A straight-up depiction of suicide is not ideal street decor, even at Halloween

In a busy city neighbourhood, the streets are swarming with skeletons, spider webbing, bloody handprints and fright masks. And hey, look over there – it’s a life-size human effigy hanging by a noose from an upper window. Locals have been stopped in their tracks.

It takes some effort to acquire a man-sized figure, paint its face and mutilate its feet, dress it in an adult jacket and trousers, stick a knife in its chest, then find a rope to suspend it from a window. It checks all the boxes for gory, gruesome, realistic and seasonal. We are in “sense-of-humour” territory.

This is the murky realm where a comedian, say, acts on the theory that no subject is off-limits if there’s a joke in it; while a chunk of the audience might feel seen, the rest are left shifting uncomfortably. The difference here is that an audience has a choice about whether to buy a ticket to see that comedian, knowing transgressive humour might be involved. That choice is denied to an adult and a seven-year-old walking along a residential street where a display of a gruesome corpse hanging out a window is unavoidable.

Halloween is meant to be scary and children like it that way. It’s part of the shivery, bug-eyed wonder of it. There is spooky fun in enormous spiders, ghosts, witches and skeletons. Many of them (and plenty of adults) have an annual appointment with 1993-vintage Hocus Pocus and its three villainous witches on a retribution tour, chasing screaming children, casting spells on the stunned grown-ups and turning a kind boy into a cat for trying to save his little sister. It’s scary but it’s also campy, colourful, funny, silly and even poignant at times. And there is whimsy.

The problem with the new incarnation of Halloween displays is that the gore and the villainy are fully unleashed without the whimsy. You may gaze for a long time at a man-like figure hanging by the neck and fail to discern the whimsy. Most of us in this small country are unfortunate enough to have a connection to someone who has been affected by suicide – 500 were recorded by the Central Statistics Office in the 2022 census – so it’s understandable if a straight-up depiction of suicide is not your ideal street decor, even at Halloween.

Of course, death was always a central part of the season – Samhain to the Celts; All Souls and All Saints Day to Chistians; Día de los Muertos for Hispanics – and outside of Christian tradition, a reminder of the power and beauty of life in the face of oncoming winter darkness. The gloomy seasonal atmospherics have also been a useful vehicle for slasher movies since the 1980s. The problem is that in everyday settings, the horror movie genre has gained dominance over the traditional ghost stories and spookery.

[ The banshee is alive and well on the western seaboardOpens in new window ]

Even hardy types are looking at the added tons of fake gore, dismembered body parts and bloody entrails that deck many of the Halloween-clad malls and halls and wonder why we’ve fallen so hard for another trashy American import. Or why pumpkins are sprouting on so many doorsteps.

Since we are reclaiming the language, music and dance, Ireland might also reclaim Halloween and the Jack-o’ -lanterns, in which we placed candles inside carved turnips to create scary-faced lanterns. It was our turnips that inspired the scary-faced US pumpkins.

[ The story of Jack-o’-lantern: ‘If you knew the sufferings of that forsaken craythur’Opens in new window ]

But the tacky Halloween stuff is a good money-spinner, requires minimal creativity and allows adults to more easily hijack what used to be a children’s time.

In 2025, Irish adults were expected to spend a combined €61 million on Halloween, averaging €46 each and rising to €70 among 25-34-year-olds, according to iReach Insights.

In the US last year, spending on decorations alone was expected to reach $4.2 billion (about €3.7 billion), up from $1.6 billion in six years – and a notably more adult one, according to the National Retail Federation. To put that in bricks-and-mortar terms, stores that were dedicating 100sq ft to children are adding another 50sq ft for adults. Though it’s fair to say Americans are still being creative. Last year, in a wealthy family neighbourhood, one front-yard display featured a life-size alien figure pointing a (fake) AR-7 at a skeleton tied to the porch.

It is time to moderate the bloody carnage. If it’s the parents’ responsibility to shield a child from things that scare or desensitise them, how are they to do that? In a quick poll, one father says he takes his young children on a detour to avoid the hanging effigy. Another retorts that this attitude explains why we’re raising snowflakes with no resilience. As always there is a middle way. Ask why anyone needs to fake a death outside the window just because it’s Halloween. Tone down the gore. Make it fun again. Halloween is for children – and for adults enjoying children being children.