On a recent Sunday evening, Melanie Parker took her 2-year-old to the Ditmas Park section of Brooklyn to see a house in the area known for its elaborate Halloween displays. “He loves classic Halloween imagery — pumpkins, witches, ghosts, spiders and skeletons,” Ms. Parker, 38, a full-time caregiver who lives with her partner in Crown Heights, said of her son.
Adorning the home, though, was “a ton of blood” as well as “dismembered bodies, like a child’s head,” she said. “They were all moving and speaking and gesturing and making noises.” The decorations were illuminated in a way that made many of the figures — and wounds — appear more lifelike, she added.
Since then, her son “keeps talking about the guy who broke his head and the people who were hurt. Our kid was both riveted and disturbed.”
Being a little spooked is part of the delight of Halloween. But lately, some say genuine jump scares are abundant — on stoops and front lawns, looming in doorways and hanging from rafters — as household decorations seem to have become more gory, more violent and unsettlingly realistic.
It has caused neighbors to lodge complaints, and others to wonder about the twisted impulses that may be lurking in the collective American psyche.
“It bothers me because I think it says something about the character of our culture,” said Regina Musicaro, a licensed clinical psychologist who practices in New York City and specializes in trauma. “It feels what is being prioritized is being the most outrageous, and I think we need some self-imposed restraints on what we put out there because it reflects our thoughtfulness.”
The subtle shift might have begun with Skelly, the 12-foot skeleton with light-up eyes that Home Depot introduced in 2020. Over the last few years, it has become a must-have item, even with its $300 price tag.
This year, Home Depot has released some new, spookier decorations, like a five-foot-tall skeleton dog. “The dog piece was actually designed to be a scarier version of last year’s Skelly Dog, based on customer feedback that it wasn’t quite spooky enough,” Aubrey Horowitz, merchant of decorative holiday at the Home Depot, wrote in an email. “Since everyone’s definition of scary is different, we strive to offer a balance.”
Tom Arnold, a finance professor and retail expert at the University of Richmond, said Halloween decorations had become more realistic because of improved technology and more popular because of the capacity to mass produce them at a lower price point.
Halloween has also become a bigger spending holiday — according to the National Retail Federation, spending on decorations alone is expected to reach $4.2 billion this year, up from $1.6 billion in 2019 — and a more adult one.
“One way to think of it is if a store is dedicated 100 square feet to children, they are adding another 50 square feet for adults,” he said. “More adults seem to be getting into Halloween.”
Do adults participating in the fanfare still have an obligation to keep things kid-friendly? And then there’s a larger question about social responsibility. Is it a parent’s job to protect children from seeing scary things, or should the entire neighborhood pitch in?
“I would probably say it’s our responsibility to make sure our son doesn’t see things that could scare him,” Ms. Parker said. But, she continued, “I know I don’t have total — maybe not even partial — control over what he sees out in the world.”
Cabot Phillips, 31, a reporter on a conservative news podcast who lives in a suburb of Nashville, has started walking two blocks out of his way to get to the playground with his 18-month-old son to avoid one house.
“There is an inflatable four-foot-long demo zombie baby with blood all over his face and creepy veins, and it looks possessed,” he said. “Initially, I would walk next to the stroller so my son couldn’t see it, but now I am taking a different path.”
He said he thought his homeowner’s association should take up a discussion about the décor. “People in the neighborhood can decide together what is too far for them,” he said.
Not all the protests are on the behalf of children. Adults say they have been rattled by decorations in their neighborhood, too, and some say they have been distracted while driving or felt jumpy when walking home at night.
This year, Julia Arenson, 58, a yoga instructor and doula who lives in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, has noticed many houses in her neighborhood displaying Skelly, the 12-foot skeleton from Home Depot. “It’s like an overabundance of large skeletons standing there lording over brownstones,” she said.
“There is a lot of instability in the world right now and in our country, and I really feel like it is being reflected in all the décor, all these stark skeletal remains,” she said.
Maybe those types of decorations was always there, she added, but she just hadn’t noticed them as much before.
“I would like to see some googly eyes or some funny witches,” she said.
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