(Photo: @fliederfuchs)
Halloween is an odd holiday in Germany. Some people hang cobwebs in the window, others switch the lights off and pretend nobody is home. Honestly, I am closer to the second group, at least as far as the front door goes. As a fan you have it easier though, because you do not have to put the holiday together yourself. The worlds we spend half our lives in anyway sorted that out ages ago. In Hogwarts, something goes wrong every single Halloween. In Hawkins, four boys head out as Ghostbusters and only notice at school that nobody else dressed up. On a small island a pumpkin head trades furniture for candy, and in Springfield the rules have been switched off every October since 1990.
So we went through them. Twelve worlds, in no particular order, and at the end a few suggestions for putting together an evening out of them. If you are expecting a ranking, sorry, we argue about that enough in the office already.
Hogwarts: The day something always happens
In “Harry Potter” Halloween is never just decoration, even with the Great Hall full of floating pumpkins. It is the day Harry's parents died, 31 October 1981, and the books never quite forget it. In the first book, that is the evening the troll gets into the girls' bathroom and three kids who could not stand each other until then become friends. In the second, Nearly Headless Nick celebrates his five hundredth deathday with a party where the food is rotten on purpose (ghosts prefer smelling it to eating it), and while Harry is down there, Mrs Norris is being petrified upstairs. In the third, Sirius Black slashes the Fat Lady's portrait, and in the fourth the Goblet of Fire spits out Harry's name.
I only noticed on rereading how consistently Rowling does this. Four books in a row, and the story tips over on that one evening every time. When the pumpkins go up in Hogwarts, you may as well hold on.
Hawkins: Four Ghostbusters and a boy who is not quite all there
Season 2, episode 2 of “Stranger Things” is called “Trick or Treat, Freak” and is probably the best known Halloween episode of the last ten years. Mike, Dustin, Lucas and Will arrive at school as Ghostbusters, proton packs and all the trimmings, and work out in the car park that they are the only ones in costume. Dustin and Lucas argue about who gets to be Venkman (both, obviously). Max shows up as Michael Myers. And while everyone else is collecting candy, Will slips back into the Upside Down for the first time.
The episode has everything the show loves about the 80s: the costumes, the music, the grown-ups who are mostly scared of anything that looks like a dark wood. It is also the point where the season turns serious. If you have never watched it on Halloween, this year would be a good time.
Springfield: An October without rules since 1990
The Simpsons built themselves a whole genre for Halloween. “Treehouse of Horror” has run every year since 1990, the thirty-seventh is due in 2026, and not one of them counts towards the actual story. Which is why anything can happen in them. Homer sells his soul for a donut, the family gets abducted by aliens, The Shining gets re-enacted, an advertising mascot stomps the town flat. Characters die, the town gets wiped out, and in the next episode it is all standing there again as if nothing happened.
If you take just one habit away from this list: one Treehouse episode per evening, in order, starting on 1 October. By the 31st you have arrived somewhere in the 2010s, and the really weak years are behind you by then too.
Sunnydale: The night the demons have off
In Buffy's world there is a rule that Spike explains like this: on Halloween the demons stay home, too tacky, too many amateurs about. Naturally nobody ever sticks to it. In “Halloween” from season 2, a spell turns everyone into whatever they are wearing as a costume. Buffy becomes a helpless 18th-century noblewoman, Xander is suddenly a soldier who actually knows how to hold a gun, and Willow has to walk through walls as a ghost. In “Fear, Itself” from season 4, a Halloween party accidentally summons a fear demon that gets built up as a huge threat the whole episode and turns out to be about four inches tall. Buffy steps on it. The punchline is still one of the best the show ever did.
Buffy never took Halloween entirely seriously, and I think that is exactly why these episodes work so well. Scares, jokes, a bit of heart, done in 42 minutes. That was what the show was best at anyway.
Gravity Falls: Halloween in June
Because the summer holidays in Gravity Falls are too good to wait until October, the town celebrates “Summerween” on 22 June. With watermelons instead of pumpkins, hollowed out and carved with faces just the same, which incidentally makes a lot more mess. The Summerween Trickster punishes anyone who will not hand over sweets, and in the end turns out to be made of exactly the sweets nobody wanted. The liquorice ones.
Along the way the episode shows you can reinvent the whole holiday as long as you keep costumes, sweets, a bit of fear and a few friends. Everything else is trimmings. And if you do not know Gravity Falls yet: two seasons, finished, no slow patches. For October there is hardly a better series to start.
Halloween Town: Where the holiday gets made
Everyone else here celebrates Halloween. In “Nightmare Before Christmas” it gets manufactured. Halloween Town is a town whose only purpose is to scare the world once a year, and Jack Skellington is the best employee it ever had. Until he stumbles into a wood full of doors, discovers Christmas and decides to give that a try as well.
The film is 33 years old and still the only brand that really belongs to both holidays. You can watch it on 31 October and again on 24 December, and it fits both times. That was the plan from the start. And “This Is Halloween” is still the only Halloween song you can sing along to without embarrassment. In our office, anyway.
Animal Crossing: The gentlest Halloween in the world
On 31 October from 5 pm, a pumpkin head called Jack stands in the Animal Crossing plaza. He is the ruler of Halloween, and he wants candy. Those who have some get furniture for it. Those who do not get pranked, usually with a new outfit they had not ordered. The neighbours wander around in costume, it is dark, and nothing happens to anybody.
