Halloween History
This Celtic festival, traditionally associated with the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter, is often considered one of the historical influences on modern Halloween.
What is Samhain?
Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 short story about a man driven to murder and then haunted by his own guilt features this animal whose beating heart he imagines hearing beneath the floorboards.
What is a cat?
In the classic Peanuts Halloween special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, which character spends the night waiting in a pumpkin patch for the Great Pumpkin to appear?
Who is Linus?
This almond-shaped structure deep in the brain plays a major role in detecting and processing potential threats and triggering fear responses.
What is the amygdala?
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According to this famous Mexican legend, the ghostly spirit of a woman wanders near rivers and waterways, crying out for her lost children.
Who is La Llorona?
In medieval and early modern Europe, this practice involved disguising oneself or dressing in costume and going from house to house, sometimes in exchange for food.
Answer: What is mumming?
Before becoming an HBO television series, Tales from the Crypt was a horror comic anthology published by this company, alongside The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear.
What is EC Comics?
This 1992 horror film directed by Bernard Rose was based on a short story by Clive Barker and became notable for turning an urban legend into a story about race, gentrification, and the history of Cabrini-Green.
What is Candyman?
In this type of learning, a previously neutral stimulus becomes associated with something frightening, eventually triggering a fear response on its own.
What is classical conditioning?
The legend of the Wendigo originated among Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes and northeastern North America.
Who are the Algonquian peoples?
In the 19th century, Irish and Scottish immigrants helped popularize Halloween traditions in the United States. This vegetable was originally carved into lanterns before the pumpkin became dominant in America.
What is a turnip?
Published in 1987, this novel by Black American author Octavia E. Butler follows Dana, a young Black woman who is repeatedly transported from 20th-century California to a Maryland plantation where she encounters her enslaved ancestors.
What is Kindred?
During the filming of The Exorcist, which actress suffered a serious back injury while filming a scene in which her character is violently thrown around?
Who is Ellen Burstyn?
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In John Watson and Rosalie Rayner’s famous “Little Albert” experiment, researchers conditioned the infant to fear this animal by pairing its appearance with a loud, startling noise.
What is a white rat?
In Japanese folklore, this supernatural creature is often depicted as a fox that can transform into a human, particularly a beautiful woman.
What is a kitsune?
This religion, developed primarily among enslaved Africans and their descendants in Haiti, incorporates West and Central African religious traditions with elements of Catholicism and places significant importance on relationships between the living and the dead.
What is Haitian Vodou?
Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House deliberately leaves readers uncertain whether the supernatural events are actually occurring or are being filtered through the increasingly unstable perceptions of this character.
Who is Eleanor Vance?
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In this 1960 psychological horror film directed by Michael Powell, the protagonist secretly films women as he murders them, creating a disturbing portrait of voyeurism and obsession.
What is Peeping Tom?
The Satanic Panic provides a notorious example of this psychological problem: investigators who expected to uncover hidden ritual abuse could/would unintentionally influence testimony through leading questions and reinforce increasingly elaborate accounts.
What is suggestibility?
In Haitian folklore, this malevolent spirit is said to rise from the dead and attack or torment the living. Its name comes from the Haitian Creole word associated with the dead.
What is a zombi?
The Halloween tradition of bobbing for apples is believed to have evolved from a British and Irish divination game associated with this ancient Roman festival honoring the goddess of agriculture and marriage.
What is the festival of Pomona?
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In Robert W. Chambers' 1895 collection, this fictional forbidden play is associated with a mysterious symbol, a supernatural figure, and a city called Carcosa, later influencing generations of weird fiction and horror.
What is The King in Yellow?
This famous actor served as a producer on the 2000 horror film Shadow of the Vampire, starring Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck.
Who is Nicolas Cage?
This psychologist became one of the first Black Americans to earn a PhD in psychology and conducted influential research on racial identity and the psychology of Black Americans, including work with his wife Mamie.
Who is Kenneth Clark?
According to the legend of one of America’s most famous haunted plantations, this enslaved woman was said to have worn a green turban after losing an ear, poisoned a family with an oleander-laced cake, and was later killed and thrown into the river.
Who is Chloe?