Halloween celebrations have begun and so you can expect to see lots of vampires, monsters, ghosts, cats, and clowns amongst other things that are typical for the holiday, unless you’re celebrating the festivities in the City of Oak Park. The city is holding their annual Boo Bash Halloween party at the local Oak Park Community Center, but if you are planning to dress as one of horror cinemas most popular characters right now then you are not in luck.
On a recent advertisement for the Boo Bash, that promoted the spooky food, drink and activities that will be on offer it mentioned something about costumes that people weren’t happy about. Although attendees are invited to show off their favorite costumes, a note at the bottom of the ad stated that “clown costumes not allowed.”
Considering the popularity of the most recent adaptation of Stephen King‘s IT, the popularity of clowns on Halloween has soared. Even without the success of that movie, clowns were always something that creeped people out and so always made many an appearance on Halloween. Despite this, the city’s recreation director Laurie Stasiak attempted to justify the decision in an email to KSAT:
“This event is centered around young children, In the past few years many clown costumes have been given a very scary and evil look. Many scary and horror movies are centered around these types of characters. About 3 years [ago] there were national incidents in the news were people were dressing up as clowns and scaring people and in some cases assaulting them. Many people have phobias and anxiety about clowns. It’s because of this that we asked people not to dress up as clowns for this community event.”
Although it had been previously advertised that clown costumes were not allowed, in a Facebook post it was then explained that people dressed as clowns will not be banned but they encourage parents to use good judgement as children will be in attendance.
Do you think this was a good decision? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!