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Every Halloween, as I ponder what my costume will be, I am confronted by one primary consideration: how can I make it sexy? Yes, yes, I want it to be clever or funny or unique—but above all, I want to take advantage of an opportunity to look hot. Halloween is ultimately a holiday about permission: to be someone else, to get attention and give it, to misbehave, and above all, to be sexy. And so even as the holiday becomes ever more commercialized and, dare I say, Disney-adultified, one thing remains: Halloween is the last true horny holiday.
Any holiday can be erotic if you want it to be. Fireworks on the Fourth of July, sneaking away before dinner on Thanksgiving, smooching under the mistletoe on Christmas—there are abundant opportunities for those who seek them. None quite compare to Halloween. Yes, sexy Christmas costumes exist, but they aren’t exactly baked into the economics of the holiday. And whereas Christmas is a day of togetherness, family, tradition and, you know, the birth of Jesus Christ, Halloween is a day specifically about the bending of norms. Mean Girls said it best in 2004: “Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.”
But the horniness of Halloween isn’t solely about subverting cultural norms around dress that we clearly still have many weird hangups about (looking at you, Shane Gillis). There’s a psychological reason behind it, too.
In its Victorian origins, the Halloween costume leaned far more spooky than sexy. But the distance between scared and horny is much closer than we might think, at least from a psychoanalytic perspective. Sigmund Freud first posited in 1920 that we are unconsciously propelled by two drives, sex and death. But rather than functioning separately, he believed the two were in constant conflict and synthesis. Halloween, in its exploration of death and darkness and things unseen, is fundamentally also an exploration of sex. The bodily fluids and squishy human bits of intercourse are only a few leaps from the blood and guts of Halloween horror. That we might be wearing a mask or already donning chains and whips only makes that transition easier. That the holiday allows us to be someone else, too, breaks down a layer of anxiety: assuming a second identity, we often feel more free to do what we want without having to confront our own inhibitions.
All that said, we shouldn’t count out the eroticism in simply looking hot. As historian Nicholas Rogers told TIME in 2014, the emergence of outwardly erotic Halloween costumes developed in the 1970s, functioning as a barometer for our cultural boundaries. “There was a general attempt to capitalize on what seemed transgressive…and because it’s a night of transgression you can get away with it without it being seen as particularly offensive in any way.” Again, we have a psychological reason for Halloween’s horniness. It’s hard to say whether a night of transgression makes us hornier, or whether we need the transgressive permission of Halloween to indulge in our pre-existing horniness. Either way, Halloween serves as an opportunity to indulge.
On a practical level, the sexuality of Halloween may rest on the fact that, despite all the candy, Halloween is not an eating holiday. Every other annual tradition is centered around the consumption of a heavy meal. Easter hams, St. Patrick’s Day corned beef and cabbage… even Memorial and Labor Day celebrations call for a cookout. But Halloween is the sort of day where one might even forget to eat dinner. It is a day not for sitting down at the dining table but for reveling in the streets. But even if Halloween were a day of true feasting, I’d guess that some of that eroticism would remain. Costumed, partially anonymous, leaning into a night devoted to the temporary breaking of boundaries and conventions—there is something sexy to that, regardless. And while we may all just be waiting for the one night a year to tap into a horniness laying dormant, the novelty of the night undoubtedly yields a new horniness of its own.
Ultimately, beneath the outfits and the psychoanalytic mingling of sex and death and the liminality of it all, Halloween is erotic because it’s fun. Yes, some take the night quite seriously, even religiously, but for the vast majority of Americans, it is a night of plain revelry. You are not expected to visit your grandmother or attend church or give thanks. Those are important traditions but ones for another day. On Halloween, there are no expectations for yourself except to be someone else.
