Night Of Darkness: Halloween’s Forgotten Struggle With Evil
(ANALYSIS) Halloween used to be different. Very different. Before Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger, before trick-or-treating and crowded costume parties, it was All Hallows’ Eve.
It was a night when candles burned for the dead and prayers rose into the dark. Families across Europe gathered in solemn silence, marked more by reverence than by revelry. They understood this night as a time to confront one of the most profound questions humanity has ever known.
Why does evil exist in God's world? This question has haunted believers from the very beginning. If God truly loves us and rules over all things, why do the innocent suffer? Why do dictators prosper while ordinary people are crushed? Why are children born with illnesses that can’t be cured? Why do so many starve, or even despair to the point of taking their own lives?
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Early Christians didn’t see this question as an abstract debate. Plague struck their neighbors, and war leveled their cities. They weren’t searching for theories but for truth that could speak to real suffering.
Augustine gave the explanation that endured. Evil, he taught, is not a thing in itself but the absence of good. Just as darkness exists only where light is missing, evil is what lingers when God’s goodness is rejected. This view protected God’s power and holiness, showing that He was not the author of evil. Yet it did little to ease the sting of suffering. When armies burned villages or disease swept through families, it was hard for ordinary Christians to believe they were only facing “less goodness.” To them, evil felt like a real enemy, a predator stalking and devouring without pity.
Other thinkers tried different approaches. Simone Weil watched the horrors of the twentieth century unfold and saw evil as a force like gravity, pulling souls downward. Only perfect attention to God could resist it, she believed, but few people could manage such focus. Most crumbled under affliction's weight.
Kant took a different path. Human minds can only see surfaces, he argued. Ultimate reality stays hidden from us. Perhaps evil resides in that invisible realm we can never fully grasp. We see its damage but never its essence.
Rudolf Otto turned his attention to holiness itself and found it far from tame. The sacred was not only peaceful and pure, it was also fearful and fierce. He called it the “tremendous mystery,” an encounter that filled the soul with both awe and dread. To stand before God was to tremble, and in that trembling, the line between good and evil seemed to blur at the very edge of the divine.
Nicholas of Cusa pushed even further. In the infinity of God, he said, opposites meet. Good and evil, life and death, are joined in ways no human mind can grasp. What seems like a contradiction now may in eternity be revealed as harmony. For Christians of his time, this was not license for sin but a reminder of the broader message: God’s ways are higher than ours, and what seems broken will one day be made whole.
For centuries, Halloween kept these mysteries at the heart of faith.
Masks weren’t playful costumes, but shields against wandering spirits. Bonfires weren’t decorations but barriers against the ominous forces of October nights. Every candle flame was a prayer in light, a quiet act of defiance, a blaze pressing back the darkness that seemed to stalk the world.
Over time, the seriousness drained away. Enlightenment thinkers dismissed spirits as childish superstition. Industrial society moved death out of sight, into hospitals and funeral homes, where it no longer confronted daily life. By the time Irish immigrants brought Halloween to America, much of its spiritual significance had already been eroded.
Commerce finished the job. Farmers sold pumpkins as seasonal ornaments. Toy makers churned out masks for children’s games. Candy companies seized the calendar, and Hollywood turned monsters into mindless entertainment. Stores filled their aisles with plastic graveyards and rubber spiders. What had once been a sacred vigil was reduced to a shopping season.
Today, Halloween stands as America’s second-largest retail holiday. Billions of dollars change hands every October. We haven’t eliminated evil, but we’ve managed to make it as profitable as possible. The ancient struggle with suffering has been repackaged as a marketing campaign.
But suffering hasn’t vanished. Cruelty and injustice still scar the world. Despair and destruction still touch countless lives. Halloween no longer offers rituals to help us confront these realities, yet they endure. We have only learned to disguise them with distractions.
When children come to your door this October, think of what their presence echoes. Their knocking recalls prayers once offered for the dead. Their open hands repeat humanity’s ancient plea for mercy in a merciless world.
Placing candy in their bags is more than keeping tradition. It is kindness in the face of cruelty, sweetness in the midst of bitterness. Halloween began as a night to face mystery and hold on to hope. In small acts of generosity, it may still serve that purpose.
John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist. He covers psychology and social relations. His writing has appeared in places such as UnHerd, The US Sun and The Spectator World.