Gore Halloween decorations scare the hell out of kids – while adults gain the upper hand

On my recent morning walk in Queens, I pass a front door covered in bloody handprints.

In another apartment block there is a robot in a black cloak. Walk by and it screams like a child hysterical with fear.

Then I come to a house with half a bloody torso hanging out the window and a black plastic body bag hanging upside down from a tree. There is also a severed foot sticking out of the garden.

Happy Halloween to you too!

Apparently, this is the holiday of death and demons (and, for some parents, equally terrifying: Milk Duds). But these days it can feel like, “It’s the mutilated corpse, Charlie Brown.”

How did we get here?

“It started with the pumpkins,” said Nancy McDermott, author of “The Problem with Parenting.”

As children, she said, “We got these serrated knives and made these kind of primitive faces.” But then there were these killjoys who started using carving tools, and pretty soon you had these exquisite pumpkins and you asked yourself, 'Why should “Do I even try?'”

As adults became more involved in their children's lives, every aspect of the holiday became professionalized: parties, costumes, decorations.

Soon, what was once a ghosts-and-gumdrops day became an $11 billion loss, second only to Christmas.

But while professionalization may explain the money spent, it does not explain the blood.

“Gone are the days of the 12-foot skeleton,” sighed Aneisha McMillan, marketing director for the Halloween & Costume Association.

“Now people have to do their best to make skeletons move or moan or scream crazy.”

Blame the media. (Never a bad idea.)

“Despite the fact that I live and breathe year-round,” McMillan said, “I was persuaded to see the latest 'Saw' movie and I literally thought I was going to get sick.” You saw someone's arm off and your whole chair shakes – I had to wait in the lobby.”

For millennials weaned on splatter films, growing up with squeezable pouches of juice is like growing up. You always need a larger dose.

That might explain why at the Halloween Adventure Store in Manhattan, “we have this animatronic girl with half of her head popping off and half of her mouth – they're kind of separating from each other,” said Mystic, the manager.

She also wields a different type of animatronic: “You walk by and it lunges at you.”

Some shoppers were so startled, she said, that they whirled around and hit it.

Perhaps decoration inflation simply reflects today's cultural extremism – particularly what we experience online.

The Internet's algorithms are designed to keep us glued to the screen for as long as possible. To that end, platforms are providing increasingly radical content – ​​stunts, shocks, hate – to keep us angry and engaged.

So the severed foot in the garden? It's just a kind of internet of lawn.

Wanting a sunnier outlook, I called Brian Blair, owner of the horror delivery company Pumpkin Pulp.

“I don’t think there’s anything to worry about – it’s a way to let off steam,” he said cheerfully.

Phew! So what is selling well this year?

“The Mask of the Slaughtered Pig,” he replied. “It looks like a pig’s head has been cut off. It’s very popular.”

So. I asked.

“There are just no boundaries anymore,” said a 35-year-old mother in Springfield, New Jersey, who responded to my question, “What’s going on?” Question about X. She requested anonymity as she described the street where she accidentally took her children the other day.

“There are three houses. In one, a monster holds a child by the ankles. In House #2 there are about six Freddy Kreugers with knives. And in the third house there are really detailed, bloody zombies with pockmarks on their faces.

“My oldest child is six and has started having nightmares.”

Great.

We already give children almost no independence.

We rarely let them go to school, play outside, or run errands alone. This makes her depressed and anxious like nobody's business. (It's also the culture I fight day and night.)

Then, on the one day a year we let them run around, they are attacked by blood-dripping monsters.

If we wanted to scare kids into spending the rest of their childhood indoors on the couch, this would be a great way to do it.

Bonus: More zombies.

Lenore Skenazy is president of the nonprofit organization Let Grow Promoting childhood independence and founder of the Free range children Movement.