The first time the doorbell chimed on an unseasonably warm October evening in the ‘90s, I watched my great grandmother’s face contort in bafflement. A small horde of children, clad as ghosts and superheroes, shouted a demand she couldn’t comprehend: “Trick or treat!” My own surprise was reserved for her ignorance. How could she not know this?

In hindsight, the true absurdity lay not in her confusion, but in the scene itself. The air was thick with the scent of jacaranda blooms, not decaying leaves. The days were stretching longer, not sinking into an early twilight. The entire performance was a piece of theatre staged under the wrong sun, on the wrong continent.

It is tempting to dismiss this as a harmless cultural import, another Americanism washing up on our shores alongside Brooklyn coffeehouse minimalism, Coachella chic, influencer activism, and pop science. But the creeping rise of Halloween in Australia is a perfect analogy for a global phenomenon: the flattening of time and place into a standardised, marketable spectacle. A festival that once marked the visceral turning of the year—the thinning of the veil between life and death, harvest and hunger—has been systematically stripped of its context and resold as kitsch horror and sugar highs. The communal bonfire has become an LED string light. The hand-carved gourd has become a mass-produced plastic pumpkin. We are instructed to imagine orange foliage and crisp air in a land where eucalypts stubbornly retain their leaves and the aggressive swoop of magpies send people running for cover.

We inhabit a continent with its own ancient cycles, ancestral dead, and distinct seasons of growth and decay. Yet, rather than engage with the deep, unsettling silence of our own land, we eagerly import the commodified US version of rituals, pretending to live in the dying light of a New York October we will never experience. This is the genius of capitalism: it packages meaning, severs it from the soil and history that birthed it, and sells it back to us as decoration. The market is blissfully indifferent. The shareholders and business owners care only for the transaction, for the movement of costumes, candy, and synthetic cobwebs from warehouse to home.

Rituals once marked time in a way that bound communities to the land, to the success of the harvest, to the humbling inevitability of death. They were material, collective responses to the terrifying and beautiful reality of being a fragile creature in an unpredictable world. When these rituals are commodified, they lose their power to root us in that reality. But Halloween in the Australian spring is what happens when time itself is colonised by profit-generation, turning every seasonal cue into an excuse for a marketing campaign. What was once a collective acknowledgment of mortality has become a franchise opportunity. Our ghosts are now the spectres of lost meaning, rattling their chains in the aisles of department stores.

The Colonisation of Time

To understand the depth of this loss, we must look to the rhythms that once governed life. For agrarian societies, festivals were not arbitrary dates. Samhain, the Celtic precursor to Halloween, marked the final harvest, the time when livestock were brought in from pasture and the world began its descent into the dark, hungry half of the year. It was a moment when the boundary between the living and the dead was believed to be at its most thin. It was a poetic and psychological framework for confronting the very real presence of death on a farm, the memory of those lost in the previous year, and the collective anxiety of surviving the winter. Similarly, Yule was a defiant celebration of the returning sun at the year’s lowest ebb, and Beltane a riotous festival of fertility and fire as life surged back in spring.

The industrial revolution launched a wholesale assault on this cyclical understanding of time. Seasons became irrelevant to the hum of the factory. The sun and soil were replaced by the clock and the production line as the primary regulators of human life. Time was abstracted, rendered linear and homogenous, a resource to be managed and exploited for maximum output. The sacred and the communal were pushed aside to make room for the productive and the transactional. This shift did not just change how we worked; it changed how we perceived and experienced reality.

Holidays, once the pillars of this old cyclical time, were gradually reoriented to serve the new god of consumption. Christmas was systematically transformed from a modest, often rowdy, feast into the retail climax of the year, a multi-trillion-dollar engine of gift-giving and economic stimulus. Easter shed its narrative of death and rebirth for a chocolate-induced coma and pastel-coloured trinkets. And Halloween, our case in point, was hollowed out from a sombre communal rite into a candy-fuelled spectacle of purchased fright. Capitalism co-opted these dates and replaced the cyclical with the linear and the transactional. The milestones in our calendars are now sales cycles.

A Case Study in Cultural Imperialism

The spread of American-style Halloween to countries like Australia is a textbook case of soft-power cultural imperialism. This is not a natural, organic cultural exchange, but a top-down export driven by the twin engines of US media and corporate power. For decades, Hollywood films and television shows have presented Halloween as a universal, deeply American tradition, beaming images of pumpkin-lit porches and costumed children into living rooms across the globe. This created a sense of familiarity, a manufactured nostalgia for a ritual that was never ours.

Corporations, seeing a lucrative date in the calendar, eagerly filled the demand they helped create. Supermarket aisles are now stocked with orange and black paraphernalia, and seasonal shops pop up for weeks, selling a curated version of “spooky.” The adoption, particularly in a nation like Australia, takes on the quality of a postmodern cargo cult. We are celebrating someone else’s harvest, invoking someone else’s ghosts, performing a pantomime of a season that is ecologically opposite to our own.

This reflects a deeper, lingering colonial identity crisis. Unmoored from both its European roots and a meaningful, respectful relationship with the local ecology and Indigenous history, the Australian cultural consciousness often appears eager to mimic global, predominantly American, norms as a way of belonging to a modern, homogenised world. We purchase a sense of place because we feel we lack an authentic one of our own.

