Welcome To It Not Being What It Used To Be

*typing into search box*

“Vintage Halloween Aesthetic” “Homemade Early 2000s Halloween Vibes” “POV: You Wake Up In The 90s and It’s Halloween” “Childhood Halloween Ambiance”

Nostalgia

Nostalgia is centuries old, but the continued mass resurgence of aesthetics we’ve seen before is now fueled by a look rather than a feeling. Or maybe it’s a feeling that causes the search, but seekers settle for the aesthetic. The “Is Pepsi okay?” of self-soothing.

(Side note: it’s been 3 years since the first essays on why Y2K made a comeback. How?)

I know many of you reading this are, like me, aficionados of the creepy season. And if you’ve gone searching for new treasures to add to your Halloween hoard, you’ve been confronted with the absolute slop major retailers are peddling in 2026. There are whole Reddit threads and TikTok rabbit holes lamenting the absence of quality options. 

Universal unveiled an Obsession-themed scare zone for Halloween Horror Nights at its Hollywood location, featuring actresses portraying Nikki because the movie became a full-blown film culture phenomenon online. They added it just months after Obsession’s release, even though normally HHN is planned at least a year in advance. However, clicks and comments move faster than production schedules, and hot takes on consent become a line on the call sheet.

Between global warming slowing down the arrival of fall, a major theme park using an assault victim as the main draw for one of their haunted attractions this year, and all of the above, I understand if you’re not quite in the mood for more of the macabre. Like everything else in our lives now, enshittification has been not-so-slowly creeping into events, decor, costumes, and even our beloved Spirit Halloween.

More, more, more

It’s all beckoning to us: spend more, watch more, stay on your screens, make content when you’re not consuming content. The hands controlling the machines-that-be are churning out whatever has high KPIs (if you don’t know what that stands for, I envy you), knowing there will be an audience for it all somewhere. There’s a reason we keep getting sequels to every damn thing.

Where do we go from here? Another YouTube ambiance video in the background while we scroll socials for hits of dopamine that make us feel like we experienced something firsthand? How do we invoke the spirit of the season that makes our brains swim with the same chemicals it did before?

We can start by taking off the blood-colored glasses and seeing our nostalgia for what it is: candy-coated comfort. And that’s ok! The real world is tough. We can’t put our hands over our eyes and hide from every jump scare that life has become. We can become better curators of what we consume, though. And we can reject the push for more, more, more and shift to savoring what we really want. We just have to figure out what that is.