As Halloween approaches, streets fill with children dressed as witches, ghosts, and monsters. Horror movies dominate TV screens, and haunted houses delight with scares. Beneath this fun, however, lies a deeper danger: Halloween can distort our understanding of evil by making it seem easy to spot. The real danger of Halloween isn’t children dressing up like witches or ghosts (or, more often nowadays, like superheroes). The real danger is that these caricatures of evil mask and distract us from how real evil worms its way into our lives unnoticed or, more dangerously, disguised as something good.
C.S. Lewis addresses this in The Screwtape Letters, where the senior demon, Screwtape, advises his nephew that the best way to lead a soul away from God is through small, unnoticed compromises. Screwtape writes, “The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” Lewis warns that evil often appears not as the dramatic figures we see on Halloween but as subtle distortions that creep into everyday life.
Halloween, with its focus on grotesque and obvious figures of evil, can make us less aware of how real evil often operates. When we imagine evil as monstrous or dramatic, we may miss its quieter forms. George MacDonald, a Christian writer who influenced Lewis, once said, “It is the half-truths that are most dangerous. The falsehoods we can see through, but the half-truths become part of our thinking.”
In daily life, evil rarely comes in dramatic form. More often, it enters through seemingly small justifications: a little lie, cutting a corner, or rationalizing selfish behavior. These acts may not look like the evil we associate with Halloween villains, but over time they erode our spiritual integrity. This gradual descent into evil is depicted in countless stories, from “Lord of the Rings” to “Breaking Bad.”
This point is vital: as Christians, we aren’t called to resist evil on our own. Our strength comes from leaning on God’s grace, given to us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Martin Luther captures this beautifully, saying, “When I look at myself, I don’t see how I can be saved. But when I look at Christ, I don’t see how I can be lost.” Luther understood that our ability to stand against evil comes not from our own strength, but from clinging to Christ’s victory over sin. We overcome evil as we die to ourselves and live for Christ.
As Halloween approaches, let us not be distracted by the caricatures of evil we see in costumes or movies. While grotesque and overt forms of evil are nothing to play around with, the more insidious threat comes from the small temptations in our own lives—those half-truths that pull us away from God’s will, the small compromises, the “little” lies, subtly growing pride, or a creeping sense of bitterness. Let us always remember that our strength to resist doesn’t come from our own efforts, but from God’s grace. In Christ, the power of evil has already been defeated. By turning to Him, trusting in His death and resurrection, we can stand firm against the subtle and real dangers that surround us.