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Every generation ruins something: Boomers ruined the housing market. Millennials ruined chain restaurants. Generation Z? We’ve managed to ruin Halloween.
Not the decorations or the candy — those are still around. What we’ve lost is the spirit of the holiday, the sense of transformation, performance and creative excess that once made Halloween a kind of cultural theater. In chasing irony and detachment, we’ve drained the night of imagination.
Let’s start with the early 2000s, the height of the Y2K “sexy costume” era. It was, to be clear, deeply flawed. Those years were saturated with body dysmorphia and fatphobia, teaching young women that Halloween was only for those who could afford to be seen. Costumes like “sexy nurse” or “angel versus devil” reinforced narrow, gendered ideals of desirability rather than self-expression.
But despite its problems, that era still meant something. It represented effort, intention and artistry, even if that artistry was born from sequins and double-sided tape. There was a certain cultural energy in those costumes, a commitment to performance, however misguided. People cared enough to try. Dressing up was an event, almost a ritual. You didn’t just throw something on, but you planned, you prepped and you waited weeks for the perfect accessories to arrive in the mail. It was an act of expression. And expression, however imperfect, still required vulnerability. To be “too much” was part of the point. The night belonged to spectacle.
Even if it excluded some people, the Y2K era demanded attention. Halloween became a collective performance in which effort was the currency. You could critique someone’s execution but rarely critique their intention. That flawed commitment created a sense of occasion, a cultural investment in a single night devoted entirely to imagination and performance.
Now, the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. Generation Z’s Halloween aesthetic is ironically defined by the “low-effort” costume that proudly announces how little thought went into it. A Monsters Inc. cap and a blue T-shirt become “Sully.” A white T-shirt with a name tag becomes “Karen.” A pair of sweatpants and a hoodie becomes “Casual Ghost.” These costumes aren’t creative; they’re self-protective. They let us participate while pretending not to care. The new fear isn’t showing too much skin; it’s showing too much enthusiasm.
Irony has become our generation’s default posture, and nowhere is that clearer than on Halloween. We are terrified of sincerity and allergic to spectacle. Whereas previous generations reveled in the absurd, we shrink from it. What used to be a collective celebration of transformation has turned into a performance of detachment. The result isn’t subversive; it’s sterile. A night that once encouraged creativity now rewards apathy and, in doing so, robs Halloween of its communal energy.
“When we show up caring, we permit others to care, too, and that communal energy is what makes Halloween memorable.”
Halloween, at its best, has always been about camp — that exaggerated, joyful commitment to being “too much.” It’s a night when the usual rules of self-presentation are suspended and when caring deeply about something silly is not only allowed but celebrated. To lose that is to lose one of the last communal spaces for unfiltered self-expression. Costumes, even absurd or ridiculous ones, were a way to experiment with identity, to freely perform for just a few hours. Now that freedom has been replaced with convenience and irony.
This cultural shift might seem trivial, but it mirrors something larger. The Y2K obsession with sex appeal reflected an unhealthy fixation on the body. Generation Z’s obsession with irony reflects an equally unhealthy fear of vulnerability. Both extremes flatten the holiday’s purpose: to transform, to play and to perform without apology. The difference is that one tried too hard, and the other doesn’t try at all.
We don’t need to bring back the fatphobic “hot girl” era, but we do need to bring back its sense of occasion and its commitment to caring. Buy the wig. Paint your face green. Hot-glue the sequins. Be dramatic. Be sincere. Be ridiculous. Even small acts of effort matter; they signal investment and imagination. When we show up caring, we permit others to care, too, and that communal energy is what makes Halloween memorable.
If your costume can be pulled from your closet the morning of, it’s not clever; it’s cowardly. Halloween deserves more than irony; it deserves imagination. It deserves the exuberance that once made it the most democratic, delightfully unserious holiday of the year, a night when “too much” was exactly enough. More than that, Halloween deserves joy, and joy requires effort.
Generation Z didn’t just make Halloween less fun, but we made it boring. And honestly, that’s the scariest part.
Reach Maci Lesh at letters@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.
