It does not matter what you think, Halloween has taken over the world. Through globalization as we know it, more specifically the adoption of corporate culture and marketing throughout the world. Rooted from a Celtic and/or Christian environment, the celebration of harvest or saints ( however you see it ) has definitely been commodified to fit a consumer-driven market. At this point, Halloween has been directly equated with dressing up, eating candy, horror movies and otherwise influencing all part of our lives.

All the signs and decorations at any store or establishment signifies the tie capitalism has made with Halloween, and an attack on the holiday is surely an attack capitalism as well. In this article, I’ll use datasets to explore and visualize trends related to capitalism’s favorite spooky holiday.

Methods and Tools

A quick mention on the tools and methods used to craft this article. I’ve used several websites such as Kaggle, Statista, and Google Trends to acquire dataset that I will be comparing and parsing information from.

The acquired dataset is then cleaned up and converted to an appropriate file type through Microsoft Excel and further merged, filtered, and visualized using Tableau Public.

Scary Movies- Horror, Thriller/Suspense

Looking at Google Trends for the US, across 5 years, we can see that there is a positive, as well as, consistent trend for Halloween and Horror movies, especially around the end October each year. The numbers climb towards the end of the month and quickly plummet as it rises again around the same time each year.

From looking at the trends, one would suspect that there would be an abundance of horror movies released each year simply due to pure public interest in the genre. A dataset that showcases the Top 10 genres of movies in the US from 1955-2020 reveals that while Horror doesn’t beat the other genres in such as “Adventure” or “Documentary” in cumulative amount but it has done significantly well, if not better in revenue when compared to genres such as “Drama” or “Comedy” that has a large amount in quantity but has generated less revenue in accumulation. The categorization of these genres however can be put under scrutiny as there might be themes of horror in other genres as well that we do not know of, for example, most people would consider some thriller or suspense movies to be sub-genres of horror, especially if it contains supernatural and/or gory themes. This would then skyrocket “Horror” cumulative movie count, as well as cumulative revenue to the semblance of the bars “Adventure” and “Action” movies in the chart.

Diving deeper into the Horror genre on IMDB, English seems to be the dominant language for the majority of movies released in this genre. While the amount of horror movies sees an explosive growth post 2012, many of them are only rated around 4~5 out of a 10 point scale. Perhaps horror movies that are “mediocre” do better as they are more palatable to a wider audience, and who doesn’t love a good laugh looking at poorly done zombie prosthetics or productions such as the Scary Movie franchise.

Candy Sales

While candy isn’t something that is only popular during Halloween, it does have a prominent mark on the modern Halloween tradition. From a database looking at candy sales in 2020 shows that California has Skittles are its best selling candy, with an amount of 1.5M pounds sold in that year alone. Skittles is also the best selling candy in 5 other states that year as well, namely Florida, Minnesota, Vermont, Hawaii and Delaware. The number of candy sold in each state as well as the popularity it indicates seem to stand true when I look do my usual rummages through the candy bucket placed at the School of Information Office front desk.

Reflection

As Halloween, a holiday, celebration or an excuse to party, has been a thing I’ve not really experienced while growing up, I find it interesting to be researching and looking at the modern traditions and activities people have associated with Halloween. Using datasets and visualizations has definitely provided a different perspective when investigating trends, this exercise has helped me unravel more layers of investigating my topic of interest by adding on an extra layer of complexity, in addition to the lenses of anthropology and sociology where I’ve been trained professionally.