The Frightening Pagan History of Halloween | Full Special

[music playing] NARRATOR: It's coming. There's no escape. On Halloween, the veil between this world and the next will lift, and then all hell breaks loose.

People have been scaring each other for as long as there's been a Halloween, but how long is that? Where does it come from, and why do we put on disguises and carve Jack o' lanterns? To indulge our darkest fears, unlocking the secrets of Halloween means discovering how it all began thousands of years ago.

So lock the doors, dim the lights, and don't be scared as we dig up the real story of Halloween. [thunder rumbles] How can you describe Halloween without sounding insane? Masked children come to our doors and threaten us.

In return, we give them candy. But why? Why do we carve faces into fruit then light candles inside them, and why do we adorn our homes with coffins and tombstones?

The truth is, we take great pleasure in scaring ourselves to death. Halloween is about being someone else. It's about getting outside your own skin, and I think we tolerate it because we know it's one night.

NARRATOR: This impulse to confront our fears of life and of death and make sport of them, it's ancient, and so are our treasured Halloween traditions. When did Halloween begin? Its ancient origins go back to the old Celtic calendar, and the old Celtic tribes divided the year between a light half and a dark half and Samhain, their ancient holiday, was a precursor to our Halloween that was the beginning of the dark half.

NARRATOR: Thousands of years ago, the Celts, one of Europe's early tribes, celebrated their Samhain harvest festival with bonfires on the night of October 31st to welcome the new year. For ancient peoples, harvest was a matter of life and death. If crops fail, people starved.

Death was always close. STEVEN GILLON: The harvest time could be a scary time. The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting longer.

There may or may not be enough food to last through the winter, so I think this is where this nightmarish quality possibly comes from. It's a bit of a warning. It's going to get cold and dark, gather together, come home, and don't send anybody out alone in the dark.

NARRATOR: But the Celts believe there was even more to Samhain. What marks Samhain in this transition from light to dark was that time and space became permeable, flexible, and so that spirits that, not only of the dead, but of the past or of other realities could wander into our reality, and humans could wander out and get lost in the other world as well. The veil between life and death was at its thinnest, and the living and the dead could commingle, and that's at the root of all the Halloween celebrations.

NARRATOR: Stories persist of people on Samhain night getting trapped in the other world and of the dead appearing among the living. But the truth is, we know precious little about Samhain. We can only guess that their bonfires likely drew one familiar Halloween icon, a thing familiar, yet frightening to many.

The bat. Before there was electricity, the only way you would have seen a bat would have been by the firelight, and in fact, you probably would have seen it around the fire because bats eat insects and insects are attracted to the light. NARRATOR: Bats come out at night, and nighttime was scary time.

So if bats are the best and baddest part of your Halloween, you might just credit ancient people like the Celts, and they weren't the only ancient culture with creepy traditions. Others also looked to their dead. Many, many cultures set aside a day or a couple of days to ritually celebrate and recognize the dead.

An interesting thing is that you find a lot of them about the same time period, especially in agricultural societies, because if you think about it, in the spring things come up out of the ground, they're very green. You harvest in the middle of the summer, and towards the fall and when it gets towards winter, things die. NARRATOR: But how did these ancient traditions survive into our modern era?

In Western culture, they were preserved by, of all people, Christians. In a bizarre twist of history, as Christianity spread, it adopted and reimagined Pagan folk ways rather than try to stamp them out. This made it easier to convert Pagans.

A key Pagan festival destined to get a Christian makeover was Lemuria, when celebrants placated the dead, culminating on May 13th. Of all the different days that they have in the Roman calendar to celebrate the dead, it was the spookiest. So on the Lemuria, what are called the larvae, the ghosts of the departed, would come up and haunt people.

NARRATOR: To quell the dead, Pagan Romans poured milk onto their graves or offered them little cakes, but the church co-opted Lemuria in 609 AD, turning May 13th into All Saints Day, a day to honor the most holy of dead Christians. Setting aside this day was an attempt to Christianize this very Pagan festival, and yet, at the same time, what it did was it kept a lot of the same things going. The Christianized version of Lemuria was such a success that church leaders made a decision that eventually gave rise to Halloween.

