The Dance of the Dead (2021)
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This message comes from NPR sponsor Mattress Firm. How do you sleep at night? Upgrade to the rest you deserve with Mattress Firm's premium selection of top brand mattresses. Get matched at Mattress Firm's semi-annual sale and clearance and sleep at night. One November night, a woman coming home late at the hour of the dead grew tired and sat down to rest when a young man came up and talked to her.

Wait a bit and you will see the most beautiful dancing you ever looked on. There, by the side of the hill. She looked at him steadily. Why are you so sad and as pale as if you were dead? Look well at me. Do you not know me? I know you now. You were a young breening that was drowned last year when out fishing. What are you here for? Look at the side of the hill and you will see why I'm here.

And she looked and saw a great company dancing to sweet music. And among them all, the dead who had died as long as she could remember. Men, women and children, all in white. And their faces were pale as the moonlight. Now, run for your life. For if once the fairies bring you into the dance, you will never be able to leave them anymore. I won't.

But while they were talking, the fairies came up and danced round her in a circle, joining their hands. And she fell to the ground in a faint and knew no more till she woke up in the morning in her own bed at home. And they all saw her face was pale as the dead and they knew that she had got the fairy stroke. So the herb doctor was sent for and every measure tried to save her but without avail.

For just as the moon rose that night, soft, low music was heard around the house. And when they looked at the woman, she was dead. I grew up in what I think of now as the sort of golden age of trick-or-treat.

Our whole neighborhood was really into Halloween. People decorated. The street was thronged with kids in costumes. And I really loved making my own. And there was one year, for example, I wanted to be a cavewoman. And my dad was a hunter. And we made an honest-to-God, like, realistic costume out of an old deer pelt. Oh, wow.

I mean, if there was any kind of costume contest, I feel like you would have won it because that's authentic, you know? It was. Maybe a little too authentic.

This is Lisa Morton. She's been really into Halloween basically her whole life. And a couple of decades ago, she decided she wanted to learn more about its origins. So she started sifting through archival records, old newspaper clippings, oral histories, and books. And eventually, Lisa pieced together the story of Halloween.

I have written three books on the history of Halloween, including the Halloween Encyclopedia and Trick or Treat, A History of Halloween. She's also written a bunch of horror fiction books and a few screenplays, too. Those, like, really bad movies that show up at three in the morning on the SyFy channel. You're a vampire! No, we call us Throgs. We're lower than vampires for life. But I'm not wildly proud of most of those.

At this point, Lisa calls herself something of a paranormal historian. A paranormal historian. Not exactly a traditional title, but seems pretty accurate. This history is full of creepiness. Ghouls, ghosts, demons, witches. And beyond all that, Lisa says it taps into some very basic fears we all have. The fear of the unknown, of change, of death.

We often are searching for ways, I think, to deal with our fears. And at Halloween, we are told that these fears are things that we can have fun with. And much of that, of course, is also behind the popularity of horror movies and books. It's a way to deal with our fears in a safe and playful environment. Playful being the key word here.

You're probably getting ready to stock up on candy as we speak. Okay, a couple people at ThruLine might disagree, but in my house, it's anything but candy corn, a.k.a. the reject candy. Or maybe you're decorating your yard with plastic skeletons and fake spider webs. Or maybe you just plan to stay in and watch your favorite scary movie.

I personally won't be doing that because I'm a huge chicken now when it comes to scary movies. I don't know what happened to me. What an excellent day for an exorcism. I tried re-watching The Exorcist while working on this episode. That was a bad idea. I like it.

Strike Terralord into the beast. Now laying waste your... I can't. That voice, the way her eyes roll back. Yeah, I mean, she's terrifying. And honestly, I can't get it out of my head either. I don't even have the stomach to rewatch it at any point.

Anyway, this story begins with small tribes of people in Europe. Long before Halloween was a sugary movie fest, long before it was even called Halloween. If you're tracing it all the way back, we have to go back to the ancient Irish Celts that celebrated Samhain, which is the holiday that is the great granddaddy of Halloween. 2,000 years ago in the Irish countryside during Samhain, the thing you'd fear most wasn't demons or ghosts or dudes in white masks, but fairies.

Creepy, deadly, vengeful fairies. These things were as far away from Tinkerbell as you could get. When we come back, enter the haunted history of Halloween, if you dare. You're listening to Doomline from NPR. This is Benjamin Nelson calling from Burlington, Iowa, and you're listening to ThruLine.

