Lfor the very first time The world wrote Halloween, it was… at Christmas. On December 22, 1950, Christine de Rivoyre devoted an article to “Christmas in America”. The journalist is surprised “big business” Christmas across the Atlantic: “As soon as the school year started, he made himself known. He barely waited until the pumpkins of Halloween, a celebration of fairies and pranksters, had vanished under the October mist and with the sound of firecrackers. (…). We buy, we buy, we buy. »
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Halloween party was only a very occasional object of everyday curiosity. On November 2, 1953, The world describes to his readers this strange celebration in the streets of Washington: “Trick or treat, this is the slogan that millions of American children have been repeating since last night, knocking on every door, dressed in strange clothes. »
Horror film success
From the 1970s, the word became familiar to readers of the cinema pages, imposed by the success of the horror film Halloween. The Night of the Masks, of which Jacques Siclier wrote on March 30, 1979: “The feeling of anxiety is such that we feel it throughout the film. Without a moment of faltering, John Carpenter keeps us on the tightrope of a suspense that will repeat itself”namely murders committed on Halloween night.
The term sometimes arises unexpectedly. In a major interview published on May 7, 1984, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges recounts being in Wisconsin one Halloween evening: “I’m very afraid of carnivals, I’m afraid of masks, but I was there, in this university, and everyone was dressing up (…). So I said to myself: “I don’t want to be a spoilsport and I’m going to dress up.” It was only going to last a short time anyway. So I invested 2 dollars to buy a large wolf head, suitably shaggy, with frightening eyes, huge fangs, etc. I then entered a room where there were many people in drag, as terrifying as I was, screaming “Homo homini lupus”, the phrase from Hobbes: “Man is a wolf to man.” »
At the beginning of the 1990s, France still had little interest in this celebration. To the point that the “jovial general manager” of the Euro Disneyland park which opened in 1992, Philippe Bourguignon, stated, on April 11, 1993: “Most of our visitors come to get away from it all in an atmosphere that they want to be most authentically American. But celebrating Halloween doesn’t mean much to them. We therefore decided to focus on events more familiar to Europeans such as Midsummer’s Day, Saint Nicholas’ Day…”
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