Lat the very first time The world wrote Halloween, it was… at Christmas. On December 22, 1950, Christine de Rivoyre devotes an article to “Christmas in America”. The journalist is surprised “big business” Christmas across the Atlantic: “From the start of the school year he was approached. Barely had he waited until the Halloween pumpkins, the feast of fairies and pranksters, had vanished under the October mist and with the sound of firecrackers. (…). We buy, we buy, we buy. »
The Halloween party was, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, only a very occasional object of curiosity for everyday life. On November 2, 1953, The world describes to his readers this funny celebration in the streets of Washington: “Trick or treat, such is the watchword that millions of American children have been repeating since last night, knocking on every door, dressed in strange tinsel. »
Horror movie hit
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 minute of failure, 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 an extensive interview published on May 7, 1984, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges recounts being in Wisconsin one Halloween night: “I’m very afraid of carnivals, I’m afraid of masks, but I was there, in this university, and everyone dressed up (…). So I said to myself, “I don’t want to play the spoilsport and I’m going to dress up.” Anyway, it was only going to last a short time. So I invested 2 dollars to buy myself a big wolf head, duly shaggy, with scary eyes, huge fangs, etc. I then entered a room where there were many people in cross-dressing, as terrifying as me, screaming “Homo homini lupus”, Hobbes’s phrase: “Man is a wolf for man.” »
At the beginning of the 1990s, France was still not very interested in this celebration. To the point that the “jolly 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 more authentically American. But celebrating Halloween doesn’t mean much to them. We have therefore decided to focus on events more familiar to Europeans such as Saint-Jean, Saint-Nicolas…”
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