Halloween Is Scary. And Not Always in a Fun Way

Like birthdays, I stopped celebrating Halloween around the age of eleven or twelve.

By the time I was thirteen, I had sworn it off entirely. I was still in my devout Christian era, but my objections to the celebration of witches and horror had nothing to do with religious doctrine or dogma.

It was about fear.

That’s the point of Halloween, isn’t it? It’s spooky season, after all. But where other kids seemed to delight in this, like passengers on a roller coaster feeling exhilarated by the terror, for me, it was distinctly unpleasant, and the weirdness of feeling out of step with everyone else was a second, ancillary unpleasantness, one that blossomed in particular in my twenties as going out on Halloween became a de rigueur social event.

During that period, failing to come up with an elaborate costume became proof that one was irredeemably boring—the more so in queer circles, where “gay Halloween” and its focus on increasingly niche things to dress up as became so culturally entrenched that it turned into a meme. I hate gay Halloween. What do you mean you’re going as the ’80s synthpop–inspired mourning fugue-state fever dream of a college professor from a late 2000s animated web short?

As a kid, I wasn’t afraid of witches, ghosts, or skeletons. Black cats, spiders, and bats did not set my spine tingling. What scared me about Halloween, then and now, was something that, at the time, I felt alone in, though I have come to learn others experience it too: the fear of people in costume.

I could sense then that costumes had a kind of power. That people donned them and became different somehow. Of course, this is exactly the draw of Halloween: becoming who you’re not, tapping into something else, the thrill of stepping into a new body, a new social position, a new self.

For younger me, this was terrifying. Whatever laws and rules ordered the universe that I was growing up in, Halloween—whether a day, a week, or a month—was a time period in which they were defunct. For someone still doing their best to figure out how social interaction worked, Halloween was a full-on capital-P Purge. Nothing was safe, no one could be trusted, anarchy reigned.

So deeply was this fear embedded in me at the time that I found I could not manage to enjoy Halloween as an adult, and feeling left out of its increasingly celebrated place within modern queerness left me feeling a strange kind of hollow. To feel excluded from a community comprised of people who themselves so often felt like outcasts from the wider society—this was a strange, disorienting double-minority feeling. If I couldn’t feel included here, could I feel included anywhere?

At a certain point, the costume is the true self. Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, that kind of thing.

What does it mean to want to dress up as someone—or something—else? How much time, money, and effort goes into making a costume? Stitching, ironing, trying on, modelling in front of the mirror. Undoing, redoing, not quite liking how it looks. Putting in the work to get it right, or giving up and wearing it out, imperfect? How much thought, how much care? How whole do people feel when they see themselves anew like this? How different is it from the process of creating one’s everyday look? The way so many queer people have to disguise themselves as cishet. The way so many queer people get to disguise themselves as whatever they want. At a certain point, the costume is the true self. Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, that kind of thing. Which was more me wearing a disguise: me putting on femme accessories or makeup, or me wearing boring men’s clothes all the time?

And what do the things we choose to disguise ourselves as say about us? Kids dressing up as superheroes and princesses, a jock dressing up as a beautiful woman, or the son of a prime minister dressing up as a person of colour. Halloween is an opening in the fabric of reality. Disguises part of the long history of human existence. Ancient masks uncovered by archaeologists. World War II photos on Tumblr of British soldiers in drag. Me, age six or seven, homemade Spider-Man in a balaclava, a red cagoule, eight-legged logo drawn in black marker. The daisy-chain links of human behaviour throughout time.

On the last Halloween I celebrated, it was around four in the afternoon, and I, eleven or twelve, was hurrying to the hockey arena a few blocks away to borrow the goalie equipment I would wear to my team’s away game that evening from the rink’s equipment manager, as my parents were unable to afford a set for me.

I remember that I was wearing an oversized, baby-blue toque that an aunt had knitted for me and I was walking in a noticeably odd way, timing my footfalls to land right before and after the sidewalk cracks, such that my stride became a kind of Morse code—short, long, short, long—a practice that I’ve slipped into here and there over the course of my life whenever I’m walking.

