"It's Hallo-weird this year," says Liane Curtis with a laugh. Curtis, an actress from Los Angeles, has two sons, ages 10 and 12, and admits she is a tad trepidatious about the forthcoming holiday. "I told both my boys to stay away from the malls because Mommy is paranoid. And they are definitely not allowed to dress up like they're preparing for jihad. No ninjas, no turbans, no water guns, no play guns. And with all this crazy stuff in the mail, I'm laying down the law. Nothing powdery! No more Pixy Stix this year!"
Can you blame a mom for getting frazzled? A night that is designed to unleash a kind of controlled anarchy comes this year at a time of national neurosis. Is it possible to reconcile the two? At Halloween, says Jack Santino, a professor of popular culture at Ohio's Bowling Green State University, "we acknowledge the random evil in the world and give it a central place. And it's O.K., because it is playful. It is a safe time to deal with the unsafe." But, Santino says, the eruptions of Sept. 11 make it hard to feel playful. "It's too real; it impinges upon the fantasy. So we negotiate."
In Arkansas, Governor Mike Huckabee has encouraged trick-or-treaters to engage in church or school activities instead because "we can't handle the panic that comes when a parent encounters a broken Pixy Stick in a sack and thinks it is anthrax." And businesses, fully aware that Halloween is the nation's second biggest shopping holiday, are trying to adapt too. Universal Studios in Orlando, Fla., is continuing its 11-year tradition of Halloween Horror Nights but has changed the name of its dance club from the Blood Bath to the Ooze Zone. Other businesses are erring on the side of even greater prudence. General Growth Properties, owner of 145 malls, from the Silver City Galleria in Taunton, Mass., to the Ala Moana Center in Honolulu, plans to cancel its annual trick-or-treating events on Oct. 31.
This ignores the latest twist on a now familiar argument: that unless we dress up in grotesque or silly frocks and ask people for junk food, the terrorists will have won. "Halloween is the only holiday we have left where people open their doors to strangers," says Lesley Pratt Bannatyne, author of Halloween: An American Holiday, an American History. "It's a holiday for kids, and there is no reason to take it away from them."
But some kids and adults have found a way to seize the holiday and make it their own by giving it new definition: They are turning Oct. 31 into July 4. "We are saying that to celebrate Halloween is a patriotic act," says Santino. Fire-fighter and police uniforms are jumping off store shelves as the implements of Halloween make a 180[degree] turn from fangs to flags, ghouls to Rudy Giuliani, orange and black to red, white and blue.
"Right now our factories look like Betsy Ross's flag shop," says Howard Beige, executive vice president of Rubie's Costume, a Queens, N.Y., company, which supplies such giant retailers as K Mart, Wal-Mart and Toys "R" Us. Rubie's had expected kids to demand Harry Potter and SpongeBob Squarepants. But a week after the attacks, the company stocked up on red, white and blue material and set its 1,500 seamstresses working overtime to fashion fire-fighter and soldier costumes for the boys and USA Teen Cheerleader outfits for their sisters.