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The Celts believed that Samhain was a night that the barrier between worlds was at its thinnest, a night when things could cross over from the other world. The living, believing their ancestors would cross over into their world during this time, would leave offerings for the dead outside their villages, and they would dress as animals or monsters to ward off fairies, who also crossed over, to keep them from kidnapping their loved ones.

They believed in these very malicious forms of fairies that they called the "she." And people know the Ban She, which actually means female fairy. According to Celtic legend, fairies were a mythical race of people who were driven into the shadows when a conquering force arrived in their home.

Some believe the fairies had the magical ability to disguise themselves. Sometimes the banshee assumes the form of some sweet singing virgin of the family who died young. And roamed the earth because they were not quite fit either for heaven or hell. Or she may be seen at night as a shrouded woman, crouched behind the trees, lamenting with a veiled face.

are flying past in the moonlight, crying bitterly, and the cry of this spirit is mournful beyond all other sounds on earth, and betokens certain death to some member of the family whenever it is heard in the silence of the night." On October 31st during Samhain, the Celts would gather around the fire and tell scary stories about these fairies,

But it wasn't all doom and gloom. They'd feast and have a good time, too. It was a huge party for them. Trying to figure out what they did and trying to go through the research, the best things that we have are some of the fairy tale books at this point. Oscar Wilde's mother, for example, Lady Wilde, put together some excellent collections of Celtic folk tales, and I relied a lot on those.

Lady Wilde lived through the Irish famine of the mid-1800s and was a staunch Irish nationalist at a time when the British Empire had total control over Ireland and much of the world. She set out to capture rich stories of Ireland's past in a book called Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland. To the Irish peasant earth and air were filled with those mysterious beings, half loved, half feared by them.

Flipping through the book, you encounter tales like the holy well and the murderer, the butter mystery, the farmer punished, the trial by fire,

All possible titles for a John Grisham novel. Of course, there are a lot of tales about fairies too. The Fairies' Revenge, The Fairy Spy, Whitsuntide Legend of the Fairy Horses. And there are hints throughout that these fairies are somewhat of a reflection of the Irish people themselves. The fairies loved music and dancing and frolic, and above all things, to be let alone.

and not to be interfered with as regarded their peculiar fairy habits, customs and pastimes. They had, like the Irish, a fine sense of the right and just, but the fairies took dire revenge if anyone built over their fairy circle.

So much of Lady Wilde's book is built on this kind of folklore because information about the early history of Ireland during the time of the Celts is limited. The problem with the Celts is that they didn't believe in writing their history down. Celtic priests, known as Druids, would safeguard the information and pass it down from generation to generation by word of mouth.

So what we have for them is oral traditions and folklore that was transcribed by the first Christian missionaries who came to Ireland to convert these Celts. And of course, that is probably colored somewhat by their own belief system, but some of it is fairly good and fairly substantial.

Based on archaeological records, here's what we know about the origin of the Celts. They're believed to have first appeared in Europe around 1200 BC, though the exact year is hard to pinpoint. And although they migrated as far as France and Spain, they mostly thrived in the north, especially in what's now Ireland.

Their traditions and beliefs were alien to people in the great Roman Empire many miles away, who thought of the Celts as barbarians and looked down on their tribal, pagan lifestyle, but most of all, resented their defiance of Roman power. For centuries, the Celts and Romans fought on battlefields,

As the Roman Empire expanded, it absorbed Celtic culture, and Celts had to move to find ways to survive in other, more remote parts of Europe. But they kept their pagan traditions. They had many gods and goddesses who they worshipped in lakes, rivers, under bushes, places they saw as sacred, believing that supernatural forces dwelled within the natural world. And then there are accounts of something disturbing, something truly deadly—

We have, of course, the image of the Celts burning victims alive and gigantic wicker men and so forth. Human sacrifice. It's something Julius Caesar described in The Gallic Wars, a book about the Roman conquest of what's now France.

There is some evidence where they have found, for example, the remains of someone buried in a bog. And they think that some of the remains they found around those bog figures indicated that they were having a bad year in terms of drought. They might have sacrificed someone at Samhain to the gods to ensure that they didn't have a continuing drought for the next season.