The Mask and the Market

Nowhere is this transactional nature more evident than in the very heart of the ritual: the mask. Historically, a mask was a tool of transformation, a conduit to the spirit world, a means of embodying an ancestor or a god, or a vehicle for communal catharsis and the safe exploration of taboos. It was an act of creation and community. I think of the stories from Macedonian folk tales, of the Babari and other village-specific masks carved from wood and adorned with bells, donned not for scaring children but for a specific, communal exorcism of winter’s darkness during the New Year. Similarly, the roaring, operatic Chinese lion mask, its every colour and movement codified to tell a story of blessing and ward off malevolent spirits.

Under capitalism, the mask has been rendered a pure commodity. Identity, even for a single night, is something to be purchased, not created or discovered. The transformational power of the ritual is outsourced to a factory. Children, and increasingly adults, no longer explore the thrilling terrors of transgression or metamorphosis; they simply select a pre-packaged persona from a Kmart rack, their choice limited to that year’s trending film characters and generic archetypes. The terrifying mask of the Babari becomes a plastic Scream mask; the intricate, symbolic lion becomes a fuzzy, made-in-China animal hat. The link between the object and any deeper meaning is severed, leaving only the hollow shell of an aesthetic.

This logic extends far beyond Halloween. It is the same engine that drives fast fashion and the relentless churn of personal style. "Be whoever you want" is the rallying cry, as long as “whoever you want” is an identity that can be conveniently purchased, worn, and discarded in time for the next trend. The market sells us the tools for self-expression while ensuring that expression remains safely within the boundaries of what is sellable. We are encouraged to “explore” our Irish, Dutch, or German roots, for instance, but this exploration is so often funnelled toward buying a clan tartan, a pair of clogs, or a cuckoo clock—reducing vast, complex cultural histories into a series of purchasable knick-knacks. The act of becoming is replaced by the act of acquisition.

The Sanitisation of Horror

This commodification necessitates a parallel process of sterilisation. Traditional horror and folklore were gritty, unsettling things, born from a world intimately acquainted with death, decay, and the precariousness of life. This was not entertainment in the modern sense; it was a communal psycho-spiritual technology for processing very real fears—of disease, of starvation, of the unknown darkness beyond the firelight. This horror served a social and psychological purpose, forcing a collective confrontation with mortality.

Contrast the plastic fangs of a store-bought vampire with the vampir, a bloated, purplish corpse that would return from the grave not with romantic angst, but to spread plague and suffocate sleepers, a manifestation of the very real terror of contagion and unexplained death. Or consider the jiāngshī 僵尸, the “hopping corpse,” a reanimated body stiff with rigor mortis, its skin caked in the white mould of the grave, that killed not with a bite but by stealing the breath of the living—a literal embodiment of the fear of qì 炁, or life force, being extinguished. These were not clean monsters. They were visceral, putrefying, and tied to tangible, cultural anxieties about burial, disease, and the improper passage of the soul.

The horror sold to us by modern Halloween is a safe, sanitised product designed for mass appeal and quick turnover, stripped of any genuine danger or capacity for deep reflection. The gore is cartoonish, the monsters are familiar franchises, and the scares are predictable jumps. This “safe spookiness” is part of a larger cultural tendency to aestheticise death while systematically denying its reality. We surround ourselves with plastic skeletons and cute ghost emojis while sequestering the dying in hospitals and the dead in funeral homes, their bodies professionally prepared to look merely asleep.

The festival that was once a thoughtful, shuddering acknowledgment of the dead has become a celebration that uses the iconography of death to avoid actually thinking about it.

An Antidote: Anti-Consumerist Reclamation

The alternative to this hollow spectacle is not a romantic, futile attempt to resurrect a pure, pre-capitalist past. It is, instead, a conscious effort to re-establish a material and emotional relationship with time, death, and the ecology we actually inhabit. This begins with the simple act of paying attention. What does the land around us actually do? When do its cycles of growth, decay, and rebirth occur?

For those feeling the absence, this could mean celebrating a version of Samhain at the end of April, when the southern hemisphere is truly sliding into the dark, cold half of the year. It could mean honouring Beltane at the end of October, when our spring is erupting in a riot of life, a true counterpoint to the northern autumn.

Reclaiming ritual is as simple as creating small, personal, or communal practices that hold meaning outside the logic of the market. It could be as simple as visiting the grave of a loved one not out of obligation, but as a conscious act of remembrance. It could be planting a tree to honour the dead, or taking a silent walk to observe the subtle shift in light and air as one season gives way to the next. These are acts that ground us in a reality that capitalism seeks to obscure: that we are biological beings in a cyclical world, and that our time here is fleeting and precious.

So, when I wander the streets tonight and I see another group of children running about in the warm twilight, I will feel a pang of a different kind of horror. The true ghosts haunting our streets are not the sheet-draped figures or the plastic skeletons. The real spectres are those of lost meaning, of commodified time, of a deep, cultural disconnection from the land.

We live in a world where the seasons are dying, replaced by a perpetual, air-conditioned present punctuated by seasonal sales. Yet, within that haunting lies a sliver of hope. To be haunted is to be reminded of a loss. And remembrance is the first, necessary step toward reconstruction. The challenge is to exorcise the spectres of the market not with more consumption, but with the quiet, deliberate work of telling our own stories.