From Samhain to Suburbia: The Evolution of Halloween by Hafsah Jasat

From Samhain to Suburbia: The Evolution of Halloween

Before little bedsheet ghosts roamed the streets and jack-o’-lanterns lit up porches, bonfires blazed across the grassy hills of ancient Britain. Shadows danced in the firelight, and stories of wandering spirits echoed through the chill autumn air. What we now celebrate as a night of playful frights, costumes, candy, and horror movie marathons, once held far more solemn and supernatural weight. Beneath Halloween’s commercialized mask lies a layered history steeped in ritual, fear, and the uncanny. Its roots twist through Celtic and Christian traditions, where the dead were remembered, the unknown was honoured, and the boundary between the worlds was dangerously thin.

The Early Echoes of Tradition: Samhain’s Mark

While the exact origin of Halloween is still debated, several key influences have shaped it over the centuries, the oldest of which is the ancient Celtic harvest festival of Samhain (Sah-win). Celebrated from October 31st to November 1st, Samhain marked the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the darker half of the year. Before the comforts of year-round grocery stores, electric lights, and insulated homes, Celtic pagans faced long, frigid nights marked by dormancy and decay. Days shortened, food was stored with care, and time itself seemed to stretch beneath infinitely grey skies. In those endless nights, fear took shape in the flicker of firelight, and the world felt suddenly full of eyes in the dark.

But Samhain wasn’t just a festival to mark the start of winter—it was a night suspended between worlds. In Celtic belief, Samhain was when the liminal barrier between the living and the dead grew thin, and spirits crossed freely into the world of the living. While some were ancestors, eager to see their living relatives bathed in the warmth of the fire, others were malevolent spirits, restless, wandering, and hungry for mischief.

To protect and reverend these wandering spirits, the Celts practiced a number of rituals that echo into the traditions we now associate with Halloween. To ward off the darkness that hide wandering spirits, the Celts lit bonfires as spiritual defences and guiding lights that warmed the home. In the same light, as the Celtic souls visited the homes they had once roamed, they were offered food and drink, and a place at the table, to appease the dead and protect their people and livestock through the winter. Disguises crafted from animal skins and simple masks were worn not for play, but as protection. If something uncanny were to brush past you in the gloom, it might mistake you for one of its own and move on.

These rituals weren’t just seasonal habits, they were survival strategies, both physical and spiritual. As the wheel of the year turned and the veil between worlds was believed to thin, these rites helped communities feel some sense of control over forces they couldn’t fully understand.

But like many pagan festivals, Samhain would not remain untouched. As Christianity spread through Celtic lands, the old beliefs were not erased, but reshaped. What began as a night to honour the dead and guard against the unknown slowly merged with Christian theology, creating new days of remembrance: All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. The supernatural weight of Samhain didn’t disappear—it was baptized, renamed, and reinterpreted.

Sanctifying the Shadows: From Samhain to All Hallows’ Eve

As Christianity spread across the Celtic regions of Western Europe, ancient pagan festivals like Samhain posed a challenge. They weren’t simply seasonal celebrations, or old beliefs, but spiritual cornerstones woven into the lands, oral customs passed down through generations of families.  Rather than erase these traditions, some scholars believe that the Church chose to layer its own theology over them, sanctifying what it could not suppress to ease Celtic conversion to Christianity.

While the celebration of Christian martyrs had existed in some form since the 4^th century, it was only in the 8^th century that Pope Boniface IV designated the holy day of November 1^st as All Saints Day with the night before being designated All Hallows Eve, a preface to the nomenclature Halloween. On this holy day Christian martyrs and saints are honoured with a feast, not unlike the spirits which always had a place during Celtic meals. Though the language and customs had changed, the heart of observance resounded bringing reverence for the dead, and a lingering fear of what might walk among the living.

As the Church’s calendar grew, another day of remembrance was added: All Souls’ Day, observed on November 2nd. Unlike All Saints’ Day, which celebrated canonized martyrs and the holy dead, All Souls’ was devoted to the countless ordinary souls believed to linger in purgatory, caught between worlds. Communities lit candles in their windows to guide these spirits, rang bells to mark their passage, and offered prayers to ease their journey into the afterlife. Though framed in Christian doctrine, these rites echoed older Celtic traditions—acts of reverence born from the same impulse to honor the dead, seek protection, and find meaning in the encroaching dark of winter.