You know, it's interesting about this kind of early Celtic tradition. It's connecting with the dead, right? Which is this sort of like transition point between the living and the dead. And then in terms of the time of year, right? It's this kind of transition of the harvests and the seasons. And I wonder if you see a connection between those two kinds of transitions. Yeah.

Yes, it was absolutely a transitional, a liminal time for them. They knew that winter was coming.

They were slaughtering livestock, salting the meat, getting it stocked away and so forth. It was definitely a major transitional time for them. And in fact, in part of their legends, they had a queen goddess called the Morrigan. And the Morrigan moves from being a beautiful younger woman to a sort of hag at that time of year.

Like many early civilizations, Celtic holidays and rituals coincided with the changing of the seasons, times when things are born and die. During these times of change, you could plead with the gods for a good harvest or protection for your loved ones who've departed this world. And maybe by scaring away the bad spirits, you'd open yourself up to good fortune. In the 5th century, some Roman Catholic missionaries began making their way to Ireland to try to figure out how to convert them.

Paganism was part of the old world order the now Christian Roman Empire wanted to root out. But the Catholic Church soon realized that the Celts wouldn't let go of traditions such as Samhain easily. People were really connected to those traditions. So if the church wanted people to embrace Christianity, maybe Christianity had to embrace some of what they believed.

Yeah, so the early Catholic Church had a doctrine of trying to convert people by co-opting their existing holidays and traditions and temples. Rather than stamping them out, they had found that to be much more successful. It was a pretty genius marketing move. Like, we'll basically let you keep your holiday, just add a sprinkle of holy water and a dash of Jesus to it.

So it's speculated that they looked at the Catholic calendar and moved their Catholic holiday to overlap with the Celtic holiday of Samhain. They moved the date of their saint celebration from May 13th, which is when it had originally been held, to November 1st.

And from there we get eventually the name All Hallows Day. Hollow was another word for saint at the time. And the Celts celebrated their holidays beginning on the night before at sunset, which is where that All Hallows Eve part comes in, eventually becomes the name Halloween.

Quick side note, the Catholic Church did this kind of co-opting all over the world, including with the ancient civilizations who lived in what's now Mexico, giving us Dia de los Muertos, Day of the Dead. But back to Ireland. All Saints Day, All Hallows Day, still seemed to be missing something. Sure, it celebrated the saints, but what about your own loved ones who had passed on? When could you celebrate them and ask for their protection in the other worlds?

So about the 11th century, the Catholic Church adds a second church

celebration to this time. They designate November 2nd as All Souls Day, and this serves a dual purpose for them. It lets them continue that process of co-opting Samhain, and it gives them something that a lot of the parishioners at the time were asking for, which was, hey, it's nice that we get to celebrate the saints, but we also want to celebrate our own dead.

So All Souls Day becomes the day that you would, for example, pray for your loved ones who might be stuck in purgatory. You can think of purgatory as a sort of waiting room between this world and the next, a placeless place to rid yourself of the remnants of the past before moving forward. It's kind of the perfect illustration of transition, of liminality.

There is something that was very big in Great Britain for many centuries called souling, possibly sort of precursor to trick-or-treat. People would go from house to house and offer to say prayers for your loved ones who were trapped in purgatory in exchange for food.

and they were offered these little very specific cakes that were called soul cakes. This starts with beggars doing this. Eventually, it becomes a sort of ritual that kids engage in. They would paint their faces with soot and would maybe put on some rags and would go from house to house and then be rewarded with these specific little soul cakes.

As time carried on with new traditions replacing the old, Samhain became a distant memory. We start seeing far less references in Irish folklore and history to Samhain and many more to Halloween.

Halloween wasn't just taking form in Ireland. The holiday was emerging in nearby England, Wales, Scotland, inspiring new kinds of poems. This one is from 1584 and is by a poet named Alexander Montgomery, a Scottish poet. In the hinder end of harvest on all hollow even, when our good neighbors do ride, if I read right, some buckled on a bunwad and some on a bean, some hobbled on a hemp stake.

This poem was written centuries after Samhain had begun its transformation into Halloween. And an elf and an ape and an unsell begot into a pot by palmathorn.

I can't verify any of the Scottish stuff because I don't know Scottish dialect. Right. But that was great. And while Halloween started to spread through Ireland, Scotland and England, there was still a strong divide between these places. If you've watched any of the many BBC period dramas about this era, I've watched them all.

