Halloween’s Getting Scarier. Is Our View of Death to Blame?

If you venture out this Halloween, you’re more than likely to encounter a spectacularly macabre set of displays on the lawns of your neighbors. In much of suburbia, the scale of Halloween decorations has reached new levels. From fake cemeteries and garden-variety ghosts to giant skeletons and Grim Reapers: if it evokes death, you’ll see it on October 31.

It’s easy to view these spectacles, which seem to have become significantly more terrifying in recent decades, as a sign that we’ve become desensitized, and it takes more to scare us.