The Underrated Power of Writing During Halloween
I used to go to masquerade balls every Halloween. One year I had a spare ticket, so a makeup artist offered me the full vampire treatment in exchange for it.
Two hours in a chair, prosthetic fangs, theatrical blood, the whole production. When I walked into the ballroom that night, people I’d known for years didn’t recognize me. That’s the thing about Halloween: it gives you permission to become someone else for a few hours. Which is exactly what writing does, except the transformation lasts longer. See how to use holidays in fiction.
Me at the Labyrinth of Jareth Masquerade Ball. Copyright © Richard Lowe.
I’m currently writing a gothic horror series called Grim, and the experience has changed how I think about Halloween. The holiday is the one time of year when an entire culture collectively agrees to engage with darkness, fear, and the supernatural. For writers, that’s not a novelty. That’s the job.
Watch: The ENTIRE History of Halloween: From Celtic Samhain to Modern Holiday, Fading Lore
What does gothic horror teach every writer?
Gothic horror is built on craft techniques that work in any genre. The reason Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart still unsettles people after 180 years is the narrator’s insistence that he’s sane while showing, sentence by sentence, that he isn’t. The horror comes from the gap between what the character believes and what the reader knows.
That gap is the same tool memoir writers use when they describe a childhood they didn’t understand at the time but understand now.
It’s the same tool business writers use when they build a case study where the reader can see the disaster coming before the executives in the story can. The technique has a name in horror: dramatic irony. In every other genre, it’s just called good writing.
Gothic horror also teaches restraint. The most frightening scenes in fiction are the ones where the writer withholds information. Washington Irving doesn’t describe the Headless Horseman in detail. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House never confirms whether the house is haunted or whether Eleanor is losing her mind. The ambiguity is the point. The reader’s imagination fills in the gaps with something worse than anything the writer could describe.
| Writer | What the work shows |
|---|---|
| Edgar Allan Poe | The Tell-Tale Heart: the gap between what the narrator believes and what the reader knows |
| Washington Irving | Restraint: the Headless Horseman is never described in detail |
| Shirley Jackson | The Haunting of Hill House never confirms whether the house is haunted |
| Mary Shelley | The consequences of ambition unchecked by ethics |
| Bram Stoker | Dracula as a metaphor for seduction, corruption and the loss of self |
| M.R. James | Ghost stories written to read aloud to colleagues |
This is a lesson most writers learn the hard way: what you leave out is often more powerful than what you put in.
In memoir, the moment you don’t describe in full, the conversation you summarize in a single sentence because the details are still too raw, those gaps tell the reader something important. In horror, the shadow in the hallway is scarier before you see what’s casting it. In memoir, the silence between two people can carry more weight than the argument that follows.
A Victorian hearse dressed for Halloween, jack-o’-lanterns and all. Copyright © Richard Lowe.
Why do Halloween stories survive?
The stories that define Halloween have lasted for centuries because they tap into fears that don’t expire. Poe wrote about guilt and paranoia. Irving wrote about superstition and the terror of the unknown. Mary Shelley wrote about the consequences of ambition unchecked by ethics. These are permanent.
The horror stories that don’t survive are the ones built entirely on shock. Gore fades. Jump scares don’t translate to the page. What lasts is psychological tension, moral complexity, and characters whose fears mirror the reader’s own. Dracula endures because Stoker understood that the vampire is a metaphor for seduction, corruption, and the loss of self. The monster works because it means something beyond itself.
The Halloween stories that survive tap into fears that don't expire; shock alone fades.
Writing Grim has reinforced this for me. The scenes that work best are the quiet ones where something is slightly wrong and the character knows it but can’t identify what. That slow wrongness is harder to write than an action sequence, and it’s far more effective. It’s also, incidentally, the same feeling you get at a good masquerade ball: everyone is familiar and no one is quite who they appear to be.
The Halloween Writing Tradition
Halloween has always been a writers’ holiday. The tradition of telling ghost stories predates trick-or-treating by centuries. The Celts told stories around bonfires on Samhain. The Victorians held séances and parlor ghost story readings. M.R. James wrote his ghost stories to read aloud to colleagues on Christmas Eve, but the tradition of gathering people in a room and scaring them with words is pure Halloween.
That tradition is alive in every haunted house script, every horror podcast, every community storytelling event held in October. It’s alive in the writers who use this season to start the horror novel they’ve been thinking about all year, and in the memoirists who find that autumn’s darkness gives them permission to write about the chapters of their lives they’ve been avoiding.
There’s a reason people write more openly in October. The masks give you cover. When the whole culture is playing with darkness, it feels safer to explore your own.
Me with the Red Moon Dance Company at Knott’s Berry Farm’s Halloween Haunt, October 11, 2013. From left: Jenn, Ayse Cerami, me, Merryll and Pixie. Copyright © Richard Lowe.
Write the Dark Stuff
If you’ve been sitting on a story that scares you, fiction or your own life, Halloween is a good time to start, because it reminds you that darkness is part of the human experience and the writers who engage with it head-on produce the work that lasts.
If you need help getting that story out of your head and onto the page, let’s talk.
Frequently Asked Questions
Related from the writer’s calendar: National Short Film Day: Storytelling With No Room to Hide.
