Though religious reformation has loosened the festival's ties to Catholicism, and secularization has turned it into a capitalist commodity, Halloween perseveres. Each year, it returns the world, for a brief spell, to the whirlwind chaos out of which it was born. But the dark ride, loaded with the trappings of bewitched Protestant Weirdness and the Age of Reason, is also a repository of a thousand years of human history. One room leads to an unconnected other, one twist becomes another turn through time and space as dark riders travel an erratic line from mad science lab to jungle wilderness to ghost highway over a span of three minutes. Despite the random array of elements and icons, we understand their message perfectly.
All signs point to scariness and, inevitably, foolishness.
And, as we peer back into the shadowy past, we find that people have been taking dark rides of one sort or another for a very long time. Summoning devils, conjuring ghosts and animating skeletons for frightening entertainment is a cross-cultural commonality. The knotted-up roots of the modern, Western imagination of death, the devil and hell can be found in medieval Europe. In that time, vernacular sermons and penitential literature, apocalyptic books and visionary narratives, illustrations and paintings, religious legend and popular drama influenced and refined one another. The constant flow of reciprocal creativity nourished Christian beliefs with symbols of heaven and hell, good and evil.