Off-Guardian – Oct 31, 2025

1. Climate Change is ruining Halloween, too

Everything for everyone everywhere is getting more expensive, and yet it’s always for different reasons. Brexit or Putin or Covid.

For chocolate, it’s Climate Change. Trump too, but mostly climate change. Something about growing cocoa beans and extreme weather events I think. I don’t know, after a few years of doing this, things start to blur together.

Let’s check in on The Guardian:

Ghosts and goblins might not be the only scary things popping up this Halloween. Prices for the holiday’s most popular candy treats are rising, spooked by Donald Trump’s tariffs and climate change.

We recently ran a piece bemoaning the smallification and shitification of confectionery. Clearly, that author didn’t realize it was all climate change’s fault.

To be clear, you’re not being price-gouged by super-monopolies bent on eternal profit, it’s climate change.

Got that?

2. Urban Scary-tales

It’s one of those fascinating meta-phenomena, that Halloween has spawned urban legends to scare the parents of eager children.

There’s the razor blades in the bobbing apples and cyanide in the Pixy Stix!

Scary stories of demonic neighbours bent on seasonal sadism. Tales that persist despite there being no record of them ever happening. Not one single time.

This year, apparently, it’s THC-laced “counterfeit candy” in a bid to get kids baked out of their minds, at least that’s what Good Morning America says.

This one probably isn’t true either. But that won’t stop some people from adding a urine dip test after their candy X-ray.

3. Digital Costumes are making the internet a scary place

Writing on the UK Parliament’s website, Mike Freeman MP is warning of the danger of deepfakes. Apparently, a deepfaked video of him switching parties went “viral”, and this shows that…

We’ve allowed the growth of a dangerous digital space where pretty much anything goes.

He bemoans the “gap in the law” that enables digital identity theft and the “lack of accountability online”.

We all know where this is going, right?

This ad pretending to be journalism from Integrity 360 strikes a similar tone, warning of Deep Fakes meaning you could be conned into talking to pretend people.

In the age of Deep Fakes, we need to be sure we’re talking to real people.

…if only there was some way to digitally identify people!

4. Halloween is racist. Again.

Every year there’s more race-bait outrage about Halloween, usually focused on who can dress up as what. It’s actually quite hard to keep track.

For example, we’ve all heard of “cultural appropriation” and how important it is to avoid it when picking a costume.

And yet, according to this Professor of Psychiatry from Yale, her “black-presenting” child being told she can’t dress up as a Korean girl because her skin is the wrong color is racist. Not just racist but tear-jerkingly, “excruciatingly” racist.

Oh, and wearing a sombrero to dress up as a Mexican bandit is racist, but Speedy Gonzalez isn’t. I don’t know why.

Suggested Halloween Watching

As usual with these recommendations, we try to go outside the box. Nobody needs to be told to watch Halloween on Halloween.

Saying that, a critically and commercially successful mainstream movie is hardly “outside the box”, but Robert Egger’s Nosferatu is  a wonderfully evocative and unsettling film.

If you want to be truly scared, then The Haunting (1963) and The Woman in Black (1989) are, quite comfortably, the scariest films I have ever watched.

Mike Flanagan’s loose remake The Haunting of Hill House is very good, and is only held back from being great by a lacklustre ending, nevertheless it is very worth watching. As is his movie Oculus (2013).

To go even further back in time Dead of Night is a classic of early British horror cinema.

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All told a pretty hectic week for the new normal crowd, and we didn’t even mention dangerously flammable Halloween costumes or how sustainable choices can maximize Halloween fun.

There’s a lot of change in the air, a lot of agendas in the works, if you see a headline, article, post or interview you think is a sign of the times, post it in the comments, email us or share it on social media and we will add it to the next edition.

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