The Psychology of Halloween

I needed a short break from politics, so I researched and made this video instead. I hope you like it. Almost everyone has some degree of morbid curiosity, and most people don’t want to admit it. We slow down at car accidents. We binge true crime podcasts. We watch horror movies that we know will keep us up at night. And every October, we turn an entire holiday into a celebration of death, fear, and disguise. The question isn’t whether we’re drawn to dark things. The question is why. In 2021, behavioral scientist Coltan Scrivner at the University of Chicago published a paper in the journal Personality and Individual Differences that introduced the first psychometric tool for measuring this trait. He called it the Morbid Curiosity Scale, a 24-item assessment designed to measure how drawn a person is to information about things that are dangerous, threatening, or related to death. What Scrivner found is that morbid curiosity isn’t rare, and it isn’t a disorder. It’s a normally distributed psychological trait, which means most people fall somewhere in the middle. Almost everyone has some degree of it. The people who binge true crime podcasts, slow down to look at car accidents, and watch horror movies on purpose aren’t broken. They’re normal. And Scrivner’s research suggests there’s an evolutionary reason for that. Scrivner identified four dimensions of morbid curiosity: curiosity about the minds of dangerous people, curiosity about the supernatural, curiosity about body violation, and curiosity about violence. Each one maps onto a category of threat that would have mattered to our ancestors. Paying attention to predators, understanding what dangerous people might do next, and learning about physical harm without having to experience it firsthand would have given early humans an advantage. The people who paid attention to threats survived. The ones who looked away didn’t. Morbid curiosity is leftover survival wiring that most of us still carry. Halloween activates every single one of those dimensions at once. Monsters and ghosts hit the supernatural dimension. Gore and horror movies hit body violation. Scary costumes and jump scares hit violence. Haunted houses are designed to trigger all four. The reason millions of people line up to experience it every October is that the brain is already wired to seek it out. Halloween didn’t create our fascination with death. It just gave it a date on the calendar. **Halloween vs. Día de los Muertos** One of the most revealing things about Halloween is what it looks like when you put it next to another culture’s version of the same thing. Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is celebrated in Mexico on November 1st and 2nd, just one day after Halloween. Both holidays exist at the same time of year. Both are built around death. Both involve costumes, decorations, and gatherings. And they solve the exact same problem in completely opposite ways. Halloween was born from fear. The Celts believed the dead were dangerous. They lit fires to keep the darkness back. They wore disguises so the spirits wouldn’t recognize them. They sacrificed animals hoping their gods would protect them through the winter. The entire structure of Samhain was built on the idea that the dead were a threat and the living needed to defend themselves. Día de los Muertos was born from love. Its roots trace back to pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, including the Aztecs and Maya, who viewed death not as an ending but as a continuation. When the Spanish arrived and brought Catholicism, those indigenous traditions blended with All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day into what the holiday is today. Families build altars called ofrendas and decorate them with marigolds, candles, food, and photographs of the people they’ve lost. They visit cemeteries, clean the graves, and sit with their dead. They tell stories about them. They cook their favorite meals. Sugar skulls and painted skeleton faces aren’t meant to frighten anyone. They’re meant to normalize death and celebrate the people who lived. Halloween hides from the dead. Día de los Muertos sits down to dinner with them. Both holidays are doing the same psychological work. They’re giving people a structured way to process the reality that everyone they love, and they themselves, will die. The difference is in the approach. Western cultures, and the Celtic tradition that became Halloween, tend to treat death as the enemy. Something to ward off, distract yourself from, and avoid thinking about for as long as possible. Mesoamerican cultures, and the traditions that became Día de los Muertos, tend to treat death as part of the family. Something to acknowledge, accept, and carry with you. Neither approach is wrong. But the contrast is striking. One culture builds a holiday around running from death. The other builds a holiday around sitting with it. And both cultures have kept doing it for thousands of years because the need is the same. The only thing that changes is whether you face it with fear or with flowers. **Horror makes you stronger** The script covers Marc Malmdorf Andersen’s recreational fear research and Margee Kerr’s work on how scary experiences boost confidence. But there’s a finding that goes even further, and it came from one of the most unexpected laboratories in recent psychology: the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, while the world was shutting down, Scrivner and his colleagues at the University of Chicago noticed something strange. Horror fans were reporting lower levels of psychological distress during the early months of the pandemic than people who didn’t watch horror. They weren’t just coping. They were coping better. Scrivner’s research found that people who regularly watched horror movies reported feeling more prepared for the pandemic and showed greater psychological resilience than people who avoided scary content. And fans of pandemic-specific movies like Contagion showed even higher levels of preparedness. They had already rehearsed the scenario in their heads. When it actually happened, their brains had a framework for it. This supports a theory that researchers in the field have been building for years: horror works as threat simulation. When you watch a scary movie or walk through a haunted house, your brain isn’t just getting a dopamine hit. It’s running a practice drill. It’s learning what fear feels like, how your body responds, and what it takes to get through it. The more you