They moved all saints, or Hallows day, to November 1st to drain the life out of Pagan Samhain. Because Samhain fell on the night of October 31st before All Hallows day on November 1st, people started calling someone All Hallows evening, the evening before All Hallows Day. This shortened into All Hallows Even, and finally, into Halloween.

And then, to be safe, the church went one step further, adding a holiday to honor, not just saints, but everyday Christians. November 2nd became All Souls Day, a church sanctioned holiday to honor the departed. This is real important for Halloween, because this is where Halloween gets its association with dead souls, death, and the supernatural again.

NARRATOR: So thank the church for inspiring the creepy essentials of Halloween, but wait, there's more. The church also helped establish the tradition of trick or treating-- sort of. It all started during the Middle Ages on All Souls Day when priests told Christians to pray for souls trapped between heaven and hell in another world they called purgatory.

Purgatory was not a pleasant place. It's not hell, it's not as bad as hell is, but it's still probably pretty fiery. Souls are suffering there.

Luckily, there is something that you could do. You could offer up prayers for them. NARRATOR: How did souls get out of purgatory?

According to the church, if enough prayers were offered, a soul would fly up into heaven. This led to a medieval custom that bears more than a striking resemblance to our modern trick or treat. Children would go souling, begging for soul cakes, spiced cakes filled with raisins.

In return for these treats, the beggars would offer up prayers for souls trapped in purgatory. While this forerunner to trick or treat became a preoccupation for medieval Christians, so did another future essential of Halloween. Witches.

It made perfect sense for people in medieval times to believe that there were demons and witches, and if there were demons in which they were responsible for bad things in the world, it made sense that you hunt them down and you kill them. That was their world view. NARRATOR: A witch panic in the 16th century helped establish the look of the character that, for many, epitomizes Halloween.

Almost always women, witches were seen as in league with Satan. They were probably the healers who had cures and folklore and passed down orally through generations, and at some point, that becomes very suspicious for whatever reason to the religious people around them, and a lot of the symbols that were associated with these women, who probably often lived alone, may have been somewhat eccentric, of course, end up becoming associated with witches. NARRATOR: Over time, as more and more women were accused of witchcraft, their practical kitchen tools acquired sinister dimensions and became model Halloween icons.

Even something as mundane as a broom became an instrument of evil, as well as handy transportation. Another accessory in every witches lair was perfect for brewing devilish potions, the caldron. Caldrons become very popular.

Again, it was something that every household had in medieval ages. It was your basic cooking implement. NARRATOR: The pointed witch's hat was a variation on a medieval country woman's hat, and of course, the mysterious lurking killer with the glowing eyes, the cat.

It's not surprising that cats are associated with witches and Halloween. Cats can be a little enigmatic. You don't really know what's going on in their head.

Also, they used to hang out near the hearth and by the brooms, so they became associated with witchcraft and with Halloween. NARRATOR: Black cats and witches, graveyards and ghosts. The spooky elements of America's great Gothic holiday were taking shape.

These ghoulish icons would soon make their way to the new world, where they'd helped create the extravaganza we know today. Bonfires, worshipping the dead, begging for treats. The elements of our modern Halloween were haunting Europe at the dawn of the 17th century, but they hadn't yet collected into a spooky, secular holiday.

History would now start consolidating them and give life to an odd celebration of death. It's a death that makes this holiday. Whether it's the threat of death if there is a bad harvest.

The end of one order or the beginning of a new. This idea of the endless cycle of life and death and renewal is part of a lot of holidays, not just Halloween. NARRATOR: This period saw the continued influence of one of Halloween's most colorful icons, the mask.

It often appeared in tandem with another Halloween tradition. Destructiveness. Rowdy beggars at All Hallows Eve also guzzled their share of alcohol and demands for food and drink became more threatening.