You know that there was a ton of political maneuvering and feuding between the leaders of these nations at this time. And you know that witch hunts were carried out, an easy outlet for these political games. They mainly targeted women who didn't conform to social norms and accused them of being pagans loyal to the devil.

These political games were all about power. Power that was totally wrapped up in religion, specifically the Catholic Church. And in 1534, the King of England, Henry VIII, grew tired of a church a thousand miles away in Rome telling him what to do, particularly when it came to a personal matter: his divorce. As a result, he broke off from the Catholic Church, laying the groundwork for the Church of England.

a Protestant reformation swept through the region. And before long, Catholicism was part of an old world order right alongside pagans. But many in Ireland and Scotland remained loyal to the Catholic Church. And when a new king, James I, who was originally Scottish, took the throne a few decades later, one group in particular was targeted.

He was obsessed with witches and with demonology. In fact, even wrote a famous treatise on demonology. The fearful abounding at this time in this country of these detestable slaves of the devil, the witches or enchanters have moved me, beloved reader, to dispatch and post this following treatise of mine.

And so the first time that we see witches tied to Halloween is under his rule. And he had a very big witch trial. And that's the first time that we see mention of witches celebrating their Sabbath on Halloween.

The Catholic Church had basically created Halloween. Halloween attracted witches and demons. So if you get rid of Halloween, you get rid of witches and demons, and you weaken the power of the Catholic Church. Such assaults of Satan are most certainly practiced, and the instruments thereof merits most severely to be punished.

The British outlawed all Catholic celebrations, so All Saints Day and Halloween kind of went underground at that point and were not hugely celebrated within England, although they remained popular in Scotland and Ireland. When we come back, Halloween hides in the shadows and gets tricked out.

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On this week's episode of Wildcard, soccer legend Abby Wambach says the transition from professional athlete to normal person can be tough. There's this innate narcissism that is almost required in order to be a high-level athlete. I'm Rachel Martin. Join us for NPR's Wildcard podcast, the game where cards control the conversation. Part two, trick or treat? Greetings, my friends.

One of the most famous fairy tales and folk legends told throughout Europe and later on the Americas is about a blacksmith named Jack. He loves to drink and so forth and the devil comes for his soul and he tricks the devil out of taking his soul. Finally, he runs out of luck.

When he dies, Heaven obviously doesn't want him, but now the Devil is really angry at him and doesn't want him in Hell either, and is afraid that if he lets him into Hell, he'll start tricking him in Hell. So the Devil very reluctantly throws Jack a burning Hell Ember to light his way, and so Jack puts this burning Hell Ember in a carved gourd and uses that to light his way as he endlessly wanders the Earth.

And that's how he becomes known as Jack of the Lantern or Jack-o'-lantern. And that whole folktale is where we get the connection with the carved pumpkin or earlier the carved turnip. Those carved turnips are actually extremely creepy. You can look it up if you don't believe me.

Anyway, the legend of Jack of the Lantern, who was also called Stingy Jack, seems to reflect that while Halloween was relegated to the shadows, people got more sneaky about how they celebrated. They played fortune-telling games and kids were playing pranks. One popular prank was inspired by Jack of the Lantern. They were carving this face into this turnip and lighting it from within and then putting it out in like a hidden corner or around the edge of a house or something.

Someone coming home late at night, suddenly stumbling on that would be genuinely startled. Or they were doing these odd things like they would light a celery stalk, which would smoke a lot, and stick that up to a keyhole on someone's door. And you would come home and find your house filled with smoke. But while one Jack was creating mischief in the shadows, another Jack seized the attention of the world.

The Union Jack. In 1801, the United Kingdom, the UK, was formed. And the Union Jack was the name given to the flag that flew over it. This new country swallowed up England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland and forced all of them to report to a central government in London.

The UK reigned over a massive empire with colonies around the world. And over the next few decades, resistance to this new setup grew. People like Lady Wilde, who we met earlier, wanted Ireland to be independent, free from the clutches of the British. The Irish, they argued, were a people with a long, proud history, whose age-old customs had been preserved despite attempts to change them.

In the islands off the west coast of Ireland, where the most ancient superstitions still exist, they have a strange custom. No funeral wail is allowed to be raised until three hours have elapsed from the moment of death because, they say, the sound of the cries would hinder the soul from speaking to God when it stands before him.

Around the middle of the 1800s, the Irish Kean, that haunting funeral wail, began to overpower the calls for Irish nationalism.

