The McBournie Minute: It’s Halloween, not Comic-Con

Halloween is fun for all ages. When you’re young, you get to dress up like your favorite cartoon and get all sorts of candy. When you’re older, you get to reveal your inner nerd by dressing up as someone from your favorite TV show or movie.

Not to hate on a holiday that allows everyone to dress up in revealing costumes, but I’m starting to think that my generation doesn’t get what the holiday is all about. In countless other countries, it’s about embracing that which you fear and do not understand, most popularly, death. Here in the U.S., there’s none of that.

I’m here to tell you, Halloween is not Comic-Con.

To be fair, there are some really clever costumes out there. Every year I am amazed at what people in my area come up with for Halloween. If you can’t come up with scary, I can at least respect clever. However, this does not mean that it’s acceptable for you to dress up like one of those blue things from Avatar. Think about how our parents did it. If they dressed up for a party, they didn’t dress up as something they used to love as a kid, like Howdy Doody, they wore some homemade thing, or sometimes just threw on a mask. The point is, they weren’t using the holiday to be a furry.

Another example of how my generation just doesn’t know how to do Halloween is with carving pumpkins. While a lot of cultures celebrate Halloween with costumes somehow, we’re really the only ones that carve huge, orange gourds and put candles in them. It’s a big opportunity to get creative. How creepy can you make the face on your pumpkin? That sort of thing. But there are those, and we all know some of these people, who opt not to carve a scary face, but instead go with a friggin’ Storm Trooper.

Take Halloween music, when was the last time there was a good Halloween song? The answer is Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” from his 1982 album of the same name. That means that in my lifetime there hasn’t been a single decent Halloween song made. Some of you are going to say that anything off of The Nightmare Before Christmas, but that’s immediately disqualified, because you don’t hear it on the radio, and certainly not at parties. We need something to play besides “Monster Mash.”

Halloween is about scaring the crap out of each other, or at least giving kids nightmares once a year, but we’re too busy trying to bring back our collective childhood to remember that. Stock up on the fake blood tonight. Make those trick-or-treaters earn that candy with emotional scarring.