Masks helped hide their identities. These boundaries between the living and the dead and between society's rules and anarchy were tested as day turned to night on All Hallows' Eve. In Britain, they got into some very particular forms that involved dressing in costumes and going house to house to present these little plays, and at the end of the performance, they would be rewarded with food and sometimes money.

NARRATOR: Was this trick or treat? Not quite, but the resemblance was there. In 17th century England, many of these customs survived only in rural areas, but they would soon turn up in the city streets, thanks to a prokaryotic terrorist named Guy Fawkes.

On November 5th, 1605, Fawkes tried to blow up London's house of lords with 36 kegs of gunpowder. Guy Fawkes was tried, found guilty, and hanged. And according to legend, his body was then drawn and quartered and the pieces were thrown into a fire.

NARRATOR: The next year on the anniversary of the failed plot and every year that followed, the children of London mocked the memory of Guy Fawkes by causing chaos in the streets, parading, begging, and building bonfires. Today, all over England, this is called Guy Fawkes Day, or bonfire night. A Guy Fawkes Day fell on November 5th, which is very close to Halloween, so a lot of the energy that was focused on Halloween shifted toward Guy Fawkes Day.

NARRATOR: While it wasn't our Halloween yet, it had all the signs children and adults alike taking advantage of the darkness and letting loose, but would this Pagan form of celebration make its way across the Atlantic to disrupt the sanctuary of the new world? Not if colonial Puritans had their way. The Puritan worldview was very much informed by the Bible, and in the Bible, you do find, not only god, but the devil, demons, angels, the whole spread of supernatural beings.

This is really what their focus on. Pernicious evil forces. NARRATOR: For the Puritans of New England, the supernatural was a dark, menacing force, not a harmless superstition worthy of inspiring a holiday.

Despite their efforts to kill the Halloween tradition before it took hold, there were a few Guy Fawkes celebrations that made their way to the shores of America. Other settlers tolerated or even embraced the traditions that threatened the Puritans, and seeds were planted for the holiday that would morph into our American Halloween. You find snippets here and there.

People celebrating or having a costume party or something, but it's very difficult to actually pin that to something we would call a capital H Halloween. For example, there's an 1833 description of a Halloween, not even so much a party, but just a small gathering where they told ghost stories around a fire. NARRATOR: But now, one more spooky standby.

The image of a spirit or ghost would join witches and skeletons in a macabre Halloween dance. By the mid 19th century, America was primed for a much darker holiday. Having endured four long years of civil war that ended in 1865 with over a half million dead.

There were so many unclaimed, unknown dead bodies that the Civil War left behind that this country was obsessed with them, and mostly, it was that so many of these soldiers died unknown. We don't know what happened to them, so there was a huge sense of they could come back. Maybe they're not dead.

It makes perfect sense that people would tell more ghost stories. And the very first Halloween ghost stories were about people coming back home. NARRATOR: It's at this time that America's Halloween story really begins.

After the Civil War when Scots and Irish immigrants brought their rural, old world Halloween customs with them, they helped to establish even more American Halloween traditions. For the Scots, it was a little bit of a scarier night. Until fairly late, we're still talking about the appearance of bogies on Halloween.

NARRATOR: Bogies, or Boogie Men, we're amorphous, pestering ghosts that plagued children, hiding under beds or tapping on windows or lurking by a gate or turnstile. There was a belief that there was a bogie on every style, which meant on Halloween night, you could cross any gate and there might be something sitting there waiting to get you. NARRATOR: Halloween's signature symbol, the Jack o' lantern, also began as a European tradition, but the prototype wasn't carved from a pumpkin.

There is a great legend about a character named Jack o' lantern. And Jack was a troublemaker, but he was so bad he even managed to get himself thrown out of hell, which is not an easy thing to do. But the devil did decide to have pity on him and scooped up an ember from the fires of hell and gave it to him.

So Jack takes the ember and he puts it inside a hollowed out turnip, and he walks around and that becomes the legend of Jack o' lantern. NARRATOR: In one age old European practice, children would carve their own Jack o' lantern out of turnips and light them with candles. The first reference we have in the United States to Jack o' lantern comes from Nathaniel Hawthorne, and he's writing in twice told tales and he's describing someone's very tattered coat full of holes, and when you hold it up to the light, it shines like a Jack o' lantern would.

