In a busy city neighbourhood, the streets are swarming with skeletons, spider webbing, bloody handprints and fright masks. And hey, look over there – it’s a life-size human effigy hanging by a noose from an upper window. Locals have been stopped in their tracks.

It takes some effort to acquire a man-sized figure, paint its face and mutilate its feet, dress it in an adult jacket and trousers, stick a knife in its chest, then find a rope to suspend it from a window. It checks all the boxes for gory, gruesome, realistic and seasonal. We are in “sense-of-humour” territory.

This is the murky realm where a comedian, say, acts on the theory that no subject is off-limits if there’s a joke in it; while a chunk of the audience might feel seen, the rest are left shifting uncomfortably. The difference here is that an audience has a choice about whether to buy a ticket to see that comedian, knowing transgressive humour might be involved. That choice is denied to an adult and a seven-year-old walking along a residential street where a display of a gruesome corpse hanging out a window is unavoidable.

Halloween is meant to be scary and children like it that way. It’s part of the shivery, bug-eyed wonder of it. There is spooky fun in enormous spiders, ghosts, witches and skeletons. Many of them (and plenty of adults) have an........

© The Irish Times