I’ve been totally lacking energy since Halloween, so I’ve decided to rant about Halloween decorations to help me get back my Halloween spirit.

I’ve noticed many people decorate their lawns with fake tombstones. Some look kind of like actual tombstones, but many look something like this:

You know they’re supposed to be tombstones, but they don’t even really resemble actual tombstones:

I imagine the first Halloween tombstones must have looked like actual tombstones, but over time there’s been a sort of conceptual drift, where the Halloween tombstone took on an exaggerated appearance (“R.I.P.” in huge letters being common on Halloween tombstones, but horribly offensive on real ones) and incorporated other spooky elements, like skulls and grim reapers.

If real tombstones correspond to simulacrum level 1, or reality itself, then fake but accurate tombstones would be simulacrum level 2 (a lie about reality), and Halloween-themed tombstones that no longer try to seem realistic would be simulacrum level 3 (pretending to pretend to be real). I’ve seen some pretty egregious examples that have lost almost all pretense of being an actual tombstone (simulacrum level 4?), so overtaken they were with spiders and spooky fonts and so on. I wish I’d taken a picture of a particularly horrible example on my street, but you can get the idea if you look at the purple ones here:

These ones at least have a tombstone shape. Some don’t even have that.

If you challenged someone who had never heard of Halloween to make a spooky graveyard in their front yard, they would never in a million years design tombstones like this. These could only have been produced by a gradual, recurrent memetic process whereby decorations cease to represent real world items, but rather simply reflect an overall Halloween-y aesthetic, much in the way a microphone too close to a speaker will recurse to create screeching feedback that eventually has nothing to do with the original sound.

It’s not just the tombstones. Halloween ghosts only resemble undead spirits because that’s what we know they’re supposed to be. They’re cute little white or green blobs with eyes, and could just as easily be snot-men to the uninitiated. You sometimes see multi-colored Jack-o’-lanterns, even though pumpkins only come in one color. And spider webs as thick as ropes. Signs of cats wearing witches’ hats with quirky slogans underneath. Octopus skeletons. Inflatable green women with bubbling cauldrons, an archetype that’s lost all connection with the alleged practice of cursing others with black magic — a practice still punishable by death in parts of the world, but seen here only as a quaint fiction.

Just as a speaker and microphone create feedback and approach a frequency based on the resonant characteristics of the room, so to have Halloween decorations reverberated through their suburban environment until they finally matched the friendly and unobjectionable tone of their surroundings. What started as a solemn time to remember the dead, and transformed into a celebration of that which we fear, has now further transformed into a celebration of the aesthetic of Halloween itself. Instead of an authentic representation of death and fear, we get black and orange; Plastic spider rings and black cats and big eyeballs for some reason. And candy. The holiday has ceased to have a point, and has become simply “Halloween”.

I think which kinds of decorations you prefer comes down to which kind of Halloween you would prefer. Which simulacrum level you think the holiday should operate on. Would you rather a realistic, scary Halloween, where we learn to laugh in the face of death? Or the more modern “Halloween party” Halloween, which serves as an aesthetic backdrop for collecting candy and having fun? Put like that, the modern thing seems like a cheap degradation of the original. But despite its spiritual degradation, I can’t help feeling some attachment for the modern Halloween-as-Halloween, with its trick or treating and horny costumes. Rather than being merely an expression of the world, Halloween has become something that exists in its own right, for better or worse.