This evening, across the globe, armies of witches, skeletons, zombies, and all sorts of other ghostly creatures of miniature proportion, will take to the streets, knocking on the doors of their neighbours, with one important question on their lips: “Trick or treat?”
This of course forms part of the much-loved Halloween custom of trick-or-treating, whereby children don spooky disguises and go from house to house in their local vicinity asking for treats, and punishing refuters with idle tricks. The tradition is frequently associated with North America, where house decoration and costume efforts are most zealously embarked upon – think the iconic trick-or-treat scene in E.T. – but it was not popularised in the US and Canada until the 1950s, rather finding its roots in the UK and Ireland in the late medieval practice of “souling”, where children and the poor would sing and say prayers for the dead at the doors of the rich in return for cakes. The first account of "guising" at Halloween, however, was recorded in Scotland in 1895, where disguised masqueraders are described as carrying lanterns made from scooped-out turnips, and visiting homes to be rewarded with cakes, fruit and money.
Here, in celebration of both Halloween and trick-or-treating, we present a gallery of AnOther contributors, and their children, in their favourite ghoulish guises, from stylist and Another Man creative director Alister Mackie dressed as the dying Christ alongside Katy England, complete with a crown of thorns, to photographic editor Zoe Maughan as "a more cutesie than spooky" witch.
Text by Daisy Woodward
