Every year on this day both print journalists and scribes across the internet remind us about, or perhaps discover for the first time, the pagan roots of Halloween. This year is no different, though this particular piece today in The Washington Post is better than most. It recounts Christianity’s co-opting of Samhain and other ancient feast days, and then the gradual capitalistic morphing of such events into the entertainment of doorbell-ringing and sexy avocado costumes. But it goes further, and uses Halloween as an example of modern disengagement from imminent mortality (at least in the U.S.).

“Halloween is supposed to be about death,” the authors write. “Part of the power of these rituals is to make death into a known quantity, something to be accepted, even embraced, rather than feared,” but modern death “has been sanitized and sequestered away from the world of the living”, and our ignorance of death “breeds fear, uncertainty and avoidance”.

And with those thoughts in mind, it seemed fitting on this particular Samhain day that we would be able to premiere a song by a band named Feed Them Death, who shy away from nothing but revel in crushing and slashing the life from their listeners in a “Bloodshed Theatre“. Continue reading »