Maeve Higgins: Channelling my inner Cher for Halloween

Everyone is catered for on Halloween, a sugar-fuelled party that celebrates the most harmless of holidays, albeit one with roots that trace back to the ancient Gaelic festival of Samhain

A 'scary dentist practice' Halloween display in Brooklyn, New York, in 2018. Photo: Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images

SPOOKY season is upon us, and my mind, body, and spirit have never been more ready. I have horrible little warty squashes crammed into a bowl on my kitchen table, I have bags of Hershey’s Kisses prepared to fling at the trick-or-treaters, and I’m invited to a Witches of Eastwick-themed party.

Throughout my Brooklyn neighbourhood, people have decorated their buildings with webbing and giant spiders crawling up the walls. Nodding clowns and tumble-down tombstones line their front gardens, alongside carved pumpkins and floating puppet ghosts crowding their steps.

It’s fun during the day but, when walking home from the subway after work at night, some houses are genuinely creepy — particularly the ones with body parts poking up through the ground or with motion-activated demonic giggling.

I am impressed by the ingenuity on display. Still, nobody has yet come close to an artist named Steven Novak in Dallas, whose terrifyingly realistic Halloween decorations caused several people to call the police last year. Novak used gallons of fake blood and a number of dummies to create a kind of mash-up of a zombie invasion and a major crime scene all around his house, and succeeded in completely freaking people out. In an interview with The Dallas Observer, Novak seemed thrilled with the response.

“I’m most proud of the wheelbarrow tipped over by the street full of Hefty bags, looking like a failed attempt to dispose of the dismembered bodies in the middle of the night,” Novak said.

A kid walked by and asked me what happened to them; I said they ate too many Skittles.

One in three New Yorkers, myself included, were not born in the US. Many more are the children of immigrants. This city is populated by millions of people from all over the world, from a massive variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds, with thousands of different traditions and celebrations. 

Diwali, Yom Kippur, Ramadan, Easter, Thanksgiving; those big days do make an impression in the city’s daily life, but not one as visible and commercial as Halloween. It’s just a big party, an almost meaningless time, a secular holiday, albeit one with roots that trace back to a number of both pagan and religious traditions.

The name is a derivative of ‘All Hallows Eve,’ which is October 31st, the night before All Hallows Day on November 1, followed by All Saints Day on November 2 — two critical dates in the Christian calendar.

Also crucial to the ever-evolving meaning of Halloween is that it connects back to the ancient Gaelic festival of Samhain, meaning the end of summer. The seasons change now; winter is coming and Samhain marked that for our ancestors. Samhain was also a ‘thin’ time of year, when the boundaries between our Earthly realm and other, invisible worlds became porous, and we could connect with the underworld and the dead.

The Gaels were not alone in practising this custom; the Mexican Día de Muertos, or Day of The Dead, holiday occurs at the same time of year — a tradition that also honors and communes with those who have died. The voracious appropriation of these important inherited rituals is quite a sight to behold.

Today, it looks like most of us pick and choose which parts of this vast and mysterious set of rituals and beliefs to keep or discard, and simply make up our own version of Halloween. Ultimately, of course, Halloween provides an opening for the grandest of all American traditions: the opportunity to make money. 

It provides an endlessly marketable theme; the magic and scariness and goriness translate to endless amounts of plastic nonsense, which comes pouring out of every kind of manufacturer.  I’m talking trashy cultural products, from films and mass-produced costumes that will be worn once, to all manner of specifically spooky sweets, which will be reduced to half price in Walmart on November 2. 

Honestly, I’ll be there to buy them, filling my pumpkin-shaped bucket with cheap candy corn and ghoulish chocolate treats because cheap sweets (AKA bargain candy) is my adopted religion. Bargain candy and Cher.

At least be spooky and devastating

The Witches of Eastwick party invitation came from my friend Sara with instructions on the dress code: “Interpret the theme as loosely or strictly as you like, just be witchy, and if that’s not your style, I’ll settle for spooky and devastating.”

I’m not sure exactly what I will wear, but I know it will be more Cher than Jack Nicholson. I just can’t pull off that look he gives with those eyebrows of his, although not for lack of trying.

Cher plays Alexandra Metford, and she is perfect. A widow who wears bodycon outfits and works as a sculptor when she’s not quilting or drinking martinis, she delivers one of the greatest strings of insults heard on screen.

To Nicholson’s character, Daryl Van Horne, she says: “In the short time we’ve been together, you have demonstrated every loathsome characteristic of the male personality, and even discovered a few new ones. You are physically repulsive, intellectually retarded; you’re morally reprehensible, vulgar, insensitive, selfish, stupid; you have no taste, a lousy sense of humour, and you smell. You’re not even interesting enough to make me sick.”

Cher who plays Alexandra Metford in the Witches of Eastwick and delivers a plethora of insults to Jack Nicholson's character, Daryl Van Horne. Photo: Sam Morris/Getty Images

That’s her vibe, one I’m hoping to emulate through my attitude as well as my costume. I will gladly wear the tight black clothes, and make my hair as big as possible. I may even accessorise with earrings. I have explored some homemade options on Etsy, where the range available is quite extraordinary.

Every imagined trinket has become real. The makers are so creative and capable their work will surely blow the minds of future archaeologists as they examine the small acrylic pumpkins with glowing eyes and miniature guillotines tinged with blood. 

I have my eye on a pair of macrame earrings with a grinning skull suspended in the centre. One reviewer gave the earrings five stars, stating: “YES...JUST WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR!! I am a skull fanatic & throwing in Rasta colors makes it even better.”

Do you see? Everyone is catered for on Halloween, this silliest and most harmless of holidays. It’s a sugar-fuelled party that we are all invited to, so you may as well come along and have fun while you can — between you and me, I’ve heard Cher might be there.