I love Halloween. I love the community it creates. I love walking around our neighbourhoods in blustery Alberta weather with waddling, snowsuit-clad kids or fun-loving teenagers decked out in all kinds of costumes, saying hi to neighbours; we may only see this once a year.
I know that many people love a good scare, haunted house or gory display. Horror is alive and well, and that genre is here to stay and be enjoyed by many. However, it increasingly concerns me that the explicitness of Halloween displays in stores or on front lawns has in some cases become too scary for our kids.
Let me give a “for instance”.
I regularly walk my son to and from school and we need to walk past a home that is decked out for Halloween. This is completely fine on its own, however the content and accessibility of this display is what concerns me.
This display contains realistic bloody severed heads on spikes and a bloody corpse wrapped in cloth, among other things. In a haunted house I would have no problem with this, but when children from kindergarten to Grade 6 must walk by every day to get to school, it concerns me.
I believe that it would be kind to our children to keep public displays (i.e., without warnings or age limits) below a level that we would see in a PG-rated movie. The display on the way to our school is absolutely fit for an episode of “The Walking Dead” (which is a show that I enjoy watching, but would not let my son anywhere near for several years).
Most parents would never take their kids to an R-rated movie, but there are some displays that are absolutely on that level, and in that I think we are doing a disservice to our children, forcing them to see things their eyes don’t need to see.
I would suggest, if you love a gory horror Halloween display that would only be allowed in a rated R movie to consider giving our little trick-or-treaters an alternate route to your door or a warning of the content in the display so they can choose.
This Oct. 31 let's let everyone have fun and eat a bit too much candy and not go home with nightmares. Let’s keep it fun for all.
Sarah Knutson, St. Albert
