Ghouls cash in on the frightening growth of Halloween

The nights are drawing in, and ghoulish outfits are on sale in the shops. It’s a few weeks off Halloween, but the build-up is long these day.

One outfit was so ghoulish, so completely inappropriate, that a supermarket chain has had to issue an apology. Leeds-based store Asda has held its hands up, said it did the wrong thing, and promised a sizeable donation to the charity Mind after putting a costume called “mental patient fancy dress” for sale on its website.

It featured a bloodied T-shirt, a crazed mask and an imitation meat cleaver. Mental health campaign groups were quick to point out that it was an insulting, incorrect stereotype and Asda said it was a fair cop.

They were quickly followed by Tesco, who apologised for selling their own costume referring to mental health issues – a bright orange outfit called “Psycho Ward” with the word “committed” on the back.

But the row about these costumes leads to a bigger question about the whole commercialisation of Halloween. Have our retailers, in their bid to make more cash out of us, simply gone too far?

After all, Halloween is now close to rivalling Christmas as a money-spinner. This year we will spend more than £300m on a night that, a relatively short time ago, meant nothing to us. Even a decade ago, when the new Halloween was firmly established, we were only spending £12m.

It is no coincidence that our Halloween habit really took off at the time Asda was bought by American retailer Wal-Mart in 1999 and began filling its shelves with props for what was already an established American custom.

It still doesn’t quite match our festive season though, which is a huge juggernaut of a cash-generating extravaganza. The one advantage of Christmas is that we are used to it and can brace ourselves for it, but Halloween is something else, because it has only flattened us with its commercial weight in recent years.

And, because of that, it has become a symbol for the way our ancient festivals are becoming retail money spinners.

Asda is being coy about its Halloween sales in the wake of the costume gaffe, saying it does not believe it is the right time to be sharing statistics about what it is selling and how much it is making. But, as an indicator, two years ago it was expecting to sell more than a million pumpkins.

Yet, at one time, Halloween did not register as a retail event at all. Back in the sixties, on the way home from school, we would tell each other that witches would be flying about tonight, and we didn’t mean our mothers. And that was that.

We were more interested in bonfire night, which meant chumping for wood to feed the street bonfire, and standing around it eating the pie and peas and toffee that everyone would provide.

The real focus of our attention was Mischief Night: hide a dustbin lid, tie a door handle to a dustbin lid. There were lots of dustbin lids involved, and a fair amount of adult exasperation. But no money changed hands. At best, we would carve a face out of a swede – pumpkins being unknown to us back then.

Of the costume blunder, an Asda spokesperson said: “This was an unacceptable error and the product was withdrawn immediately. We’d like to offer our sincere apologies for the offence it caused. We take our responsibilities very seriously which is why we will make a sizeable donation to Mind.”

But still this year we are being inundated with Halloween: recipes, outfits, themed confectionary. There are Halloween home accessories: the lanterns, the spiders, the cauldrons, the broomsticks and even blood-soaked hands to hang out of the letter box to frighten those Trick or Treaters.

Gangs of children in their shop-bought costumes – it isn’t just Asda, every retailer with any possible product to add is in on the act – roam the streets.

They knock on strangers’ doors, an activity they are expressly forbidden from engaging in at any other time of the year. Meanwhile their parents hang around nervously at the bottom of the road, smiling and wishing it was all over.

Hearing the knock on the door makes the householder’s heart sink too. But they will have called in at the supermarket for a few of those multi-packs of sweets thoughtfully provided by the supermarkets, at a cost, and will hand some over every time the doorbell rings.

But at least there’s the consolation that it’s then over and done with – until next year.