There was some discussion somewhere within the past couple of months about how Halloween season gets earlier every year. I don't recall if it was this thread or somewhere else. The WSJ put up a story this morning about it.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/ar...ready-wants-you-to-start-spending/ar-AA1f924J
The Halloween Industrial Complex Already Wants You to Start Spending
By Jacob Passy
8/11/2023
Summer vacation is still in full swing across much of the country. That hasn’t stopped Walt Disney World from rolling out the jack-o’-lanterns on Main Street, U.S.A.
The resort is hustling summer off the stage and kicking off its Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party seasonal event on Friday. Yes, images of scarecrows and tawny foliage are elbowing into prime beach season. It is the earliest that the Halloween event at the Magic Kingdom, first held in 1995, has started.
There will be Disney characters such as Cruella De Vil and the Seven Dwarfs, special parades and fireworks shows, performances featuring the Sanderson Sisters from the “Hocus Pocus” films and candy galore.
Disney is firing the first, extremely early shot in this year’s theme-park Halloween arms race. Some events, like Disney’s, are more family-oriented. Others at Six Flags and Universal Studios lean into the horror, with actors in gory makeup trolling the grounds. What nearly all of these events of the Halloween industrial complex have in common is that they are growing—in size, popularity, and most notably, duration. The witching hour has turned into the witching months.
“August is the new September,” says Martin Lewison, an associate professor at Farmingdale State College in New York who studies theme parks marketing and strategy.
Ginny Phillips, a mother of three and social-media influencer, will be among those in attendance at the Disney Halloween party on Friday, along with her oldest daughter.
“It is like an end-of-summer bash,” says Phillips, who splits her time between the Nashville area and Central Florida. She predicts her family will do far more summertime trick-or-treating at Disney World in August and September than they will in October in their own neighborhood.
The Halloween creep into August brings challenges, such as how to hack a costume in this summer’s record-breaking heat.
Many people dress up for Disney’s Halloween events. Nicole Rivera, a
travel agent with Marvelous Mouse Travels, is attending Disney’s festivities on Tuesday, and has coordinated costumes for her family based on characters from the Disney animated film “Moana.”
Her son will be dressed as the chicken character, Heihei, but will wear a T-shirt and shorts instead of full chicken garb, and Rivera also cut back on the feathers she planned to glue onto his get-up.
“I’m the type to go all out so it was really hard to hold back,” she says.
He won’t be wearing the costume again on Halloween proper, since the family lives in Buffalo, N.Y. “It will be about 40 degrees here and windy,” she says.
Theme parks are taking their cues from a Halloween-addicted society. On social media, fans make “Code Orange” posts when they spot the first Halloween merchandise in the wild in stores and many restaurants have already rolled out pumpkin-flavored menu items weeks before Starbucks starts selling its pumpkin spice lattes.
“I feel like adults are more willing to celebrate the things that they enjoyed as a kid, more so than we’ve seen with past generations,” says Mike Wilton, a marketing professional from Southern California who runs a website called All Hallows Geek.
Universal Destinations and Experiences is developing a year-round interactive attraction in Las Vegas based on its popular Halloween Horror Nights events. In California, the Oogie Boogie Bash event at
Disneyland Resort, which occurs over 25 nights in September and October, sold out within the first day. Universal Studios theme parks in California and Florida unleash their Halloween Horror Nights in early September.
The epicenter of spooky shindigs is arguably Southern California, home to more than a half-dozen major theme parks. There, Knott’s Berry Farm, a regional park located near Anaheim, Calif., hosted its first Halloween event 50 years ago and is viewed in the industry as the pioneer of the genre. The first edition of what now is called Knott’s Scary Farm took place over just three nights, with tickets costing $4, or about $27 in 2023 dollars, says Jeff Tucker, a show director at the park. Today, the event occurs over six weeks, with admission starting at around $55 per person.
A preview event for the Knott’s Scary Farm celebration is set for late August. The festivities start in earnest in late September.
Now that Halloween events go for more than a month, theme parks have to find ways to keep things scary for people who visit repeatedly. Haunted mazes lose their bite when you know just where a frightening character might pop out. Gus Krueger, a creative and scenic designer at Knott’s, says his team adds rich back stories and lots of hidden details in their mazes—things that visitors might not fully take in on their first times through. The planning takes all year.
