Poll: Is Halloween Metal?

As some of our readers might have noticed, I fucking love Halloween. It’s the day my whole calendar revolves around, a colorful celebration of horror, weirdness, evil, insanity, and the demise of the year. People talk about laughing in the face of Death, but October 31st is the day that Death laughs back.

My obsession with Halloween and my metal fandom come from the same place: an appreciation for the fun of darkness. Those of us who thrive on dark thoughts and gallows humor often feel rebuked by the world at large, which doesn’t understand why you can’t just be nice and smile. Metal is a musical and cultural expression of those people who feel that same draw towards intensity and negativity, and Halloween is the day where everyone has a good time with us.

And yet I find that the two don’t always mix. A lot of metalheads I know — especially those drawn to extreme metal, death and black and doom metal — not only don’t really like Halloween, they actively hate the holiday. To them, it’s either kid’s stuff that they grew out of and feel no need to revisit, or it’s amateur hour when everyone else plays at what they do for real the other 364 days of the year. This heavily ties into metal’s exclusivity, the idea that one must earn their fangs rather than just slap on a costume and say you’re a monster. Think Suicide from Return of the Living Dead.

To a certain extant, I grasp that side of the argument — as a drinker, I get bitter and weird every St. Patrick’s Day and New Year’s Eve — but as a lover of Halloween, I can’t fully understand it. Halloween is the night when the living and the dead are practically rubbing shoulders, and when the world accepts that with a smile and joins the party. That’s about as metal as it gets! But maybe I’m just a big kid who’s biased towards a day of drunken slasher movie marathons and shoveling Kit-Kats into my maw.

So you tell us: is Halloween metal? Is it the ultimate day of monsters, witchcraft, and worshipping the dead, just as King Diamond intended? Or is it some commercialized bullshit for kids that allows idiots to pretend they know anything about the thing we do every day? Let us know below.