Halloweenomics: From Celtic Ritual to the Global Fright Economy

Halloween is a transnational seasonal market for costumes, confectionery, decorations, social displays, and deliberately frightening experiences. This concise paper introduces the “fright economy” as the conversion of ritualized fear, identity performance, and collective participation into economic value. It selectively examines a Scopus export of 1,171 records retrieved using “Halloween” and two associated VOSviewer visualizations. A transparent metadata screen provisionally classifies 111 records as directly focused on the holiday and another 52 as related to horror and media; most other records concern unrelated scientific meanings of the term or incidental uses. The network maps reveal why unfiltered bibliometrics distort the study of festive consumerism. As an illustrative market indicator, the National Retail Federation projected U.S. Halloween spending of US$13.5 billion in 2026. This paper links this scale to staged experiences, cultural adaptation, and social and environmental costs. Our results are intentionally reported at the aggregate level; source-level rankings, detailed NLP cluster estimates, and full expenditure decompositions are outside this brief account.