Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, and every year my family has a party at my grandparents’ house where my parents invite a bunch of their friends and we all eat dinner, and then we go trick-or-treating. But this year I’m too old for trick or treating, and I don’t want to hang out with my parents’ friends and their kids, so I’m going to my friend’s house. I’m probably going to go over to her house and get ready and redo my makeup and do my hair and then take pictures, and hopefully I’ll get to stay the night at my friend’s house because we’re probably going to be out pretty late. For my costume, I’m going to be an FBI agent, and my friends are going to be a firefighter. I’m hoping that this year’s the best Halloween yet because every other year has been boring, and I’m excited to not just be trick-or-treating.
The Halloween experience acts as a measurement of growth as it changes after every birthday. I watch each Halloween become less and less magical as my costumes have faded to my everyday clothes. Halloween is, as they say, “what you make it,” because unlike holidays like Christmas where there is no escaping the holiday spirit, Halloween is the easiest time to take a knee.
Spending time with friends and family passing out candy or trick or treating this year has been discouraged due to COVID. I’m not too disappointed, as I haven’t done much in recent years either, though I celebrated with a glass of apple cider and a little pumpkin to keep up the spirit.
I look forward to the day when I can spend the evening with my friends again, and maybe put together a costume with some magically newfound makeup skills. For now, however, I am content with this year’s Halloween because I know that there are many more to come.
All Hallows Eve, or Halloween, is a holiday that many people around the world celebrate. Many people of different ages, ethnicities, and nationalities all celebrate this popular holiday.
Halloween “originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward of ghosts” (History.com).
Photo credit: History.com
Halloween is full of many fun activities such as carving pumpkins and turning them into jack-o-lanterns.
Houses are decorated with cobwebs, fake skeleton bones, gravestones. Some neighborhoods even have halloween decoration contests.
Children and teens dress up as many different things and walk around their neighborhoods. They walk up to the doors and say trick-or-treat, which leads them to get candy.
Halloween is a great holiday to watch scary movies with your friends and family, such as Hocus Pocus and Poltergeist.
October 31 is a day where everyone alike can eat candy and dress up like anything they can imagine.
When I was three, my parents told me about the Halloween Pumpkin. I could keep as many pieces of candy as my age and if I put my the rest of my candy on the door step before I went to bed, the Halloween Pumpkin would come during the night and leave me a toy. They made sure to tell me that he would only come if you gave him a couple days notice and only my parents could deliver my wish to the Halloween Pumpkin. At least a week before October 31st, I would contemplate for hours (or at least what felt like hours to a young child) about what types of candy I would keep and what amazing toy I would receive the morning after Halloween.
Last night, my friend and I went to go to a haunted house. The house was closed, so they gave us a bunch of candy. I figured, I’m really not going to eat this because of carbs, sugar, and the amount of calories. When I got home, I went up to my parents’ room.”Bey, remember the halloween pumpkin,” I asked. “If I put this on the door step, will it magically turn in to twenty bucks by tomorrow morning? Tell ya what, I won’t even keep fifteen pieces”
“Nice try,” my parents said. “But, no.”
When I was younger, I remember going trick or treating every year. I would count down the minutes until I could knock on doors and hold out my spookily-decorated candy basket. My friends would start counting down the days until the magical holiday as soon as October 1st rolled around.
Nowadays, it seems my Halloweens consist of hours of homework with the occasional annoying interruption of happy children knocking on the door.
Sometimes, I wish I could just put my Halloween candy on the front porch and the Halloween Pumpkin would come during the night and give me what I wished for: the chance to be kid again.
Halloween is arguably one of the most fun holidays. You can dress up like a banana, a zombie cheerleader, or even a cat. However, a certain kind of costume that is not acceptable, comes around every year. Those costumes fall into a small category: when people adopt the aspects and features of another race or culture as a costume, a joke. Some examples of this are blackface and yellowface where people will literally paint a color onto their skin to make them look like a different race. Halloween is not the proper place to display your racial microaggressions. You may not even be aware of them, most people aren’t. Microaggressions are when you say a racial slur or dress up as another race to make fun of them. Actions like these showcase how unaware our society is to the amount of cultural appropriation we experience on a daily basis. Some may take this as it not being okay to dress up as their favorite movie character of a different race, but that is not the case. Little kids can dress up as Mulan, Pocahontas, and Tiana, because they are doing it out of admiration, not disrespect. It is hard to identify when a costume goes from okay to bad. If you think someone will be offended by your costume then odds are it isn’t appropriate.