NARRATOR: Americans improved on the Jack o' lantern tradition. They substituted big round pumpkins for the old world's hard little turnips, and Halloween finally had its trademark. Certainly by the time of the Civil War, the expressive possibilities of pumpkin carving were very well known that ghostly shrunken skull was the turn up in the old country had really blossomed into something else.

NARRATOR: Pumpkins are generally harvested around Halloween, and kids realized Jack o' lanterns could be a pranksters best weapon on Halloween night. Kids figured out this great thing they could do. They could take a pumpkin and you could hollow it out, and you put a candle on it, and then you take that pumpkin and you put it on a stick and you put a sheet over it, and you'd parade around you put it in front of a window or something, and it's really a pretty scary picture.

NARRATOR: Jack o' lanterns soon became the face of Halloween, but Scots and Irish immigrants also brought with them the more rambunctious, stone throwing, prank playing, Halloween revelry to America. And on Halloween night, at the dawn of the 20th century, there was a whole dark world of trouble just waiting for American boys. Halloween had been on a dark and scary journey from its origins with the Celts centuries ago.

In the Middle Ages, it became a Christian holiday honoring the dead. But by the 16th century, it was turning into a rowdy, kids celebration, marked by begging and pranks. By the 1800s, Halloween had even moved into cities and towns across America.

But the ghastly face of Halloween was reimagined in gruesome shades of orange and black at the turn of the 20th century. For the first time, artists of the era brought together all things scary and linked them to Halloween. Skeletons and spider webs, Jack o' lanterns and bats.

They established the look of Halloween that we still use today. Among these icons are white sheeted ghosts. The sheet that a ghost wears derives from the winding sheet, the shroud that corpses were traditionally wrapped in before burial.

NARRATOR: And Jack o' lanterns. The big grin still connotes the rictus of a death's head, as does the triangular nose hole, and even when it seems kind of jolly, death is still lurking there in the imagery. NARRATOR: Horned devils came from medieval depictions of Satan, and witches from witch hunting hysteria that swept through Europe and Puritan America.

Witches became very popular in the early part of the 20th century, which is why they naturally became linked to Halloween. There's actually a change in the way we perceive witches. The witches in the 19th century were old, they had big noses, and there were warts.

And the witches in the 20th century are actually kind of attractive. It makes Halloween just a little, not only scary, but also a little naughty. NARRATOR: But even as Halloween was dressing its old customs in new costumes, it was also creating new traditions.

Bad ones. Was Halloween in the early 20th century getting out of hand? To the dismay of authorities and property owners, the answer was yes.

There was whatever you could think of. There was a bunch of mischief. Back in those days, people had buggies.

The bigger kids would try to take a buggy and put it up on a haystack and there's about a half a dozen guys and they just push and push it up the haystack. It was a lot of fun. Oh, we never did anything that was really destructive.

Mostly tricks. NARRATOR: But for others, those tricks were more destructive. Pranks, usually committed by adolescent boys, plagued cities like Chicago and Philadelphia.

By the 1920s, Halloween in America was turning into a crisis. Tricks on Halloween night were out of hand. The destructive pranks went beyond just smashing pumpkins.

Kids would take bars of soap, and they'd put them on the rails for street cars so that the street cars would derail people would actually get hurt. They would take the steps in front of people's doors and move them so when people walked outside, they would fall over and get hurt. They would set fires.

They would throw stones through windows. I mean, this is really destructive stuff. NARRATOR: In rural communities, pranksters took wagons apart and reassembled them on roofs.

They removed gates on farm fences so that animals could escape. This particular prank was so popular that in some places, the night before Halloween was called gate night. In other cities, it was mischief night, or even hell night.

Halloween pranks during the Great Depression may have been in part a product of the desperation of the time. An excuse for troublemaking, but there was already trouble everywhere, and many communities couldn't afford to feed their own, much less clean up destructive messes. LISA MORTON: The Halloween of 1933 was actually labeled black Halloween in a lot of newspapers because of all of the destruction that the cities incurred.