As these observances evolved across medieval Europe, new customs began to emerge—blending Christian theology with folk practices that brought remembrance into the streets and homes of everyday people. From sung prayers exchanged for soul cakes to costumed performances that blurred the line between sacred ritual and popular celebration, the spirit of All Hallows’ Eve began to take on more communal, theatrical forms.

All Hallows in the Middle Ages: Prayer, Performance, and Play

Across villages in England, Ireland, and northern France, poor pilgrims known as “soulers” travelled door to door on All Hallows’ Eve and All Souls’ Day, singing hymns and offering prayers in exchange for small shortbread-like cakes, otherwise known as soul cakes, and treats to sustain them on their journey. This practice of souling blended charity with remembrance, forging an early link between communal spirit and the sharing of food, an echo that lingers in today’s trick-or-treating.

For many, souling wasn’t simply a seasonal custom; it was a vital social exchange. In times of scarcity, it allowed the poor to receive nourishment while participating in a sacred ritual that benefitted both the living and the dead. Prayers were believed to help souls ascend from purgatory, and the giving of food reflected a communal commitment to mercy, faith, and reciprocity. In this way, the act of knocking on doors became not just a plea for sustenance, but a gesture of spiritual interconnection across social lines and even across worlds.

Alongside souling, folk performances known as mummings or guising gained popularity throughout late medieval Europe. Groups of masked revelers, often young men or traveling players, would process through streets and hearths, enacting short plays, reciting poems, or dancing in exchange for food, ale, or coins. These grounded, often raucous displays carried forward Samhain’s themes of disguise and boundary‑crossing, though now framed within a Christian context. Costumes shifted from animal hides to more human guises—saints, devils, sinners, and stock characters from village lore blending the sacred with the theatrical and the spiritual with the absurd.

Disguises offered more than anonymity or the traditional guise of protection; they were a kind of social license and spiritual camouflage. To wear a mask during this liminal time was to blur the line between the living and the dead, the sacred and the profane. Roles could be reversed, identities obscured, and norms briefly suspended. Beneath the jest and play was a residual sense that the veil between worlds had not entirely closed, that something older, stranger, still stirred in the revelry.

In these centuries, then, what began as solemn remembrance took on an increasingly social and performative character. Rituals of prayer, masquerade, and gift-giving spread across Europe, gradually shifting from fear-driven rites towards communal celebration. Yet even as the Church sanctified the season, the ancient echoes of Samhain, the flicker of firelight, the masking of identity, the fragile line between life and death, remained tucked into the shadows of All Hallows’ Eve.

Halloween Comes to America: Immigration, Reinvention, and Secularization

As waves of Irish and Scottish immigrants arrived in North America throughout the 19th century, they brought with them the customs and superstitions of their homelands. In the crowded streets of East Coast cities and the small, growing towns of the Midwest, old-world traditions like souling, guising, and mischief-making were reborn in a new context. But like many immigrant customs, Halloween would not remain unchanged. It would be reshaped by the landscape, the culture, and the pressures of American life.

Guising took on a more theatrical flair, especially among children. Makeshift costumes were cobbled together from old clothes and household items, and masks, sometimes homemade, sometimes store-bought, became a central part of the night’s excitement. Mischief-making also evolved, and what were once lighthearted pranks rooted in folk tradition turned, at times, into full-blown vandalism. By the early 20th century, Halloween had earned a reputation in some towns as a night of mayhem, with smashed windows, overturned outhouses, and streetlamp sabotage becoming annual headaches for police and city officials.

In response, civic groups, women’s clubs, and schools began promoting a safer, more wholesome version of the holiday. Halloween was reimagined as a celebration for children becoming less spectral and more social. Community centers hosted fall festivals, churches organized costume parades, and families gathered for apple-bobbing, ghost stories, and pumpkin carving. The focus shifted toward fun rather than fear, though the flicker of Halloween’s darker origins never fully disappeared.

This American reinvention marked a turning point: Halloween was no longer just a religious or folk holiday. It had begun its transformation into a secular, widely celebrated fixture of American culture. And with each passing decade, the night grew brighter, louder, and more theatrical, setting the stage for the modern spectacle to come.