In 2012, a group of students at Ohio State University, known as STARS (Students Teaching About Racism in Society), made a series of posters to showcase this problematic Halloween trend. It is a series of six posters each picturing an offensive costume representing a racial stereotype, an actual person representing that racial group, and the same line: “You wear the costume for one night, I wear the stigma for life.”
And this is so true. Coming from a place of privilege, I don’t understand the type of oppression people of color receive on a daily basis; neither do any of the people who dress up as stereotypes of a culture. If you dress up as a racial stereotype, then you most likely don’t know anything about that particular culture’s daily oppression. People who don blackface or dress up as a nerdy Asian never have to live in the skin of people of color. They don’t have to wake up knowing they’ll be judged for the amount of pigment in their skin. Most people dress up as stereotypical racial figures to make fun, not knowing anything about what it’s actually like to be who they’re dressed up as. On November 1st, you can wake up in your safety bubble of skin and go on with life, but the group of people you made fun of the night before will continue to wear the skin and/or identity that you appropriated as a costume.
It’s October aka the Halloween month, so I thought that it’d be fitting to share and reflect on some of my favorite horror movies of all time. First, I’d like to talk about a rather peculiar movie that is Eraserhead. I first came across it when I was only twelve years old and it was also my first time diving into one of David Lynch’s elusive worlds.
The movie is Lynch’s debut work and it was first screened at the Filmex Festival in 1997. The plot tells the story of a single father, Henry Spencer, who has to take care of his mutant, deformed child. The setting is Lynch’s favorite- small and isolated, industrial town. However, most of the movie is an insight into Henry’s mind, full of hallucinations, nightmare-like sequences, and his dark fantasies.
Eraserhead manages to alienate the viewer from the real world into a dream world. Lynch perfectly depicts nightmare logic and that’s what makes this movie truly terrifying. This movie is also perfect if you want an authentic insight into Lynch’s mind, he directed, produced, wrote, edited and designed sound for Eraserhead. Lynch refuses to explain anything to the viewer, however, he did say that he still hasn’t read an interpretation similar to his.
I would highly recommend this disturbing, claustrophobic body-horror classic. Perhaps, you might be the first to have an interpretation that matches Lynch’s.
Halloween brings with it a lot of feelings. Excitement, happiness, the “officialness” of fall, and the feeling that all those scary things that go bump in the night are real. All of those feelings are expected, but the feeling that isn’t expected but seems to be there anyway, is a certain insecurity and anxiety.
Recently, I have grown even more conscious of my choice of Halloween costume.
Last year I found myself having to explain who I was dressed as to a complete stranger who made a not so delicate reference to my race.
He said to me, with a quizzical eyebrow raised, “Are you, like, an Asian version of, like, Harry Potter’s girlfriend or something?”
I didn’t realize at the time how much this bothered me, but the more I thought about it, the more troubling it became.
Firstly, I was not a Harry Potter character – I had no reference to Hogwarts or Harry Potter on my person. Secondly, unless he was referring to Cho Chang, who most people forget dated Harry, he was referring to Ginny Weasley (Potter). Who is not/was not just Harry Potter’s girlfriend – she was a Weasley and a kick-butt heroine.
But it really bothers me that in order to play a character that I adore or admire, people have to specify that I am the Asian version of them. Admittedly unavoidable because I am Asian, but still bothersome.
As I thought more about this, I started to think of an Asian character I could be. I thought of all the books I have read and all the movies that I have seen. Very few came to mind.
Which brings me to light whitewashing. As I furtively searched for a Halloween costume this year, I found myself not wanting to have to explain to someone that I am an Asian-American dressing up as someone who is just American or just white in general.
So I ended up looking up Asian movie and book characters. It is disappointing that I had to search this in the first place, and almost as disappointing that I found even less.
This whitewashing issue is true for every “not white” race, but I put a stress on Asian because that is what I am.
Here are some examples of some of Hollywood’s whitewashing:
Photo Credit: Hollywood Reporter
I went looking for Asian screen characters that I could play, and the results were dismal. Then I looked for articles addressing whitewashing, and truthfully I found quite a few, but it was hard to find any that were specific to the Asian-American demographic.