The kids were no longer just doing innocent silly things, now they were smashing light bulbs, they were setting fire to buildings, they were smashing car windows. NARRATOR: If Halloween were to survive, it would have to change. Schools and police departments and other civic groups consciously and very actively promoted the idea of taming Halloween.

And so they started to invent all sorts of things for kids to do to divert them. Town wide parties, costume contests, games, everything that you can think of to get the kids away from pulling tricks and into the light. NARRATOR: Novelty companies like Dennison and Bystoll helped out these civic efforts.

Dennison published a series of Halloween guides called "Bogie Books" that suggested ways of turning Halloween from a prank night into a party night. Dennison was one of the first companies that realized there was money to be made off on Halloween. They started to put their own Halloween materials out for retail sale in drugstores all over America.

NARRATOR: They also made masks and paper costumes. This was a first. It was the first time that costumes were specifically made and marketed for Halloween.

Before that, costumes had all been homemade. When I was a kid, there wasn't Halloween outfits like you wear now. So basically, you are your overalls or your jeans or sloppy claws, but you didn't go downtown and buy special outfit just for Halloween.

Just anything you know to make yourself a little conspicuous. NARRATOR: Paper costumes were fancy and an improvement on the homemade variety, but they had their drawbacks. Unfortunately, a lot of that paper was flammable, and I was surprised at how many newspaper clippings I came across of costumes catching fire.

NARRATOR: Soon, other manufacturers looking to tap into the kid market for Halloween costumes began making more durable disguises. Sears first box costumes came around 1930, and then it went from there. And the costumes came off of radio show characters and the funny papers.

Costumes for parties, costumes for wild, town wide parties. And for school parties and church parties, Halloween was a big social occasion. NARRATOR: Halloween parades also helped drag the holiday out from the shadows and into the public arena.

Allentown, Pennsylvania may have had the first parade in 1905, but others soon followed. Toms River, New Jersey in 1919. Anoka, Minnesota in 1920.

Anoka has held its parade every year since. In fact, the city now bills itself the Halloween capital of the world. Each of these local efforts to tame Halloween worked, to some extent, but what Halloween really needed was a whole new tradition, and it would soon get one.

But this new tradition would prove to be a variation on a very old Halloween theme. Trick or treat. That phrase still triggers cascades of candy into plastic pumpkins and pillowcases across America on the night of October 31st.

And though the custom goes back centuries, the phrase, trick or treatment, is probably less than 100 years old. Trick or treatment is amazingly new. People think trick or treat goes back for centuries, and it doesn't.

Trick or treatment is actually less than eighty years old, probably. The term derives from pranking that was very widespread and destructive in America in the 20th century, and at some point, somebody came up with a brilliant idea of buying off these pranksters. NARRATOR: Homeowners bribed rowdy kids with homemade treats, such as popcorn balls and candy apples to avoid getting pranked or tricked.

In 1939, the phrase and the customer turned up in print. Doris Hudson Moss published an article in American Home magazine that talked about the success she had having a Halloween open house for the kids in her neighborhood. She didn't get tricked, she gave them sweets, it all worked.

NARRATOR: With the new custom came new treats. Not so much homemade goodies like popcorn balls, now, kids got store bought, prepackaged candies. Mars bars, Reese's Cups and good old Hershey's chocolate.

Candy finally killed the rowdy Halloween. And now, the time was right for the reinvented holiday to hit Hollywood. [gibberish] Hello, boys!

Trick or treat! Thank you, Mr Donald. NARRATOR: Halloween was becoming a pop culture phenomenon.

A national festival attended by millions, celebrating the joys of scavenging for mass produced candy. I loved Halloween when I was a kid. I participated in, and I love the rituals of it.

I love the pranks of it. I love the mischief of it. I love going to houses and dressing up and getting candy, and then there were parties, and it was just fantastic.