practice, the better you get at handling real fear when it actually shows up in your life. This reframes Halloween in a way that most people have never considered. Every haunted house, every horror movie, every moment of chosen fear is the brain rehearsing for something it hopes will never happen but knows it needs to be ready for. The Celts understood this instinctively when they built Samhain around the fear of death. They weren’t just performing rituals for the spirits. They were preparing their own minds for the darkest season of the year, when death was not symbolic but real. **The digital mask** The script covers Edward Diener’s 1976 Halloween study, where kids in costumes and groups stole candy at dramatically higher rates than kids who were alone and identifiable. The concept is deindividuation, and it explains one of the most powerful effects that Halloween has on human behavior. But what’s worth exploring is where that mask went after Halloween ended. In 1976, the mask came off on November 1st. Kids went back to school. Adults went back to work. Everyone returned to being identifiable and accountable, and their behavior went back to normal. That’s not how it works anymore. The internet gave everyone a permanent mask. Anonymous accounts, screen names, burner profiles, and faceless avatars create the same psychological conditions that Diener documented in his Halloween study, except they never turn off. You don’t need to wait for October 31st to become anonymous. You can do it every day from your phone. And the research shows that the behavioral effects are the same. People who feel anonymous online are more aggressive, more willing to break social norms, and less concerned about consequences. The same psychology that made a kid in a Batman mask steal extra candy in 1976 is the same psychology that drives anonymous pile-ons, hate accounts, and online mobs today. The difference is that Halloween’s deindividuation was temporary and contained. It happened one night, in a community, with people who would see each other the next morning. The internet’s version is permanent and global. There is no November 1st. There is no moment where the mask comes off and accountability returns. Halloween, in a strange way, was actually the healthier version. It gave people a single controlled night to shed their identity, act out, and then put themselves back together. The costume came off. The rules came back. The person underneath was still there. Online, the costume never comes off, and for a lot of people, the person underneath starts to disappear. **The $12 billion industry built on fear** In the 1950s, when trick-or-treating replaced vandalism as the main event of Halloween, something else happened that nobody planned for. Halloween became profitable. Candy companies were the first to see it. Before the 1950s, trick-or-treaters received homemade cookies, fruit, nuts, coins, and small toys. There was no standard treat. But as trick-or-treating became a national tradition with millions of kids going door to door on the same night, candy manufacturers realized they were looking at one of the largest captive markets in American history. They began marketing their products specifically for Halloween, and within a decade, candy had become the default treat. One quarter of all candy sold in the United States every year is purchased in the weeks leading up to Halloween. Costumes followed. What started as homemade disguises became a retail category worth over $3 billion annually. Then came decorations, haunted attractions, horror movies timed for October release, themed food and drinks, pet costumes, and an entire ecosystem of Halloween products that didn’t exist before the 1960s. Today, Halloween generates over $12 billion in annual spending in the United States, making it the second largest commercial holiday after Christmas. An ancient Celtic death ritual became one of the most profitable consumer events on the planet. What’s worth sitting with is what that actually means. We spend $12 billion a year on a sanitized version of the thing we’re most afraid of. We buy plastic skeletons because we can’t deal with real ones. We watch fake murders on screen because we can’t process real death in our lives. We put on costumes and pretend to be someone else because being ourselves every single day is exhausting. The commercial version of Halloween is the most sanitized version that has ever existed. There are no bonfires. No animal sacrifices. No real fear that the dead are coming. But the need that drives it hasn’t changed at all. The Celts spent their resources on bonfires and offerings to keep death away. We spend ours on candy corn and inflatable ghosts. The currency changed. The transaction is exactly the same. Halloween has been rebuilt more times than almost any tradition in human history. It started as a Celtic death ritual. The Church absorbed it. Irish immigrants carried it across an ocean. American cities nearly banned it. Communities reinvented it as trick-or-treating. And corporations turned it into a $12 billion industry. Every version looked completely different from the one before it. And every single version existed because people needed a night where death wasn’t something to avoid, fear wasn’t something to hide from, and the person they pretend to be the other 364 days of the year could finally take the mask off. Sources Scrivner, C. (2021). The psychology of morbid curiosity: Development and initial validation of the morbid curiosity scale. Personality and Individual Differences, 183, 111139. Scrivner, C., Johnson, J. A., Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., & Clasen, M. (2020). Pandemic practice: Horror fans and morbidly curious individuals are more psychologically resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic. University of Chicago. Andersen, M. M., Schjoedt, U., Price, H., Rosas, F. E., Scrivner, C., & Clasen, M. (2020). Playing with fear: A field study in recreational horror. Psychological Science. Diener, E., Fraser, S. C., Beaman, A. L., & Kelem, R. T. (1976). Effects of deindividuation variables on stealing among Halloween trick-or-treaters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 33(2), 178-183. Kerr, M. (2015). Scream: Chilling Adventures in the Science of Fear. PublicAffairs. Martin, G. N. (2019). (Why) Do You Like Scary Movies? A Review of the Empirical Research on Psychological Responses to Horror Films. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2298. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe