Cinema Suicide

Halloween is my Christmas. It’s a season much better suited to my morbid sensibilities. This is also a time of year when other horror bloggers go on a blogging rampage and do something every day. I know a couple of guys who are just posting daily, or doing a horror movie review daily. I wish I could commit to something like that but if you’ve watched my daily output over the last year or so, you know that that’s a pace I can’t keep up with. But I can do little mini-blogs daily and that’s what I plan to do. Maybe you’ll learn a thing or two about this sweet month.

Halloween is a linguistic breakdown of All Hallow’s Evening, which broke down to All Hallow’s Even, which broke down to All Hallow’s Eve which somehow managed to mutate to Halloween. What does that mean? All Hallow’s Eve was the Christian replacement for the Celtic Pagan festival of Samhain. Originally, set on March 13, Pope Gregory III moved it to October 31st in 9th century, AD. Christian settlement of Ireland, England and Scotland began in 6th Century, AD and over a period of several hundred years, they slowly replaced the pagan traditions with traditions from their own faith, often replacing Celtic holidays with their own in order to ease the transition. All Hallow’s Eve, also known as All Saints or All Souls Day (now a separate pair of Christian holidays on the first and second of November), is your typical Day of the Dead festival similar to the Mexican Dia De Los Muertos yet without all the revelry and sweet iconography and stacked to the rafters with the laconic sincerity of Ireland’s dreary brand of Catholicism. It’s a day of reverence for remembering the dead.

But old habits die hard, don’t they? You can’t just uproot traditions of a people dating back to 1200 BC so the old Samhain festival, sans burnt offerings and druids, combined with themes of the dead to create the spookiest holiday of the year. Old Celtic beliefs that the border between the living and the dead was thinnest on October 31 conitnued. As everyone was remembering their dead ancestors and friends they were also lighting jack-o-lanterns, leaving out offerings for their ancestral spirits and wearing disguises to look like the spirits they sought to placate. They also partied like their lives depended on it. Hence, a tradition for the ages is born. The most fun day of the entire year.

Expect more Halloween trivia daily.