NARRATOR: Then, in 1966, Halloween found a home where all pop culture ultimately goes, TV. Halloween stature zoomed off the charts when America went trick or treating with Charlie Brown. The whole idea the great pumpkin of course, came from the comic strip when Sparky Schulz decided that it would be very funny if one of the kids got his holidays mixed up, and so that's how Linus ends up in the pumpkin patch every year.

Who are you writing to, Linus? This is the time of year to write the great pumpkin. On Halloween night, the great pumpkin rises out of his pumpkin patch and flies through the air with his bag of toys for all the children.

You must be crazy. When are you going to stop believing in something that isn't true? When you stop believing in that fella with the red suit and the white beard.

NARRATOR: Television, and America's most popular comic strip had given Halloween its unofficial seal of approval. The holiday had never in its entire history been so mainstream, but Halloween themed cartoons aimed at kids were one thing, a movie for adults with Halloween as its theme was another. Nobody had ever tried it before.

That is until director John Carpenter took a stab at it in 1978 with the classic "Halloween. " The idea of recalling my film "Halloween" came from the distributor. And when he said it, I thought, you know, he's absolutely right.

There's never been really a Halloween themed film. It's one of those eye openers. Wow, why didn't I think of that years ago?

What a great idea. NARRATOR: Carpenter's $325,000 film would spawn a franchise grossing more than $500 million. It broke new ground, elevating the horror film from B movie status to respected genre and completely by accident.

The film would also redefine our attitudes about Halloween masks. It started when the wardrobe budget forced the crew to create a mask for the villain, Michael Myers, for next to nothing. The production designer ran up to Burt Wheeler's Magic Shop on Hollywood Boulevard and bought this Captain Kirk from Star Trek mask, which didn't look anything like William Shatner, just this strange face, elongated face.

But it was spray painted and fixed up a little bit. It was distorted, which is perfect. It's kind of written that way in the script as wearing a face.

NARRATOR: The bargain basement mask and the villain behind it soon became another Halloween icon. Michael Myers, still, even though the original movie came out in 1978, it still remains one of the most popular Halloween characters of all time. This idea of the mask as a stalker, menacing young people at Halloween.

It shifted the focus of Halloween away from ghosts and goblins to human villainy. NARRATOR: But this nondescript mask did much more than that. It helped to redefine the limits of what a Halloween mask could be, and it ushered in a new face of Halloween.

One for a new Millennium. For hundreds of years, masks and costumes have been a way for partiers to disguise themselves. And now, it's a multi-million dollar business.

One Halloween themed store, Burbank California's Halloween Town is so popular it's open 12 months of the year, satisfying customers need for disguise. We've had this business for 10 years now, and we really wanted to make it special so we decided to open a year round permanent store with ultimate spooky shopping environment it really puts people in the mood to shop for Halloween. NARRATOR: Halloween stuff is all over the store.

But the heart of Halloween town's business is masks. We have dozens of masks. We have the best zombies you can find.

The best clowns. Masks and disguises have always been great ways to let you off the hook in terms of your behavior. With an acting out kind of holiday like Halloween, of course, it's perfect.

When I was a kid, I loved masks, but usually all you can find at the local stores were crappy, plastic flimsy masks that lost their shape, but as time went on, they've really evolved into an art form, where there's a lot of time spent in the sculpting in the painting, and now it's to the point where you can get an expensive high end mask that almost rivals movie quality. NARRATOR: And Wayne Toth would know. He's a special effects artist for major motion pictures.

We have a lot of customers that like higher end stuff or high quality stuff, so we go out of our way to get that. We have high end costumes, fancy jackets, and all kinds of accessories you really couldn't find anywhere else. We try and make it so, no matter what you're looking for, you can find it here.

NARRATOR: Today's upscale masks and costumes are a far cry from the generic devils, witches, skeletons, and ghosts of the 1960s, but that's the decade when the Halloween wardrobe began to change. Hollywood started to influence what kids wore, transforming them into their favorite TV and movie characters. Today, that trend has escalated to an obsession.

