When did Halloween stop being scary?

When I was a kid, and used to go trick-or-treating with my dad, I would absolutely lose it if I lost sight of him for even a second. I had a lot of imagination when I was young, so I truly believed that on Halloween, in the dark, there really were zombies, vampires, mummies, and other monsters out and about just waiting for kids to walk away from their parents to eat them.

Flash forward to a few years later, when I was a young teen, and I went to small Halloween house parties that usually involved a bunch of R-rated movies that our parents didn't know we had our hands on. I spent these Halloweens pretty scared as well, I mean, I watched the movies with lots of people, but I had to go home and sleep alone... Let's just say I kept a few lights on.

Then came the phase at the end of high school, when my friends and I thought it was a good idea to look for haunted houses and graveyards. We actually tried to scare ourselves. Costumes were no longer cool, so we had to find other ways to celebrate. There is a church out in St.Andrews where there's an urban legend that says if you walk around this place in a row of 13, 13 times, by the end of the walk, one of you would be missing. We did a few of these ghost-chaser events throughout the years, but there was always that guy who decided he wanted to scare all of us girls, so he took it upon himself to make the myths come true. Because of this, I never saw anyone go missing for real, but that doesn't mean I didn't get scared out of my wits.

This is where Halloween began to lose its horror. The party stage. As soon as my friends and I were 18, suddenly Halloween didn't mean "let's get scared!" it meant, "let's party."Costumes had become cool again, and we went all out. Halloween represented one of the most fun nights of the year.

And now? I still love Halloween, but I miss the times where I would get scared to death. When I would see a black cat, and intentionally walk around it. I guess this is one reason horror movies are so huge this time of year. Maybe we're trying to re-create that feeling from when we were kids. Maybe it's the reason I'm gonna be Snow White this year?

In any case, I'll still go on celebrating. To be honest, it's nice to pretend that it's the goblins, ghosts, and vampires who are to be feared for a night.