From across the street, two older boys, well into their teens and significantly bigger and stronger than me, noticed what must have seemed a strange sight: my large sky-blue head, my hands jammed in my pockets, and my lunatic gait, my little legs stretching to make up the length of each sidewalk square and then immediately doing a much shorter hop as I danced my feet around the lines in the cement.

What they recognized was prime material for bullying. They crossed the street and, in an instant, there was one on each side of me, their arms across my shoulders, trapping me in a new three-person unit.

The silly walk disappeared, replaced by pure, unalloyed fear. I didn’t know or recognize these guys, and they had singled me out, initiating an interaction over which I had no control and into which I had no insight. I don’t remember what they said to kick things off—only what one of them said at the end of the conversation a few metres farther down the road. I believe I asked them, somehow, why they were now flanking me, to which one of them, in a voice whose put-on raspy timbre I still precisely recall, responded, “Because we want to fuck you.”

Instinct took over. In a split second, I dropped my shoulders from beneath their arms, spun around, and tore off back in the direction of home, for the first time feeling like I was in one of those terrible children’s stories I’d read so many of, where the protagonist has to escape from peril.

I also remember their response: laughter. How humiliating to be rewarded for your daring escape with the aggressors’ boast that it was all in fun and you had never been in any real danger at all. This was my first experience with sexual cruelty. At some point between hearing the word fuck uttered aloud in a threatening way and the next October 31, something in me closed the door on Halloween. It was not and had never been a safe time to be outside. It was a time—a day, a season—that drove people to a certain kind of madness.

Of course, whether its being Halloween factored in any way into the two boys’ decision to give me a scare remains unknowable. Famously, teenage boys interested in wreaking havoc on those around them do not restrict themselves to cordoned-off times and places within which misbehaviour is sanctioned. They might have done the same thing to me, or to someone else, any other day of the year. I very much doubt that either of those two people would remember this moment, one that’s been seared into me for nearly a quarter century. It was a lark, the kind of thing teenage boys might do on unthinking dares all the time. Perhaps this was an aberration for one or both, or perhaps they did similar or much worse things to other people before and/or after that Halloween.

It is not hard for me to imagine, in retrospect, a world where the one older boy’s specific choice to go to a sexual place was indicative of something more interesting, more human, than just wanting to be monstrous for a moment. Was he uttering an unsayable desire for intimacy with the other boy, using me—unconsciously, unknowingly—as an intermediate? Was he someone who had been victimized in one way or another like this in the past, and taking on the role of predator rather than prey was a twisted stab at healing?

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Somehow, it feels like the whole of my relationship to Halloween runs through the lens of the things that made me different from the other people I knew when I was growing up—things that were unsayable, or at least unknowable, if not indescribable at the time, but have since resolved into relatively neat definitions: queer (bisexual, non-binary) and neurodivergent (anxiety, ADHD, possible autism spectrum, high functioning).

Before I had the words, it was just a morass, an ugly space of a palpable negativity that crept into view as the calendar flipped to October, something I could not narrativize into a pleasing answer for decades. I don’t know. I just don’t like Halloween. It was a feeling, something in the pit of me.

Gay Halloween isn’t the only aspect of contemporary queer culture that made me feel incredibly alone, though—pride parades do too.

The pain of my mismatch with Halloween’s pull only increased over the years, as it went from being a matter of mainstream culture to one that freaks like me were supposed to enjoy even more than the normies. I watched everyone I loved revel in its black-and-orange glory. I felt alone in my discomfort. That schoolyard feeling again. I was a sad, pathetic loser whose habit of spending the night in, heartbeat elevated at the thought of the outside, marked me.

Gay Halloween isn’t the only aspect of contemporary queer culture that made me feel incredibly alone, though—pride parades do too. Though, on the surface, the vibes of the two occasions are quite different—a kind of dialectic: dark/bright, eerie/fun, day/night, colourful/sombre—for queer people, they can have much in common: an annual opportunity to dress up, to show out, to come together, and to reject the conformity of straight culture’s jacket. For me, the sensation of being overwhelmed by crowds at each proved equally good at keeping me away. How was I so bad at being queer? At times, my neurodivergence, which felt like an important part of my non-binariness, has felt like an immovable fact standing in the way of my acceptance into the alphabet mafia too. Too crazy to be cis, and too crazy to be queer as well. A secret third thing.

