Celebrating life and death on Halloween

An attendee dressed as Michael Myers from "Halloween" poses during New York Comic Con at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City, Sunday. AP-Yonhap

By Choi Bada

Halloween is just around the corner as it is celebrated on the last day of October annually. This festive occasion, which was originally celebrated in some Western countries with a Celtic connection and is extremely popular in the United States, successfully went global with the spread of American pop culture.

Celebrating the day of festivity is no longer a new phenomenon at least in some places in Korea, such as Itaewon and Hongdae, where expatriates and the young get together.

Halloween has become popular among young adults in Korea, whereas it is still more like a wholesome family activity, which is almost exclusively children oriented, in the United States. In Korea, there is no culture of decorating homes to make them look spooky and of playing trick-or-treat, which is found mostly in occasional parties for kids at English-language crammers.

Instead, young grown-ups in Korea have adopted and relished the Halloween idea of disguising themselves and being anything that they want to be.

They seem to have celebrated Halloween as a day to dress up in costumes ― from traditional themes, such as witches, zombies, and vampires to figures in pop culture, such as Iron Man and players in teal-green tracksuits in "Squid Game" ― and throw a lavish party with friends that involves the excessive drinking of alcohol.

What made Korean young adults embrace and enjoy the Western festivity and its costume tradition? For them, getting into the Halloween spirit by dressing up is perhaps more like a means of pure fun than a way to protect themselves from the mischief of roaming evil spirits, which is the fundamental purpose of Halloween costumes.

In my view, celebrating the day in costume is more than a way to pursue amusement, given the social contexts where young Koreans are located.

They live in a highly competitive and high-stress Korean society, which experienced an accelerated and compressed sociocultural, economic, and political changes over the past few decades.

Young adults have had too much pressure and stress from their daily lives where they have been forced to study and work hard and to continuously engage in the competitive struggles for survival. They also get stressed due to strict and hierarchical Confucian sociocultural norms that guide them to behave in certain ways and influence their social relationships.

Disguising themselves in costumes for Halloween then provides them with an opportunity to take on different identities they choose and to indulge in their alter-egos at least for a night. Living in the body of another prods young adults to do what their true selves have difficulties doing in real life.

Taking on an alternative self also permits them to conduct themselves in different ways that are incongruent with the standards of society, but largely and exclusively in certain places where Halloween celebration is popular and acceptable.

In this regard, Halloween performs as a ritual of overturning the existing sociocultural codes for young grown-ups, a ritual with an ephemeral quality that enables them to temporarily escape and even subvert the status quo just for a night once a year.

Celebrating the festivity in disguise is not only a secular getaway from, but also a reversal of sociocultural norms that control their behaviors and leave them always struggling to succeed. It is no doubt that dressing up in costume offers them the anonymity or identity concealment necessary for the momentary inversion ritual.

Therefore, the commemoration of Halloween can serve young adults as a welcome short break from the humdrum and drudgery of daily life.

During the festival, they can express their vitality and individuality, regain their youthfulness, and express a variety of negative emotions that they have suppressed so far. Doing so would eventually help reenergize them to come back to reality and live their life harder until the next year's carnivalesque event.

Halloween was historically inseparably related to death, however, although the social function and meaning that the occurrence now has for young Koreans is about life. This is what the young ones who commemorate Halloween under their alter-egos need to know.

It is known that Halloween has its roots in the ancient festival of Samhain celebrated by the Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in what is now Ireland, Scotland, the U.K. and northern France. Samhain was celebrated from Oct. 31 to Nov. 1, marking the end of the harvest season and life and the beginning of winter and death.

The Celts believed that the boundary between the living world and the otherworld becomes blurred on the night of Oct. 31, causing the spirits of the dead to return to the earthly realm. They laid feasts and set a place at the table for the souls of their deceased kin with the belief that those spirits revisit their homes seeking hospitality.

Bowls of food were also placed outside homes to mollify evil spirits and hinder them from entering houses. Moreover, people disguised themselves by wearing special masks and clothes made of animal skins and heads to fool and ward off the wandering demonic spirits.

Although traditional Celtic Halloween customs were strongly associated with death and the dead, the connections gradually became weaker since Halloween traditions were introduced to the United States by Irish, Scottish, and other European immigrants in the 19th century.

Death has almost, if not completely, lost its centrality to Halloween in the process where the incident became one of America's favorite holidays and later a global cultural phenomenon.

Halloween was originally a special day when people actively engaged with death. Dressing up like the dead and keeping death in mind allows us to be aware of our own mortality, which is the heart of Halloween.

By facing our own mortality, we can realize the finitude of life that we often take for granted and rarely even think seriously about. It also stimulates us to perceive life as something we should be grateful for, cherish, celebrate, and live to the fullest.

Halloween costume traditions have always told us the simple and unchangeable truth in a less serious way that death and life are inextricably linked as two sides of the same coin.

I hope that young revelers in disguise can enjoy Halloween not simply as the ritual of social inversion shared with fellow alter-egos, but also as an opportunity to acknowledge their own mortality. It would impel them to try to love more deeply and live more passionately every moment of their finite life on earth.

Choi Bada (ckai421@gmail.com) is a cultural anthropologist and a writer.