One complaint. ONE
A single person “fails to see the humor” in something so nobody else should be allowed to purchase it?
I suppose the shadowy people who make rules about these things have decreed that Halloween costumes shall only depict people who perform 100% honorable and legal activities? Hey kids! This Halloween why not dress up as a professor of modern interpretive dance theory?
“It makes light of a very serious crime,”
So by reverse logic she doesn’t consider all the other halloween stuff depictions of serious crimes.
Ugh. Just because something trivializes something serious doesn’t mean it needs to be banned. Doing so would wipe out vast swaths of popular culture, some of which we might even miss.
Edit: Also, as pointed out, the fact one person can do this is scarier than, I dunno, catching some creep peeking in your window.
It’s intended for the HOV lane.
How come the US can buy this but can’t have Kinder Eggs? That doesn’t seem fair.
As someone from the US, I’m OUTRAGED that vagina-faced man is banned in Canada!
…did, did that fix it?
Well, I’ve seen The Exorcist about a hundred and sixty-seven times AND IT KEEPS GETTIN’ FUNNIER EVERY SINGLE TIME I SEE IT!
Walmart sells these around here
You think that’s tasteless? You should see some of the skimpy “sexy” Halloween costumes.
Halloween has become an increasingly fraught holiday. Every year we see more costumes that involve racism, cultural appropriation, blackface, sexism, etc., and we also see more protests against these elements. On the one hand, Halloween serves as a dark dream version of American Culture (like a nightmare, but ostensibly more fun). It embodies the very purpose of horror movies and amusement park rides (terror and catharsis in a safe place, exercising our range of emotion without the actual risk of harm), and thus tends to include many manifestations of awfulness and inappropriateness. On the other hand, we don’t always accurately measure the potential damage caused by indulging that nightmare.
I know someone whose father fell off his ladder and (fatally) landed on his chainsaw. As a result, there are now fairly large swaths of horror and Halloween culture that are, to her, more traumatizing than they are cathartic. She can’t even try to get into Ash vs. The Evil Dead. And nobody can blame her for that.
But the deep and widespread presence of horror-for-fun in Western culture is not for nothing. There’s obviously a use for it, and a need for it. Why else do we put ourselves and our children through this?
At the same time, there come changes in cultural sensitivities as the years go by. I helped run a haunt at a school Halloween carnival in suburban San Diego for over a decade, and we had all kinds of probably-too-scary-for-small-kids things in there. We’d tone down the show for the younger ones, and they typically exited the haunt and ran right back to the end of the line to go through again. At some point, we got rid of the gallows. We’d built a simple gallows out of 2x4 lumber, and we had one of my zombie dummies hanging from a noose. It was good and spooky and nobody ever complained about it, but at some point it dawned on me that there was unintended symbolism there that shouldn’t be ignored. We’d honestly never thought of it as a lynching symbol (it was mere steps away from our fake electric chair, and on some level we equated the two when it came to thoughts of due process), if for no other reason than that the zombie dummy was Caucasian. But we ditched it once we realized that it was possible someone might interpret it as something more sinister than just another fake dead dude.
But it’s an odd line to walk. So much of Halloween these days involves death (usually by violence) and dismemberment, and it’s not always obvious which elements will be okay and which will go “too far.” I mean, I’ve never been a big fan of Carpenter’s Halloween, which pretty much is the classic horror movie of the season. Yeah, it’s well-made, but to my mind it’s just about some creepy stalker dude with a big knife, which is obviously terrifying to a lot of people for good and obvious reasons, but I like my horror a bit more outre and supernatural and atmospheric and monstery, not so drearily run-of-the-mill. I mean, when it comes down to it, any one of us could lose our marbles and pick up a butcher knife and start lurking around our local housing development with murderous intent, which is terrifying enough I guess, but the very mundanity of that fact makes it less fun and interesting to me, which is why my haunts didn’t generally contain a regular-creeper-guy-with-a-knife character. Snooze-a-rama.
But Halloween is supposed to unsettle, and transgress, and freak us out a little before we realize it’s just plastic and fake blood and plywood and paint. I wouldn’t buy the “Peeping Tom” prop (and didn’t when I saw it at Home Depot last week) simply because I don’t find it scary enough. It’s just some rando peeking in your window, which I’m privileged to say would annoy me much more than it would frighten me. Now if it were a Xenomorph peeking in, I’d soil myself.
I wonder if Halloween will cease to be Halloween as we know it within my lifetime. I don’t believe it will, but more of us will have to better explain its value as catharsis in the face of true-life horrors. I think the culture has been asleep at that particular switch for a while.
Community-theatre friends ran a haunted house with something I found genuinely creepy.
You walked into the room and a woman was facing away from you, sobbing relentlessly. Just weeping - no sudden turn to the room, no change of lighting, no speaking - just crying.
Then the guide spoke and opened a door and revealed she was crying because her daughter was possessed. BLAM - tension gone.
If the weeping, wailing woman had been left as is it would have been context-free creepy - a horrible blank slate for our (un)consciousnesses to fretfully wander.
THAT is the sort of “haunted house” I’d like to work on - abstract, context-free. It would be awful (and nothing remotely like those “EXTREME” haunted house cesspools).
Well, in my head it would be terrifying. In reality it could well be much like so many small-town theater productions.
What?! This is the most genius Halloween decoration I’ve seen in a long time. It’s not supposed to be funny, it’s supposed to be scary, and I know if I was at my friend’s party and glanced at the window and saw that I would jump.
Yes, it is at the expense of making a gag out of serious crimes, but so is a lot of Halloween themed celebrations. It’s what Halloween is FOR.
ARGH!
My number one rule for scary things: NEVER EXPLAIN IT.
Vague references, maybe, but never explain. It’s what keeps the scary scary.
It looks like a vagina with a face in it.
You beat me to it!
How do we know he’s a sexual predator? Maybe he’s a just murderous cannibal prowling for tender young children he can hack apart and devour as their hog-tied parents look on in horror.
Then it would be okay, right?
The creepiest thing I ever had was a guy dressed as a clown that just got inside one’s personal space and, well, that was it. They just stared at you from far too close. Incredibly unnerving.
We’ll get together halfway between us and make some coin this holiday season!
I’m not sure you could get creating an Frankenstein-style monster through IRB approval, though, and doing it without would leave you open to quite a few legal problems.
It isn’t possible to remove all the triggers from the world.
So who gets to decide which people will be pampered, and which people will be told to suck it up?
Should the the contest be to determine who is the most victimized, or to see who is the most fragile?
Obviously we shouldn’t waste resources trying to help people get back to a stable mental situation where they won’t be triggered by the inevitable state of the world. That’s just crazy talk.
