Why Demons Hate Halloween

Last updated on: October 28, 2026 at 8:50 am by Talley Cross

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Why Demons Hate Halloween 2026-10-28T08:50:04-04:00 Talley Cross

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Halloween

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A lost letter from Screwtape’s Desk on the perils of Halloween–

My dear Wormwood,

You appear to have made the elementary mistake of believing that Halloween belongs to us merely because the humans have decorated it with our traditional furniture. Skulls, graves, devils, witches, and ghosts may look promising, but such symbols are useful only while they retain their power to terrify and degrade. The difficulty is that Halloween far too often fails in precisely this respect, as the Enemy appropriates our most spectacular material for His purposes. As I’ve warned you before, the Enemy is, at bottom, a hedonist; nothing is more characteristic of Him, or more exasperating to us, than His habit of taking a perfectly fearful thing and converting it into an object of delight. The cross itself ought to have remained a dreaded emblem of torture, yet He transformed it into the sign of our defeat. When the humans make death ridiculous, dress it in cheap fabric, illuminate it with orange lights, and send their children laughing past it in search of sweets, they rob it of precisely the solemn terror on which we thrive. We want death enthroned as the final catastrophe. On Halloween, humans reduce death by making a joke of it.

And that is the main reason you should despise Halloween as much as Easter or Christmas: it perversely reminds us that the Enemy reduced death and its horrors – what should have been OUR VICTORY – to nothing, on the cross.

Yet our grievances against Halloween do not end with this particular indignity.

The communal character of Halloween is destructive to our cause. For much of the year, we labor successfully to keep neighbors behind locked doors, enclosed in their private anxieties, resentments, and entertainments. Then, on this lamentable night, humans emerge from their homes. Porches are lit. Streets fill with children. Strangers compliment one another’s inventions. Humans who have ignored each other for months exchange greetings and gifts. They call this trick-or-treating, and it may seem silly, but do not be deceived by appearances. The Enemy is fond of disguising His operations within such trivialities. Every open door, every act of generosity, and every moment of uncalculated pleasure threaten the splendid angst and isolation we have so carefully cultivated.

Remember too that our aim is not simply to make humans miserable, but to make them passive. The last thing we want is for them to discover how much pleasure can be gleaned from their own ridiculous ingenuity. Yet on Halloween, they flourish as creators, tiny microcosms of our Enemy. They carve faces into pumpkins, transform scraps of clothing into impossible creatures, invent identities, decorate houses, and laugh at their own absurdity. Even their wonderfully grotesque inventions testify against us, because they place what should sensibly remain objects of fear and ugliness and death into the service of life. This Halloween business is therefore far more dangerous than you seem to suppose; for in their subversive, joyful creativity, humans bear an intolerable resemblance to the Enemy Himself. It is horrifying to behold.

While Halloween therefore may seem to celebrate death, the true horror of Halloween, from our perspective, is its defiance of death. The humans gather after sunset and fill the darkness with light. They surround themselves with images of death and answer them with generosity, invention, and laughter. They acknowledge fear without submitting to it. They stage, without fully understanding it, an odious reenactment of the cross in which the grave is opened, the monster is unmasked, and death is deprived of the final dignity it should demand. Our Father Below would much prefer that they spend the evening alone, scrolling anxiously through their phones and dreading their own mortality, or lulled by screens into a splendid stupor – numb to the Enemy, to one another, and even to themselves. Instead, they walk together beneath the autumn trees, dressed as heroes, beasts, saints, and fools, celebrating life in the very presence of death.

Do not misunderstand me. We may still exploit the occasion through vanity, cruelty, intoxication, gluttony, genuine occult curiosity, or the commercial exhaustion of parents. Nearly every human celebration contains some entrance through which we may crawl. But you must abandon the childish assumption that an image of a devil is necessarily a victory for devils. We do not want to be caricatured. We want to be either worshiped or disbelieved, feared or dismissed as irrelevant. What we cannot tolerate is being mocked. Children wearing horns and witches’ hats do not pay homage to us. They diminish our terrible majesty to gaiety and costume.

When humans can look upon death and laugh, we are compromised. So do your utmost to spoil this ghastly holiday. Take this dreadful spirit of festivity, which points far too plainly to the Enemy’s final victory, and infect it with apprehension. Whisper to the Enemy’s followers that by celebrating, they serve us. Bury the merriment of Halloween beneath a mountain of imagined dangers. When an opportunity for true depravity presents itself, exploit it mercilessly. Alternatively, you may grow complacent amid the skeletons and gravestones, mistaking their abundance for our success. Should you make that blunder, the customary consequences of failure will be visited first upon you, and only shortly thereafter upon me.

Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape

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C.S. Lewis

Halloween

About Talley Cross

Talley is a compliance manager at a global payments company. She received her Master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from the American University in Cairo, where she was a University Fellow, and worked with the Anglican Diocese of Egypt on Muslim/Christian interfaith dialog projects. Talley has a Bachelor’s degree in Religious Studies from Sewanee / The University of the South. You can read more about the author here.

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