Vampires reflect the prejudices of their times.
Articles on Halloween
Displaying 1 - 20 of 188 articles
Halloween originated in Ireland, but the Irish used to carve turnips – not pumpkins.
They’ve got better things to be getting on with than plotting with witches.
Why early Protestants embraced demons and witches but turned their backs on ghosts. Listen to expert Penelope Geng on The Conversation Weekly podcast.
Horror films teach us to confront real-life trauma and atrocities, not escape from them.
Was there any scientific basis to potions, lotions and salves that folk healers prescribed, or was it all just hocus pocus?
On Halloween, children face a fourfold increase in pedestrian deaths and a 70% spike in life-threatening allergic reactions – here’s what you need to know.
From gruesome portraits to creepy critters, these are the paintings that have stayed with our experts long after their first glimpse.
Your Halloween sweets might do more than cause a sugar rush. Some ingredients can interfere with medicines or trigger harmful reactions.
Listen if you dare …
Belladonna, mandrake and mugwort may be better known for magic than medicine, but these so-called witches’ herbs helped shape modern pharmacology.
The horror category in the West has roots in South Asian, African and Indigenous narratives — a truth often overlooked.
A chocolate rivalry in the 1960s transformed a Pennsylvania town and its iconic amusement park.
From blood-squirting lizard eyes to zombie cockroaches, the natural world is ready for a truly terrifying Halloween.
While most Canadians trust science, half of us also believe in unexplained phenomena.
With its mixture of bloody costumes and scary themes, it can often feel like Halloween is luring kids into topics they are not ready to grapple with.
For the last few millennia, the changing of the seasons has been marked by Celtic peoples with festivals. And some of the costumes were genuinely terrifying.
‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ owes its cult success to independent repertory cinemas and their audiences.
Bats are our allies, not enemies.
US farmers grow over 1 billion pounds of pumpkin each year.
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Associate Professor of Research, University of Hertfordshire
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Cornelia H. Dudley Professor of Psychology, Knox College
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