by Joel Schwartzberg

A while back, my kids and I attended my town's annual Halloween Parade and Costume Contest. I was the "Cat in the Hat," my son was "Sam I Am," and my twin daughters went dressed as "Thing 1" and "Thing 2." Our costumes were painstakingly handmade, down to the Styrofoam green eggs and ham. With a little aggressive marketing, I thought we had a decent shot to win "Most Original Costume." I approached anyone holding a clipboard and made my pitch, tossing Thing 2 from arm to arm for cute effect.

Sure enough, we won a $50 savings bond that in ten years could be worth as much as $52.75. But standing onstage next to an eight-year-old boy squirting blood from his eyeballs and a twelve-year-old bloody zombie bride, I thought, "Whatever happened to pirates and princesses?"

It's not just the themes that have changed. The costumes themselves have gotten awfully sophisticated. Case in point: My 1976 Superman costume was basically a shapeless plastic body apron crudely illustrated with the requisite pieces of Super attire and a short plastic cape. No bulging, sculpted muscles or soft cloth, like in every Superman costume you see now, even the ones for dogs and toddlers. In fact, my costume inexplicably came with a sharp red plastic Lone Ranger-style mask. Back then, it was apparently important to be disguised, even if your character wasn't.

As modern horror movies traded in spookiness for sadism (been there, SAW that), so too have children's costumes gone from sickly sweet to just plain sick. A walk down the dripping, splattered, plastic machete-stocked Halloween aisle of your favorite drugstore proves my point.

Mind you, I love a good, scary horror film, though probably not by choice. In 1980, my mother, a devout fan of horror, made one of the most ridiculous parenting decisions since Joan Crawford shared with her little girl a certain distaste for dry-cleaning hangers, when she brought her two young-ish children to see The Shining. My brother and I screamed and hid our faces like kids trapped on a hell-bent roller coaster. Escape From Witch Mountain this was not.

Scarred by that experience, I could have grown into the kind of child other kids hide their pets from, but I simply inherited my mother's taste for scary media. I knew I was hooked when, as a movie usher in 1984, I was so mesmerized by the new Wes Craven film called A Nightmare on Elm Street that I volunteered for ticket-ripping duty just to be close to the poster.

But that's me as a grownup. I'm all for Halloween returning to its scary roots, but is it right to open a child's mind to images of sadistic brutality in the name of Halloween fun? Should the Leatherface costume from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre come in sizes 4-6? (With rubber chainsaw, natch!) Why are so many costumes for very little children based on movies they're not even old enough to legally see, like Star Wars III or Transformers?

Fortunately, my kids don't find fright pleasurable at all. My 8 year-old son is the biggest Star Wars fan in the world, but he won't watch parts III and VI because he senses they're just too scary. Good for him. My acquired appreciation of misery doesn't have to enjoy his or anyone else's company.

Still, if someone wants to see something scary with me on Halloween night, they need only say the word. Just leave the kids at home. Please.