The Irish Times view on Halloween: something spooky this way comes

Amid the commercial tat and razzmatazz that attend the weeks leading up to Halloween, there remains something mysterious and ineffable about the night itself, the one moment in the year when the wall between the physical and spirit worlds is most easily breached.

In the western Christian tradition, the evening of All Hallows Day represents the beginning of the period dedicated to remembrance of saints (the hallowed) and the faithful departed. Like other dates in the liturgical calendar, it maps closely to a pre-Christian festival, the Celtic celebration of Samhain, marking the passage from harvest season to the dark and dangerous days of winter. The two became fused together in the Gaelic culture of the Irish and Scots, who brought traditions such as guising (travelling from house to house in masks and costumes) with them when they emigrated to North America. In recent years, the Americans have returned the favour, with calls of “trick or treat” echoing across Irish housing estates, and pumpkins replacing turnips as the vegetable of preference for what was originally the Irish tradition of carving a jack-o -lantern.

Some may complain that the banalisation of Halloween has taken away much of its mystery and symbolic power, but that was probably inevitable in our globalised world. What is more interesting is the fascination that endures in secularised societies with the idea that the dead still walk among us. The dark may not be as perilous as it was in pre-industrial times but it still has the ability to terrify us with the thought that something truly awful lurks in the gloom. The robust popularity of horror movies surely reveals something about the craving for something great and terrible beyond our quotidian reality. In Irish mythology, Samhain was when the doorways to the Otherworld opened to allow the souls of the dead along with supernatural beings to enter our own world. So if that misshapen form lurching out of the shadows proves to be a five-year-old ghoul demanding a fistful of Quality Street, be grateful to have been spared for another year.