On Halloween, society seeks to assimilate or interact with that which affronts and scares it. This assimilation is, of course, duplicitous: it is acknowledged as foreign and frightening, so it is precisely what will not be assimilated. Often, even this process is paralysed; for instance, by other reactions to the feared like 'offence.' In addition, this is all done in the name of 'Halloween' or society's encounter with hostility, which people get involved in. Given the duplicity of the task, it will often devolve into merely people wearing 'safe' costumes and celebrating - abandoning any seeming point to this occasion. In any case, however, this kind of 'horror' is rarely substantial.
As such, 'horror' of any interest which is associated with it will be predominantly of two kinds. Firstly: things which are already fearsome, and remain so. In this case, it does not matter that it is Halloween. Halloween is assimilation, which these are not drawn in by. Secondly: insofar as society interacts with fearsome elements, these may also react within this framework. This leads to the common tropes of Halloween taking on a distorted form, due to foreign elements counter-acting them. Hence, some aspect of society is rendered in a self-negating form. However, this is ultimately also inconsistent from the perspective of the feared elements, which have to both remain fearsome and take up the opposite perspective to merely assimilate this. Hence, in the end substantial horror in this event reduces to merely the attempted equation of opposites. That phrase might seem familiar.
One might draw analogies between Halloween and another main organ of assimilation, Hollywood. Again, the whole purpose of that institution is people assimilating things that they are not. In the process, the 'actors' abandon their own identity to instead merely follow the dictates of capital in this area. They are hence reduced to empty vessels for capital, which then tries to use these to assimilate foreign trends - hence, the empty vessels are to try and assimilate other fields. Where these empty vessels are normalised, one can hardly expect that much of worth. It might occasionally gain from a positive interaction with external forms of film-making, however of itself it cannot do much of ultimate worth. Hence, 'glimmers' of validity will occasionally show, yet rarely something that can hold together without the hollowness of the enterprise trivialising it. Nonetheless, we may compare this 'industry' to 'Halloween,' albeit with less independence. In either case, society sets itself an absurd task.
People hence must engage in the festival of Halloween with a sense of duty. However, perhaps this duty is actually a result of 'aloof' or 'isolated' figures sought in a social context, and not things which are 'feared' and instead run from. More generally, people also seek figures who they see portrayed in an analogous social context to theirs, and they are encouraged to for multiple reasons. Perhaps these others have different forms of interaction or expression. In any case, these more coherent attempts at search are derailed into the apparent form of society 'assimilating the fearful,' perhaps in part due to the attempt to fit these aloof figures into our own everyday social forms. This was in part also due to a society which was unstable and transient - in a situation of foreboding. Hence, when searches go in directions that ultimately turn out hollow, it might be that the search had a different basis altogether.
