Pumpkin Faces in the Night: How Halloween Lets Us Play with Fear and Identity
Going treat or treating could help your mental health this spooky season
By Wesley Higgins
It’s almost Halloween again. The time of year when plastic skeletons, candy corn, and patchwork costumes herald the transition into the dark winter months. But after brushing aside the cobwebs that lay upon the haunted house’s facade, what could be happening on a psychological level in the basement of the human mind?
Halloween isn't only about spooky fun fueling the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup and pop-up costume stores. Halloween is a cultural event where we collectively and individually dance with ghosts that haunt human experience. It’s a modern ritual that allows us to merrily touch on something deeper and perhaps darker in our cultural psyche. What if Halloween is a black mirror revealing how our minds cope with fear and identity?
Dr. Frankenstein, or How I Learned to Love the Zombie
There are few sensations that we try to avoid as much as absolute terror. It is what anxiety wards us away from getting ourselves into. But yet…we love fear in controlled doses. Halloween horrors let people stare down into the abyss while also understanding that they can look away if it ever feels too real. This thrill could even remind us that we’re alive.
This seemingly irrational contradiction is mediated by the rational capacity of our nervous system. The near-instantaneous scare and relief we experience after seeing a fuzzy spider guarding a cauldron full of chocolate is an example of our amygdala (the brain’s fear factory) working together with our prefrontal cortex (our emotional regulation center). If you were to remove either part of the neural process, you would basically become a walking zombie.
For people with anxiety and phobia disorders, fear isn’t fun — it’s constant. But here’s the twist of the knife: psychological research suggests that engaging with simulated fear that’s also fun, like horror games or scary movies, can help people with anxiety.
A 2020 study found that horror fans were more resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time of anxiety for almost everybody, where many of us developed phobic responses and behaviors that were rational (at least temporarily). Why were these horror aficionados perhaps better able to cope with the social dread of the pandemic? The researchers’ interpretation is that they had been practiced at coping with emotion of fear. Through a neurological lens, their brains were better at regulating the amygdala (Scrivner et al., 2021).
That particular study, although under a unique situation, could be generalized into the theory that Halloween allows us to practice managing the universal human experience of fear through a sort of cultural rehearsal that prepares us individually and socially for real existential threats that may lurk around the corner. From a functional standpoint, when we watch Jack Nicholson take a hatchet to a door, we’re learning how to process and manage our emotions.
Dead Ringers: The Call of the Uncanny
The origins of Halloween trace back to the Celtic holiday called Samhain. Like many ancient holidays, such as Saturnalia where Rome’s rich and poor traded places, Samhain celebrated the blurring of boundaries. On the night before November, the blurring was between the living and the dead. The changing season caused a shift in boundaries that also allowed for the possibility of transformation by bringing to the surface the dead who are seemingly absent in daily life.
This echoes Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny. You’ve probably heard about the uncanny valley at this point. It’s the uncomfortable feeling that something feels off because it’s blurring the line between the real and the absurd, such as when we see a human face that we know in our gut is not human but we can’t explain why. Freud described the uncanny as the experience of the familiar becoming unfamiliar. The pinnacle of the uncanny was the encounter with the dopple-ganger. It is the dark image reflected back onto us. It is the monster that we created in our image. It is the fear of death incarnate. The dopple-ganger is well represented during Halloween — think Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein, or the ghastly echo of a ghost.
If you’ve ever experienced a moment when you felt like a stranger to your own self, or when the world around you doesn't feel quite real, that’s what is called dissociation. Don’t worry, it can happen to all of us at some point especially during times of extreme stress or trauma. The experience of the uncanny perhaps gives meaning to the feeling of dissociation. Halloween allows us to play within this topsy-turvy liminal space between life and death without the trauma.
For Freud, the uncanny dopple-ganger is the embodiment of the individual psyche’s repressed dark desire. In psychoanalytic thought, the cure happens through the process of making the unconscious conscious. From this psychoanalytic perspective then, Halloween may allow us to collectively tap into our unconscious morbid curiosities and play out our darkest impulses in a socially responsible way. Perhaps in this way, Halloween allows us enough catharsis to get through another winter so we don’t go full Purge-mode in a violent return of the repressed. By becoming more fully in touch with all our emotions, we can reverse the dissociation and live a more integrated life with a social acceptance of oneself and others.
The Changeling: Eyes Without a Face
Halloween isn’t the same thing as therapy, but like therapy, it offers a liberating space for self-expression and the fluid nature of identity. On the last night of October, you become a shapeshifter. An optometrist becomes an eye-patch-wearing pirate, and an office worker becomes an unusually attractive avocado. Hell, you can even try on different masks on the same night. You can walk, and talk, and pose in all sorts of strange manners. And society accepts it.
Costume play allows us to safely experiment and perform identity. This can be helpful for people who struggle with accepting aspects of their identity that are difficult to express in their everyday lives (Rahman et al., 2012). Wearing a costume allows us to play out values and emotions alien to everyday experience and sense of self. You can be as strong as The Undertaker, as confident as a David Bowie, and as expressive as a Van Gogh missing an ear.
Imaginative roleplay, according to developmental psychologists, helps people with emotional identity flexibility. For people dealing with rigid identities that can cause distress when threatened, Halloween offers respite from the insecurity of having to always conform to a rigid inflexibility of self. Paradoxically, by allowing oneself to explore their alien aspects, one can become more secure in their stable sense of self. Halloween also allows us to turn the tables through the externalization of our internal psychological struggles. Someone who feels invisible might dress as a ghost in order to be seen, or someone who feels drained may dress as a vampire.
What We Do in the Shadows
Well, is Halloween good for your mental health then? While no replacement for therapy, it can help us process our emotions through a safe and healthy experience. To summarize, it allows us to feel fear without danger, which can help us learn to better regulate our emotions in the face of a real threat without becoming paralyzed. It can help us venture into the uncanny and the stranger parts of human experience that we often spend a lot of energy trying to deny ourselves. And it’s an opportunity to explore identity with joy and without fear of social judgement.
Happy Halloween from the therapists at Present Authentic Development!
References
Scrivner, C., Johnson, J. A., Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., & Clasen, M. (2021). Pandemic practice: Horror fans and morbidly curious individuals are more psychologically resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Rahman, Osmud & Wing-sun, Liu & Cheung, Brittany. (2012). “Cosplay”: Imaginative Self and Performing Identity. Fashion Theory The Journal of Dress Body & Culture.