The Rise of Modern Halloween: Play, Performance, and Profit

By the 1920s, Halloween in North America had firmly taken root—but it was still a patchwork of customs, varying from one community to the next. As urbanization grew and children became the central focus of the holiday, efforts to standardize and sanitize Halloween accelerated. The once-chaotic traditions of guising and mischief evolved into a more structured form: trick-or-treating.

Trick-or-treating, as we know it today, was shaped during the 1930s and 1940s, but gained widespread popularity in the 1950s. The concept was simple and appealing: children, dressed in costume, would go door to door, offering a cheerful greeting in exchange for candy. It was a gesture that nodded to souling and guising but now cast in a lighthearted, commercial glow. Suburbs embraced the practice, and Halloween became a night where entire neighborhoods participated in a shared ritual of performance and reward.

As mid-century America leaned into consumer culture, Halloween followed suit. Candy companies quickly saw the opportunity and began marketing treats specifically for the holiday. By the 1970s, individually wrapped candies became not just a convenience but a safety assurance, responding to urban myths and parental fears. Costumes, once cobbled together at home, became mass-produced, offering children the chance to become their favorite characters, monsters, or celebrities for a night. Stores filled with orange-and-black decorations, plastic skeletons, and blinking jack-o'-lanterns. Halloween was no longer just celebrated; it was sold.

During the same era, Halloween’s darker tones returned, not through folk ritual, but through film. Horror movies surged in popularity throughout the 1970s and 80s, many of them centered on Halloween itself. John Carpenter’s 1978 slasher Halloween turned suburban streets into sites of terror, and the genre's influence only deepened in the decades that followed. Haunted houses, both amateur and professional, became seasonal staples. Television networks aired horror marathons, and October became synonymous not just with costumes and candy, but with fear, suspense, and storytelling.

Adult participation also grew. Costumed parties, horror film screenings, and haunted attractions allowed grown-ups to reclaim Halloween as a night of indulgence and theatricality. What was once a children’s celebration became multigenerational, a blend of nostalgia and escapism.

By the end of the 20th century, Halloween had become a multi-billion-dollar industry. It was a holiday of play and performance, blending innocence with eeriness, fun with fear. And though few remembered its origins in Samhain’s sacred fires or medieval soul cakes, the bones of the old rites were still there, draped in synthetic cobwebs and glowing under porch lights.

The Echoes of the Past: Liminal Spaces in a Modern World

Despite its glossy exterior, Halloween has never entirely severed itself from its origins. Beneath the bright costumes and mass-produced masks, the holiday still speaks to something deeper—older. It remains a liminal space, a night where transformation is celebrated, darkness is welcomed, and the boundaries of identity blur.

Children become ghouls and heroes. Adults don costumes to step outside themselves. We court fear for fun, telling ghost stories, visiting haunted houses, watching slashers that make our hearts race. But the thrill is familiar; it recalls the ancient tension between safety and the unknown. We light our homes, just as the Celts once lit bonfires, and greet the specters at our doors with offerings, even if they now come dressed as superheroes and cartoon villains.

Our fascination with the supernatural persists. Each October, shelves brim with skulls, witches, and spirits. Horror fiction thrives. Paranormal podcasts and urban legends capture our imagination. And in the ritual of dressing up, decorating, and gathering in the dark, we enact a shared acknowledgement that something stirs just beyond the veil, whether it be memory, fear, or something unnamed.

Halloween endures because it offers a space to face the things we usually ignore: death, fear, and the thrill of transformation. It gives us permission to explore the eerie and the absurd. In a world that often demands certainty and composure, Halloween remains a night of sanctioned strangeness, where the masks we wear say something true.

Conclusion: The Shadows We Carry

From Samhain’s sacred fires to suburban porches lined with jack-o’-lanterns, Halloween has always been a night of convergence. Each era reshaped it, layering new meanings, rituals, and aesthetics, but never fully erasing the old. What was once a festival of survival became a feast of the saints, then a playground for children, and finally, a celebration for all ages.

Yet the core remains: remembrance, fear, transformation, and story. We may no longer leave out food for wandering souls or pray for the dead with every door we knock, but in our costumes, our stories, and our shadows, we remember. We still gather in the dark, lighting candles, telling tales, and daring the night to come closer.

Written by: Hafsah Jasat