, I’ve never done Halloween. I haven’t even worn a bedsheet and a pair of Ray-Bans. Never even been to a Halloween party. I mean, why would I? I was never a goth so why would I want to dress up as a member of Siouxsie and the Banshees? But maybe you do. If you’re a fan and you’re still looking for somewhere to celebrate Halloween, then why not opt for the K-Pop Halloween Special in Tenby on the night itself. Apparently, “K-Pop Superstars” is the ultimate K-Pop tribute show, featuring four “incredible” performers, “dazzling” choreography, “sparkling” costumes and “non-stop” hits from BTS, Blackpink, Seventeen, K-Pop Demon Hunters and more. If I’m not pretending to be dead, I might even go myself. There is, however, a silver lining to this omniscient orange and black cloud. As Donald Trump has become many people’s favourite bête noire, for the last couple of years he’s been something of a popular Halloween villain, with some of the more adventurous among us becoming increasingly experimental in how they portray him. Some simply wear a lurid plastic Trump mask as they traipse along the streets, some attempt to approximate his girth, and others wrap themselves in an elongated necktie before encasing themselves in one of those mobile coffins. Saliently, because of his rather unyielding tangerine hue, Trump’s face has also become a modern iteration of the pumpkin lantern. All you have to do is gouge out the eyes and stick a tealight in the cavity between the ears. In Kensington this year, I think you’ll see a few Andy Burnhams, too.