My pride parade was staying home. My LGBTQ was talking to one other person and letting them be my whole world for an hour or two. As I posted on Bluesky once, “Not gay as in attracted to people of the same gender, queer as in there’s something just a little . . . off . . . about me.” I could not fathom losing myself on dance floors, in crowds, raves, clubs, marches, the subject of a thousand imagined glances, trapped in a net with a real psychic weight. Whenever I was in a crowd, whether one I felt congruous with or one I felt scared of, I was always at least a little bit tense.

I felt like a bad gay. How bound up in shame and otherness I was, that Pride itself felt alienating. And yet Halloween, in many ways its vibe apogee, I was equally repelled by, a spinning magnet caught between two forms of queerness I could not manage to hack.

It didn’t help that I never really found anything I wanted to dress up as. The two times I did go out as an adult, each an instance of my caving to a different significant other’s desire to attend a costume party, I fashioned almost comically genderless outfits, turning a white pillowcase into the Société de transport de Montréal’s new red-and-blue metro ticket in 2009, and then turning another white pillowcase into the graphic to represent a broken JPEG in 2012. Around when I came out as non-binary in the fall of 2019, I realized, in retrospect, that this refusal to dress up either as anything remotely masculine or feminine for so long was a tell.

So, in some sense, I owe Halloween and its insistence on pretending—as Vonnegut famously wrote, “we are what we pretend to be”—for an early piece of reassurance, as I grappled with whether I qualified as “queer enough” in the months surrounding my coming out. When I realized that I’d never taken the opportunity to dress up either as a man or as a woman over the course of the past nearly two decades’ worth of Halloweens, it felt like a sign, something I could point to. The best kind of proof of all, one that extended deep into the past, back to before I knew what being non-binary was, before I’d ever heard or read the words. Proof that it was a descriptor, a shorthand for understanding something about me, rather than a buzzwordy trend I was hopping on.

I lied earlier. I did dress up a third time, sort of. I went as the colour grey in university—matching American Apparel hoodie and skinny jeans—to a Halloween party a few blocks from my place stuffed with other members of the creative writing program. One of those nights that I can recollect a dozen scenes from, all these years later. Wanting to write a short story about it at some point afterward, it came out as a few lines in a poem draft:

We are chunked up in the haze of the basement, the house’s fitting id. Over the din, Mario and Luigi are holding forth with a fireman. Tonight, I am nobody, so it’s fitting that I’m talking to the well-dressed ghost of Allen Ginsberg. In the next room, a bedappled Eve is conspiring with the blue sky to pull off a ménage-à-trois under a rubicund cloud of Jell-O shots.

Something about this jumbled-together collection of such different ideas and images felt beautiful. The idea of a person being subsumed into their costume, at least for a few hours. Why had it been possible to be present then and so impossible to even make it out of my apartment every other year? There had been joy as that STM metro card—a bus driver had let me ride for free, and beautiful strangers in line outside Rocky Horror had asked for a photo with me. And though almost no one got the broken JPEG, that in and of itself was kind of apt.

So much of the fear of Halloween was really a fear of men.

But the fear response I felt every year was real. The rustle of excited voices a few blocks over, in every direction. That chaos. The association I always seem to have with unruliness in public—of unchecked male behaviour, anarchy, that I’m not safe. A cortisol spike that I cannot seem to will myself to push through. Unless I was doing it for love.

On some level, then, so much of the fear of Halloween was really a fear of men—what they could, might, would do when unshackled by the invisible web of rules that seemed to make up society the other 364 days a year. Whether they were lying in wait under piles of leaves, or hastening across the street to accost me. Or just laughing and yelling in the distance, breaking things—bottles, or rules, or laws. Maybe next year, I’ll host a Halloween party for some friends. Not having to go out—that could be the thing that saves me.

Adapted and excerpted from Post-Man: Essays on Being a Neurodivergent Non-Binary Person by Alex Manley (2025), with permission from Arsenal Pulp Press.

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