I did find one by the New York Times though, which was nice because it wasn’t just about how whitewashed Hollywood is or how lacking in Asians it is. The article was also about how some Asian-American stars who had made it to recognition were fighting back (read more here).
Piggy-backing on the New York Times’ article, the Odyssey also published an article about the whitewashing of Asians in American cinema, stating, “The only difference between this generation’s whitewashing and the previous generation’s whitewashing is the gradual separation from the use of “yellowface.” (read more here).
Now Hollywood just neglects that the fact that the character was meant to be Asian.
But thanks to Buzzfeed, I can at least see what blockbuster films would look like with Asian leads. For example, this is only one of them:
Photo Credit: Buzzfeed
Perhaps part of the issue comes from my own insecurity of not looking “enough” like the people I look up to. But it does make me sad that I don’t find more people to look up to who look like me.
It is now mid October, and IT’S STILL SUNNY AND WARM IN OJAI. This irritates me to no end, which means this post will be a long rant.
In Ojai, and pretty much all of Southern California, three of our seasons are summer, and the fourth season is kind of cold, but not really. This means, there is a very good chance that Halloween will be a warm, sunny day. There will also be no cool decorations around town like the Jack O’Lanterns in Chicago (pictured).
Disneyland, scary movies, and cold weather are all things I associate with Halloween. But, obviously the cold weather part isn’t exactly true for California.
But, Halloween is still one of my favorite holidays, whether it’s 80 degrees (ew) or 50. And, The Tower of Terror is closing at California Adventures, which is an amusement park tragedy. But it’s all ok, because after Halloween, Thanksgiving Break will be closer than ever.
As I prepare for my four-day weekend and Halloween, I think back to my favorite Halloween movies that I watched in elementary school, or even younger.
To this day I am not one for gruesome, gory Halloween films, but movies that resonate more with Hocus Pocus (AKA the best Halloween movie ever) rather than Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
What I’m saying is my Halloween is more Disney than AMC ( I’m looking at you The Walking Dead). But while some may be gearing up for Trick or Treating, going to Six Flags or Universal Studios to be scared senseless, or staying at home diving into a bowl of candy, Halloween, in my opinion, is a very retrospective holiday.
Whether it be looking back to all the things you did to celebrate years ago, getting the type of sugar rush that usually only seven-year olds are acceptable of getting, watching scary movies, or any other time-honored tradition.
But one thing I do know is that I won’t have to go to sleep tonight thinking that my dog coming up the stairs is actually a serial killer.
Trick or treat – These costumes are definitely better than the ghosts made from bed sheets.
Every year celebrities take the spooky streets and dress up just like us normal folk.
When November 1st comes around we get to look at the tabloids and take a look to see how the stars dressed up as for this annual ghostly night.
Here are the 5 best dressed celebrities of the night
photo credit: getty images
5) Gigi Hadid
Gigi dressed up like good ol’ Sandy from the 1970’s classic Grease. What can I say it’s a classic but I craved more creativity from Gigi, but still she looked great because, duh she’s a super model.
photo credit: the ellen show
4) Ellen Degeneres
Ellen’s costume gets all the points for creativity. The queen of daytime television and of life in general dressed up as Karla Kardashian, the new Kardashian sister. This costume screams tacky and I love it.
3) Neil Patrick Harris’ Adorable Family Costume
photo credit: ew.com
What’s the point of having kids if you aren’t going to coordinate an adorable costume with them? Ok there are a lot of pros to having kids, but a Star Wars themed family costume has to be up there. Look at them and feel the force of cuteness overtake you.
2)Kim Kardashian
photo credit: twitter.com
Do you remember the 2013 Met Gala where Kim Kardashian wore a completely floral ensemble and everyone said she looked like their grandmas couch. Do you? Well good, because so does she. That’s right Kim Kardashian dressed up as Kim Kardashian for Halloween and blessed everyone’s Instagram feed and eyes.
And now the moment we have all been waiting for
The best dressed celebrity on Halloween was..
Heidi Klum
photo credit: justjared.com
Heidi Klum gets all the points, a 10 out of 10. Every year she takes it upon herself to become completely unrecognizable and she has done it yet again. She spent hours, literally hours, in hair and makeup completely altering her face and body shape to becoming the ever so famous Jessica Rabbit. She sets the bar higher and higher every year and she has yet to disappoint.
So that’s it, the top five for Halloween 2015. I can’t wait to see what the stars have up their sleeves for next year.
OVS Journalism Blog 
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