For quite a lot of people this is their first contact with Halloween at all, long before the first horror film. And anyone who has spent the whole of October growing pumpkins to complete the spooky furniture set knows that this game takes Halloween more seriously than most people I know.
Lavender Town: Where Pokémon got scary
Anyone who played Pokémon Red or Blue remembers the moment the music changed. Lavender Town, the Pokémon Tower, the ghosts you cannot identify without the Silph Scope, and the story of the Marowak mother who protected her child and was killed for it. That was 1996, in a game for children, on a Game Boy without a backlight. A whole generation has not forgotten it, and the internet legends about the Lavender Town music are still doing the rounds.
Since then “Pokémon” has had its own October. Gengar is the unofficial Halloween mascot, and Pokémon GO has run a Halloween event every year since 2016 with ghost Pokémon on every street corner. If you go out with your phone in October, you are already playing along whether you mean to or not.
Minecraft: What happens on 31 October if you look
On 31 October something happens in “Minecraft” that most players have never seen, because they had other plans that day: zombies, skeletons and their relatives walk around wearing pumpkin heads. There is no announcement and no event. The game simply looks at the date on your computer, and if it is Halloween, the monsters wear pumpkins. With a bit of luck you can even get the pumpkin as loot.
It has been in there since 2012, and I like that a game with no story at all still has a tradition like that. If you want to check tonight, you only have to move the system clock forward. We did not say that, though.
Luigi's Mansion: Nintendo's answer to horror is a vacuum cleaner
In 2001 the GameCube came out, and the game that came with it was not a Mario adventure but a haunted house for his brother. Luigi's Mansion is a whole game about fear. Luigi trembles, hums to keep himself going as he walks, and calls out for Mario in the dark corridors, and Mario does not answer. His only weapon is a vacuum cleaner, which he uses to suck up ghosts like crumbs from under the sofa.
The reason the series still works, and part 3 on the Switch is the best one, is exactly that mix: the scares are taken seriously, the hero not at all. You can play it on Halloween with kids who are otherwise scared of everything. Luigi is scared too and keeps going anyway, which goes down surprisingly well with seven-year-olds.
Thriller Bark: The Halloween arc that is not called that
There is no 31 October in “One Piece”, but there is Thriller Bark. An island that is actually a ship, with zombies, a haunted castle, a princess who plays with ghosts, and a villain called Gecko Moria who steals people's shadows and stuffs them into corpses. Plus a singing skeleton with an afro who joins the crew at the end. If that is not Halloween, I do not know what is.
The arc is the complete spooky construction kit as Oda understands it: none of it is really frightening, all of it is gloriously over the top, and at the end there is still one of the most emotional moments in the whole series, when Brook explains why he spent fifty years alone on a ghost ship. Around 45 episodes, so more of a project for the whole of October than for one evening.
Over the Garden Wall: The series that comes back every October
“Over the Garden Wall” is the hidden gem of this list, at least in Germany. Ten episodes of eleven minutes each, aired on Cartoon Network in 2014, and since then it has become a sort of ritual: every October the series resurfaces everywhere, and every year new people find it for the first time. Two brothers, Wirt and Greg, get lost in a wood that looks like a 19th-century American autumn fairy tale, with talking pumpkin people, a singing frog and a Beast that turns children into trees. Greg carries a frog around the whole time and keeps giving it new names.
The series is neither properly scary nor harmless, it is something in between, and that is what makes it so right for October. You watch it in one evening and tell yourself you will do it again next year. And then you actually do.
Salem: Three witches and a film that never goes away
“Hocus Pocus” was not a hit in cinemas in 1993. Then it ran on TV every year, and at some point it became the Halloween film of an entire generation, without anyone being able to say exactly when that happened. The Sanderson sisters, Bette Midler as Winifred, a talking cat who has waited 300 years for revenge, and a teenager who lights the wrong candle by mistake. In 2022 “Disney” released the sequel nobody needed and everybody watched anyway, us included.
In this list the film is the opposite of everything else. No big universe, no lore you need to know. Just a film that is Halloween, and that has obviously been enough for thirty years.
Your Halloween evening
Nobody gets through this list in one evening, we certainly do not. So here are three suggestions, depending on what kind of evening you want:
Cosy: Animal Crossing first, visit Jack and hand over your candy. Then “Over the Garden Wall” all the way through, that is just under two hours. Finish with an old Treehouse of Horror episode, ideally one from the 90s. Nobody is scared, everybody is happy, and you are in bed before midnight.
Scary: The Stranger Things Halloween episode, then straight into the Buffy episode “Fear, Itself” to come back down, and finally Luigi's Mansion with the lights off. The game is harmless, the lights being off still makes a difference.
Nostalgic: “Hocus Pocus”, then the very first Treehouse of Horror from 1990, and to wind down, dig out Pokémon Red and walk to Lavender Town. If you still have the game, you know exactly which drawer it is in.
And if you would rather have the real scares: season 13 of American Horror Story is on right now, with the finale landing just in time for Halloween. Everything about it is in our big AHS article.
Whatever you go for: the handy thing about Halloween as a fan is that you do not have to invent the holiday. The worlds we love anyway have been celebrating for years. You just have to walk in.
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