It’s a “whistling past the graveyard” sort of thing, an attempt to distract ourselves from the parts about our lives we find most unsettling by turning them into a joke. We hope by making light of these fears to domesticate them, to make them into playthings we can control, candies and costumes, costumes which can be taken off tomorrow as easily as we put them on today.

When we don the garb of what we fear – the undead, the life-drinkers, the manimal-hybrids, the half-alive – we are grasping at an uncomfortable truth. When we dress as these things, as zombies, vampires, werewolves, and ghosts, we live out for a moment the reality of the Fall’s effect on our humanness. Just as each of these is a parody of our intended natures, our sin-corrupted frames now live on as caricatures of who we were meant to be.

We know deep down that evil has taken up residence in our hearts, and we attempt by playing dress up for a day to drown out a barely heard whisper from the back of our souls, reminding us that all is not right with the world. In our heart of hearts, we know that there is something wrong “out there,” and, most distressingly, “in here.”

We try ever so valiantly to pretend it’s otherwise. We like to think that death is something that happens to someone else, or that it’s just a natural part of life, neither to be hated or feared. But all it takes is a health-scare or the loss of a loved one to bring back the stench of death to our nostrils.

We tell ourselves that evil is just a fanciful thing, a conditional thing, the artifact of our cultural moment, bearing no more moral weight than the shifting fortunes of style and fashion. This is a tougher nut for reality to crack. With death, we cannot avoid the reach of its grim grasp, but with evil, we have no end to self-deception.

We create grand philosophies and coping mechanisms to justify our indifference to our own moral corruption. If we’re of a naturalist temperament, we say that matter is all there is and ever will be. If we’re of a rigorous disposition, we lie to ourselves, saying that evil only comes to those who are not upright. If we’re more sentimental, we do our best to ignore, to excuse, to sanitize the evil around us.

But these self-imposed sleights of hand are never enough. Something is deeply and perversely rotten in this world, and, despite our fervent attempts to keep our souls lit with imaginary candles, the darkness seeps in. The reality of evil keeps showing up in our newsfeeds.

The recent killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi reminds us that this was no “austere religious scholar” but a vile man responsible for the slaughter of thousands and the institutionalization of rape. Just this month we read of contemporary echoes of Nazi horrors: millions of human beings, members of an ethnic minority, herded into camps for “reeducation,” women assaulted in front of others, with beatings for any fellow prisoner who dared even to grimace. We have euphemisms for abortion as health-care and babies as tissue, but then we’re faced with a Kermit Gosnell or Ulrich Klopfer and the stacks of rotting tiny flesh.

All our ideals about the malleability of morality and the illusory nature of evil collapse in the dust of reality. The death and evil introduced into the world by the Fall of Man is no superficial affectation but a fundamental characteristic of our present-day existence. Halloween is an unorthodox recognition of a classical element of the Christian worldview, both pointing to and hiding the face of evil.

With this macabre fascination displayed throughout October, the unnerving juxtaposition of beautiful children done up as devils and carefully-tended lawns strewn with rotting corpses, we catch a glimpse of what our carefully-tended minds try so hard to hide from us. Evil is no costume and death no mask.

A greater Christmas is coming, and, with it, the full restoration of all God intends. But, until that day, we are left with the reality of death’s repugnance and evil’s indelibility. We ignore this truth to our peril.