Film franchises like "Nightmare on Elm Street," "Scream," and "Halloween" are inspiring growing legions of kids to dress to kill. To wear the mask of the killer the ghost of the skeleton it gives a kid a sense of a lot of power and also of safety because the monster can't get you if you are the monster for that moment. NARRATOR: Crazed killer masks are just part of Halloween's evolving taste in costumes.

The only rule now is that there are no rules. Masks take their inspiration from pop culture, religion, politics, you name it, and a growing number of faces behind them belongs, not to kids, but adults. Halloween has become a huge adult activity, and I don't think that was the case 50, 60 years ago.

But it's been, again, a specific day set aside where you can be somebody that you normally aren't. You can get behind a mask, you can wear clothes you would never wear during the rest of the year, and people enjoy it. NARRATOR: Truth is, our 21st century Halloween is as much a holiday for adults as it is a holiday for kids.

You get those children who are now grown up, and they become very nostalgic for Halloween. So Halloween shifts again, starts to become more of an adult holiday. NARRATOR: Halloween businesses now cater to anyone who wants to get into the spirit of the holiday, with parties and Halloween themed venues such as haunted houses.

50 years ago, when you were too old to trick or treat, you probably had to stay home and hand out candy. There was nothing else for you to do. Now, there is a vast and imaginative haunted house industry just for you, and there's something like 4,000 haunted houses in the United States every year.

[screaming] I loved haunted houses. They fascinated me. They terrified me as a kid.

NARRATOR: But haunted houses aren't the only place to find adults getting out on Halloween. In places like New York city's Greenwich Village Halloween Parade and West Hollywood's Halloween Carnival, the holiday takes a walk on the wild and naughty side. Of course the gay Halloween parade is now a big fixture in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and of course, a big part of the New York, celebration.

But it's this idea of turning the world on its head and being who you aren't or would like to be. Again, it's that procurial, American obsession with self transformation, and that's the thing, I think, that really ignited Halloween in America. NARRATOR: This sexually liberated Halloween sometimes crosses the line from adults to adults only.

If you look at the costumes that are sold to adults these days, the costumes for women are all borderline prostitute costumes, you know? The sexy nurse, the sexy maid, the sexy anything. NARRATOR: Now, grown ups are taking it one step further.

They stock up on specially packaged Halloween novelty candy and join their children going door to door on Halloween night. These trick or treaters of the 1970s and '80s now seize the opportunity to relive their childhood Halloween's, dressing in full costume, supposedly to keep a watchful eye on their kids. And just as Halloween has scared kids for years, Halloween scares parents, too.

They fear sending their kids out unsupervised into a hostile world full of poisoned candy and razor blade riddled apples, but they really shouldn't be. I grew up hearing about razor blades in apples myself, and it's clearly what we would call a contemporary legend. Another term as urban legend.

There is a great societal unease about this idea that we're telling our kids to go take candy from strangers, so there's a lot of stories about razor blades and candy apples and these sorts of things, and parents every year get very very worried about it. Did razor blades and apples ever happen? I believe there are a couple of cases, but of course, you can ask, which came first?

The story or the actions. NARRATOR: Razor blades in apples, Jack o' lanterns, soul cakes. They make up the legends, the texture of the Halloween we know.

Today, Halloween wears many masks. It's a day for adults to push their boundaries a little. Clearly, a lot of women want to have a very sexy side of them, and it's only on Halloween that they bring it out, maybe, you know, they could do a little more often.

NARRATOR: Yet, Halloween still remains the domain of kids. When you're a kid, you had one night a year where you were in charge. You got to dress up, you got to be something that you usually weren't, and you kind of even got paid for the privilege of this.

It was an amazing holiday. Halloween doesn't like to have its energies tamed. You know, the rebellious aspect it's going to pop up somewhere.

NARRATOR: Look close enough, and you will see that Halloween is a showcase of everything the human race fears. Through the centuries, we've learned to live with what scares us most, and now, on October the 31st, we turn our fears into fire. So beware of haunted houses and creaking doors, billowing sheets, and full moons, and don't be surprised if a smiling Jack o' lantern wishes you happy Halloween!