A review by miss_tricia
Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween by David J. Skal
3.0
Interesting! We're big into Halloween around here, and while I was familiar with the fact that the whole "strangers will tamper with your candy!" thing was a myth, I hadn't made a lot of the cultural connections that Skal makes about WHY we're so concerned about strangers tampering with candy. Death Make a Holiday takes on huge swaths of the American Halloween machine in an intelligent and well researched way.
That said, I didn't love the chapter on Halloween movies. It was a rather cursory discussion of the topic, but included a lot of detailed descriptions of a handful of particular films, including a full paragraph for every instance in which Halloween was portrayed before 1970.
That said, I didn't love the chapter on Halloween movies. It was a rather cursory discussion of the topic, but included a lot of detailed descriptions of a handful of particular films, including a full paragraph for every instance in which Halloween was portrayed before 1970.