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Last Halloween, I answered a knock on the door to find a young trick-or-treater dressed as a toilet. Not just any toilet—Skibidi Toilet, a disembodied head that pops out of a toilet and is a villain of the eponymous YouTube miniseries about an army of such creatures conquering Earth. I was visibly puzzled and asked him a series of questions. Was Skibidi his first name and Toilet his surname? Was he a man stuck in a toilet, or a new, hybrid organism? He looked at his friends and laughed; I smiled awkwardly as I distributed Airheads.

When I was a kid, Halloween featured a reliably recognizable cast: Darth Vaders, Little Mermaids, and plenty of Spidermen. But the internet’s memes have inevitably bled into costumes. For every zombie, there is now also a John Pork (an anthropomorphic pig in a red flannel that keeps calling your phone), a Ballerina Cappuccina (a cappuccino that performs ballet in a pink tutu), and a Tung Tung Tung Sahur. (Sahur is an AI-generated bipedal kentongan drum with a human face that wields a baseball bat. He’s also Italian.)

Wearing a costume that successfully confounds grown-ups could be considered a harmless act of Halloween rebellion on a day known for mischief. This holiday has long marked an occasion for kids to assert an us-versus-them mentality toward adults. In 2012, Emily Chertoff compiled a history of the Halloween pranks for The Atlantic, recounting how the antics once got so out of control that in 1923, Omaha’s “police commissioner came up with a solution: he would recruit 500 of the city’s ‘worst boys’ to serve as ‘special policemen’ on Halloween, turning over to each a badge and a beat.” Soon enough, “every boy in the city” wanted to qualify, according to an anonymous author in The New York Times.

For decades, cities introduced creative solutions to quell the discord on All Hallows’ Eve. In 1938, “Boston’s police commissioner gave ‘engraved awards’ to ‘the three schools in districts which showed the “least vandalism” on Halloween,’” Chertoff noted. She explained that after World War II, trick-or-treating took off as one of the most successful interventions to actually stem Halloween’s mayhem. It also led many people to lament the death of the holiday. “The children who come to my door will remember All Hallows’ Eve as a night when they sold their right to rebellion for some sugar in expensive wrappings,” Lois Phillips Hudson wrote in this magazine in 1962.

The rebellious spirit of Halloween wasn’t gone, though. Costumes were another battleground between kids and grown-ups, and the freedom to express oneself was at the center of this clash. “On Halloween a boy can’t wear anything feminine. The idea of lipstick horrifies a father,” Evelyn Goodenough Pitcher quoted one mother saying in The Atlantic’s March 1963 issue. The generational divide has taken on a new form in today’s algorithm-inflected celebration. In 2024, Kate Lindsay argued against such niche costumes. “The meme invasion threatens the spirit of Halloween,” she wrote in The Atlantic. “The costumes aren’t intended for my—or any other partygoer’s—consumption. They’re for our phones.”

Indeed, at a Halloween party I attended in Bushwick, I bumped into someone dressed as the grandfather who ate paint thinking it was yogurt (a real person whose image became a meme). Last year, photos went viral of adults donning “six-seven” outfits at Halloween, sounding the death knell for the meme. Children, though, aren’t always performing for the algorithm. Maybe their real Halloween joy comes from laughing at a perplexed adult holding a candy bowl on their porch.

Although pranks have faded from Halloween’s traditions—the “trick” has surrendered to the “treat”—little rebellions remain. The mischief-makers of the early 20th century might have been pleased to see legions of giggling Tung Tung Tung Sahurs roaming the streets, while mystified parents ask one another: What’s your kid dressed as?