#all hallows

Is it a romp day for children, with costumes and free candy?

Is it an autumnal harvest festival, with pumpkins and cornstalks and apple cider and a delicious chill in the air as night falls?

Is it a mystical time when creatures from bygone folklore come out to play?

Is it about Gothic horror—ghosts and vampires and fog-swept hillsides and crumbling churchyards?

Is it a day to upturn the social order, revel in your own dark side, and let your freak flag fly?

The obvious answer is that it's all of these, to some extent. And that is exactly my point. You can't properly encapsulate Halloween with a seasonal overlay to a theme park that already has a day job, or with a pop-up haunt. Halloween needs its own dedicated theme park to really explore its motifs and aesthetics. Such a complex venture would need to operate year-round in order to be successful, but I think that would work out. It's not as if people need a seasonal excuse to watch horror movies, throw costume parties, indulge in dark fairy tales, and other activities associated with this holiday. An entire literary genre, Urban Fantasy, is rooted in the premise that spooky creatures live among us on a daily (well, nightly) basis. Clearly, Halloween-style content can exist outside the month of October.

So here, then, is my vision of a Halloween theme park. Since it is meant to cover all the common moods and aesthetics of this many-masked holiday, I have decided to call it...