People were dying left and right. The ultimate nightmare, a seed without harvest, a land without food, a vengeful environment, was becoming a reality.

There was a massive famine happening. They even called it the Great Famine. Some called it the Great Hunger. And it was a terrible disaster happening, especially in Ireland. A disease tore through potato crops, a main staple in the Irish diet, and around a million people in Ireland died of starvation.

It's unclear if things got so bad in Ireland because the central government in London intentionally ignored what was happening, or if the government was just ill-equipped to respond. Either way, it was devastating, and many Irish folk ultimately decided to leave home. As many as 2 million people fled in desperation, 500,000 of them... ...to come to America, and they brought their legends and their folklore with them, and Halloween was one of those.

When the Irish arrived in the U.S., they faced discrimination. Some Americans saw them as unwelcome outsiders, in large part because they were majority Catholic and the U.S. was a Protestant country. Many took jobs no one else wanted, working in coal mines, on railroads, or in homes as servants. But this tradition they brought with them, Halloween, intrigued some people.

We see a lot of magazine stories about sort of upper class American families who might have an Irish servant and they think this whole Halloween tradition is absolutely charming.

Magazines were booming at this time. They were basically the TV of the era, full of miscellaneous information and entertainment. There are lots of stories from around 1860 to 1890 or so that detail the

Halloween parties and women were reading these stories and loved the idea and started imitating these stories and they were often for children. They would, for example, have a number of children over to the house on the day. They would pull taffy so there was candy involved. They would tell spooky stories.

By the early 20th century, most people across the U.S. had at least heard of Halloween and parties began popping up all over. But it wasn't just Halloween parties that were catching on. It turns out American kids like playing pranks just as much as Irish kids, though maybe with a few less celery sticks. Last night was Halloween, you know.

The cowbells rang, the horns did blow, the goblins stalked o'er stones and planks, and small boys played their annual pranks. These pranks are perpetrated mainly by young boys, and the pranks start kind of innocent. They masked themselves as spooks and ghosts and stood behind trees and big posts. They set logs against some folks' front doors.

Then knocked and ran away, of course. Kids running out to, say, a local farm on Halloween night, they might disassemble a gate around the farmer's property and reassemble that gate in some place weird like on top of the barn. And in fact, this was so common that there were many places that started calling the holiday gate night. So Halloween may come and go, and cranky folk may often show their temper, but the boys don't care.

For what's a boy who will not dare? What was the response to these pranks? At first, people were mildly irritated, but were kind of thought it was fun. The problem is as the U.S. became much more urbanized in moving into the 1920s and 30s,

The kids went into the cities as the cities were expanding, and at that point the prank playing became far less innocent. It became out-and-out vandalism. The kids were going into the cities and were starting fires. They were breaking windows. They were smashing light fixtures. They were tripping people on the sidewalks. And by the time we get into the 30s, this is also now during the Great Depression,

It's very hard for the cities to come up with the money to pay for the repair after these kids are causing all this damage.

There were many cities by the time you get into 1933 that just wanted that holiday to go away. It had become such a problem for them that many of them were considering banning it altogether. But Halloween is the holiday with nine lives. Even when you think it's doomed, it finds a way to survive.

One of the interesting things about Halloween is the way it morphs all the time. It's been in transition for centuries. It almost seems cyclical. It almost seems like about every 50 years its identity changes. And just as people were calling for a Halloween ban, others began to brainstorm a different solution to the pranking problem. They looked at it and thought, maybe we can buy these kids off.

And they started to put together committees and instruction guides and so forth on how to put together parties and celebrations that would entertain these pranksters and keep them from going out and committing vandalism. And in fact, the number of police calls regarding boy trouble, as they call it, on Halloween dropped by half.

The number of street light replacements dropped significantly. The number of fire alarms dropped significantly. And what a lot of the cities did was put together these little pamphlets, distribute them among homeowners. Because it was still the Great Depression, a lot of people could not afford to put on a party by themselves, so an entire neighborhood would get together. And they would call these house-to-house parties.

And the way it would work was that the first house might offer the kids a simple little costume, like a sheet, where they could dress up and pretend to be a ghost. And then the next house might offer the kids a little spooky walk through a disguised basement. And then the next house would offer the kids a treat. And eventually, out of that, we get the whole ritual of trick-or-treat. Kind of like those soul cakes from the 11th century. Yeah.

