Arts & Culture

Halloween Horrors: “X”

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Although often left unspoken, there are acceptable and unacceptable paths to fame in Hollywood. Often actors who work with explicit content are regarded as lesser than. In its satirical fashion, X challenges this long held prejudice. 

Arts & Culture

Canons of Horror: Something Spooky

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Each year, around this time, when the first icy breeze hits me, but I’m not quite ready to be shocked or frightened, I turn to spooky films and TV, allowing myself to settle in without being scared to fall asleep on a lonely night.

Columns

ONONYE | Simone Biles as My Kinda-Sexy Halloween Costume

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Which segues us into the way overanalyzed and over discussed topic of sexy Halloween costumes. I am far from the first person to write about sexy Halloween costumes: I’m not even close to the first person to write about them in The Sun. But since this is a Feminist column, I thought I’d add my own two cents on the topic and how this year I had the world’s best Halloween costume. 

candy

Trick-or-Treat: The Nightmare List

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I’d like to consider myself a seasoned trick-or-treater, maybe even a master of the craft. For as long as I can remember, I would spend my childhood Halloween evenings bargaining and trading candy with my fellow sweet treat connoisseurs, attempting to optimize my selection. I’d say I’ve been through the trick-or-treating rounds enough to know what is good, and what is horribly bad. 

In my neighborhood, the best houses gave us big candy bars or goody bags, and the worst, nothing at all, or equally as abhorrent, sliced apples. But I’ve certainly been hearing some recent horror stories about childhood trick-or-treating and found it time to finally create the nightmare list of treats. Our ranking begins somewhat mildly, with fruit.

candy

An “Objective” Judging of Chocolate Halloween Candies

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Halloween season is fully upon us, which means it’s the time of year to stuff our faces with candy and feel no remorse. In our childhood days of trick-or-treating, we all had our favorite candies that we would trade anything for and others that we would gladly give away for free. But which candies are objectively the best? I’ll use the following four metrics to score many of our favorite chocolate based candies (sorry chocolate haters). This will be scored from one to five with five being the best.

Arts & Culture

PONTIN | All Hallow’s Eve

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More profoundly, though, Halloween prompts us to tap into something that lies much deeper in our consciousness, something tied to an inherent desire to be flexible in our definitions of who we are. Halloween is, at its core, a celebration of malleability and a testament to the joy of recharacterization, imagination and exploration. 

Dining

The Past, Present and Future of Halloween

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Normally around this time of year, Americans would be gearing up for a night of chaperoning younger siblings around town, eating excessive amounts of chocolate and buying out the clearance candy from CVS on November 1st. I don’t really have to point out why things are a bit different this year. 
The night of October 31, 2020 will be one filled with college students sitting pathetically in their rooms, accompanied only by a pile of empty candy wrappers and too much free time. As such, take a moment with me to remember better times: Look at how Halloween developed into the modern holiday we know and love, and catch a glimpse into what it may be like in years to come. 
Between all of the holidays taking place around October 31 — El día de muertos, Halloween, All Souls Day —  it can get confusing to trace down where one holiday ends and the other begins. Though all three of these holidays have interconnected roots, most scholars agree that Halloween’s past is connected to a combination of ancient Celtic and Christian traditions. 
More than 2,000 years ago, when the Celts lived in modern day Ireland, the feast of Samhain (pronounced sow-win) marked the end of the harvest season as the community began preparations for the coming winter months. The symbolic “death” of a season and the reaping of crops prompted feasts and celebration, but also indicated that the space between the dead and the living was thinner than ever.