Halloween didn’t start with candy corn and Spirit Halloween — it started 3,000 years ago in Ireland with a Celtic festival called Samhain. Matt sits down with Lisa Morton, multi-Bram Stoker Award winner and author of The Halloween Encyclopedia and Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween, to trace how we got from ancient Celtic bonfires to the second-biggest retail holiday in America.
Follow Lisa Morton: lisamorton.com
Find her books wherever books are sold — search The Halloween Encyclopedia.
Topics covered:
Samhain: the 3,000-year-old Celtic festival where the border between the living and the dead came down — and how the Catholic Church co-opted it with All Saints Day.
How Irish and Scottish immigrants brought Halloween to America in the 1840s, and why trick-or-treating nearly got banned in the 1930s before candy saved the day.
The real origin of the jack-o’-lantern: Stingy Jack, a drunk who outwitted the devil three times and got banned from both heaven and hell.
Halloween myth-busting: razor blades in candy, Samhain as the Celtic god of death, and whether druids actually burned people alive.
How John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) completed the holiday’s transformation into an adult celebration — and what Roseanne and The Simpsons did to spread Halloween worldwide.
Episode captioned on YouTube: https://youtu.be/eFJB11FF30Q
SHOW OVERVIEW:
Website: thescarymovieproject.com
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