Anyway, national magazines printed articles about this new trick-or-treat thing. And just as it began to gain popularity, the U.S. was plunged into World War II. Everything was rationed during that time, including sugar. So Halloween, like most other things, was put on the back burner. War in Europe has ended. The hour for which the world has been six years waiting has come.

But then after the war ends, it comes roaring back. When we come back, Halloween gets an expensive makeover. This is Amy Thorne from Tallahassee, Florida, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

This message comes from NPR sponsor Charles Schwab with their original podcast Choiceology hosted by Katie Milkman, an award-winning behavioral scientist and author of the best-selling book How to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions.

Part 3. Mistress of the Dark.

Well, this is it. That's where old Mrs. Hubbard was strangled ten years ago. Yeah, and they say she's still haunting the place. You have to go in there at eight o'clock tonight. No. Sure. In the early 50s, television is now spreading across America, and those early sitcoms loved Halloween. Trick or treat! Trick or treat! Oh, well, you look like a couple of desperate characters. I'm afraid I'll have to give in.

For example, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet has a Halloween episode. Trick or treat. You heard me, trick or treat. Don't you know this is Halloween? Well, yes, but aren't you a little old for this sort of thing? How old are you anyway? Fifty-three. There also was an immensely popular Disney cartoon, a Donald Duck cartoon called Trick or Treat, that helped cement the popularity of this growing ritual. Hello, Butch.

With TV on the rise, Halloween was better known than ever before in the U.S. But TV networks weren't the only ones going all in on the holiday.

Now the candy companies come in and they say, hey, mom, instead of you having to cook these popcorn balls and candied apples all day, we'll make candies for you to give out. And the costume companies come in and say, hey, you don't have to sew a costume for your child anymore. We're going to give you not only a pre-made costume, but it's going to be your kid's favorite character.

Look, up in the sky, it's a bird. It's a plane. It's Superman. Yes, it's Superman. Retailers were trying to make religious holidays big business. Chocolate bunnies and dyed eggs for Easter. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Santa for Christmas.

And if you were walking down a suburban street in most cities in the U.S. on Halloween night, you'd see a lot of mini cowboys, Mickey Mouses, and Zoros clutching pillowcases filled with atomic fireballs, black taffy, and fizzies. Discover the wonderful world of fizzies. Come on in. All boys and girls are welcome.

Then, in the late 1960s, the holidays started to morph into something for adults, too, for a few different reasons, beginning with the rise of countercultural movements. You talk about the hippie is the hippie. That's a question of whether we're going to turn them on or they're going to turn us off. There were a lot of counterculture movements that were starting to spring up in the 60s and 70s.

Identity was becoming more fluid. And on Halloween night, masked and anonymous, you could be whoever or whatever you wanted to be. No questions asked. LGBTQ people adopted Halloween. One of the things that they did with the holiday was create parades.

Specifically, the Greenwich Village Parade in New York was kind of taken over by LGBTQ people and turned into a celebration of their identity. And that was huge. I mean, that parade went from being a sort of small thing that went on for a few blocks to a massive event drawing a million people.

Halloween parades turned streets into a more welcome place for LGBTQ people. And new music hits set the mood for more adult Halloween parties. And corporate America was right there to cash in.

Coors Light.

in the early 80s was looking at holidays that they could kind of claim because their rivals were doing really well with Super Bowl Sunday and Christmas and so forth. And they looked at Halloween, which at that point was not a major adult holiday anymore.

And they thought, maybe we can take that one. And their first campaign was not very successful. So they threw that out, and somebody at Coors was brilliant enough to hire Elvira. Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. ♪

Elvira here, mistress of the dark and sometimes surfer babe, because Coors Light is the official beer of Halloween and the party is at the beach, Malibu Beach. She's gorgeous. She's very voluptuous. She's witty. She's gothy. And as soon as they put standees of Elvira in every supermarket in the country, the beer flew off the shelves on Halloween. I mean,

I mean, here I am, stocking up for Halloween. I got my steaks, got my ribs. Then when I ask the stock boy where the Coors Light is at, he points me to the Coors & Coors Light Halloween display, and I'm on it! Whoa, it's like deja vu! Whoa, it's like deja vu! Elvira's fascination with Halloween began long before she took to the airwaves, back when she was known as Cassandra Peterson. As a kid, she suffered severe burns that covered over a third of her body,

And even after multiple surgeries, she still felt disfigured, out of place in her own body. She turned to Halloween for solace, a holiday of masking under cover of night, and to those society deemed outcasts, drag queens and LGBTQ people, for friendship.

Hello, darling. Yes, sirree, it's Lilo me, that gal with a shape that drives me late. Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Her big break came when she began hosting a late-night TV show featuring second-rate horror movies. The show, as you know, is movie macabre, and once again I've plucked from her vaults yet another celluloid sickie.

Dressed in a tight, low-cut black gown, a dramatic pouf in her hair, and stilettos, Elvira turned up the heat on Halloween. And like everything else, that became a business opportunity. Companies could make costumes for adults with more pizzazz. We've all seen the sexy nurses and pirates wandering the streets.

Elvira embraced the vampy, subversive, seductive side of fear. She was saying, come as you are, I won't judge you as long as you don't judge me. Elvira understood the cultural power of Halloween, and so did movie execs. In the 1970s and 80s, Halloween and horror movies were popping up left and right. There was something for everyone.

Well, there is absolutely one movie we can point to that completed that conversion of Halloween from a kid's to an adult's holiday. John Carpenter's Halloween. Halloween Night, A Small American Town.

It was a stroke of genius, by the way, to call that movie Halloween because that was not its original title. Its original title was The Babysitter Murders. Not as catchy. Yeah, exactly. I have a confession. I've never seen it. Oh, it really is good, and I think it holds up pretty well. I will check it out, but on a scale of 1 to 10, how scary are we talking? I would put that one at a good 9, I think. Ooh.

It was the first time that a movie used the holiday in a really horrific sense. And it was, of course, a terrifying movie. It was also at the time the most successful independent film ever made.

And to set it at the holiday, to give it that name, and to make, of course, a brilliant film was something that just was massive. Its impact almost cannot be understated, I think. I killed him. Yeah, I can't kill the boogeyman.

All of these different things, you know, from movies to the ad industry, they seem to successfully create this new, revised, updated Halloween. That's the Halloween we know. It's very familiar. It's almost hard to believe that it began 2,000 years ago in the Irish countryside with Samhain.

It is, yeah, definitely. And the last major evolution, I think, of the holiday that's fascinating is the global export.

This has gone from being what was almost strictly an American holiday to something celebrated all over the world, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. And that has happened within the last 20 years. That's been amazing to watch. And again, it was retailing and media representation because...

our sitcoms and our television shows have been sold to markets all over the world, specifically the Simpsons. You're here, aren't you? Yes, Bart. I never left you. What do you want from me? You'll see after the surgery.

And of course, The Simpsons does a yearly Halloween episode. And people all over the world were seeing that and going, I like that. I want to do that. And fast food companies like McDonald's that have restaurants all over the world were putting out Halloween giveaways and meals and so forth.

So those things have combined to make it popular in places that I never expected it to catch on in places like mainland China. To see it catch on in Russia, in parts of Europe that are still very dedicated to the sober All Saints Day, um,

celebration, which is about going to a graveyard and cleaning the graves of your loved ones. It's not a party or costume festival. And because of all this, we are also starting to see it catch on in places in the southern hemisphere. Now, Australia is a big one where it's starting to really catch on. It's an American capitalism success story. Yes, indeed. It is.

Halloween has lived many lives, shape-shifting as the world changed and changed again. But whether it's fairies flying by in the night or mischievous jack-o'-lanterns creeping around in the shadows or pre-recorded monsters haunting our TV screens, Halloween has always been a way to deal with and even celebrate our fears of the unknown, allowing us to sit for a time in the space between this world and whatever lies beyond it.

So as you're celebrating the haunting horrors of Halloween this year, listen closely to the whispers in the dark. Who knows? Maybe you'll come across a fairy or two.

That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Bidfattah. I'm Ramteen Adablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me. And. Lawrence Wu. Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Julie Kane. Victor Iveaz. Anya Steinberg. Yolanda Sanguini. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.

Thank you to Fiona Walsh, Michael McVeigh, and J.C. Howard for their voiceover work. Thanks also to Anya Grunman, Tamar Charney, Adriana Tapia, and Miranda Mazariegos. Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani, Naveed Marvi, Sho Fujiwara. Special thanks to Josh Newell for mixing this episode.

And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org. Thanks for listening.

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