“The only thing you have to fear is fear itself,” Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said in his first inaugural address.

When it comes to Halloween, I have to disagree. Recent years have revealed a spooky-shaped hole in the season, with the noticeable absence of ghost stories and creepy costumes leading me to wonder: Where is the thrilling Halloween atmosphere that I once knew?

In college, Halloween just doesn’t feel scary anymore. 

And I sure wish it did. As a kid, all of my best Halloween memories involved enduring some kind of fear. Whether it was braving my town’s annual haunted hayride (which I only survived by constantly repeating that the chainsaw-wielding madman is “just an actor, just an actor, just an actor”), holding basement horror movie marathons or running around playing a midnight game of hostage, Halloween always went hand-in-hand with the best kind of scares. Even when trick-or-treating, there was always something supernatural and dangerous implied, some kind of eerie enchantment that seemed to be lingering in the nighttime air. 

In college, that spooky essence has gone missing. Now, a new scene has taken its place: pictures, parties and cute costumes that reference pop culture. Halloween is still a blast, of course; but with an absence of real horror, lawns sprinkled with artificial skeletons and people walking around dressed up as zombies just because they’re cool, we’re left missing what once made Halloween so unlike any other celebratory holiday. Just like what’s shown in the dozens of holiday movies about rediscovering the “Christmas spirit,” I think we could do some searching for that Halloween spirit as well. 

It’s hard to trace how exactly Halloween lost its scare. Maybe it all comes down to age; in college, perhaps we no longer have the imagination to picture anything scarier than midterms lurking around the corner. 

Another possibility is that Halloween has gotten less spooky for everyone, not just college students. With a new age of overprotective parents — the inventors of “trunk or treating,” a safer yet arguably less exciting alternative to the door-to-door childhood tradition — we may have entered an era that avoids discomfort at all costs, including the invigorating kind of fear that made Halloween so special growing up.

Whatever the reason we have for losing it, a healthy dose of fear is at the core of Halloween. By regaining touch with it, we can see the holiday return to the same excitement it used to have.

Costumes are a simple way to do this. Due to social media and peer influence, Halloween costumes in college have become bogged down by logistics: Will my costume look good in a photo? Is it overdone or cliche? Will people “get it?”

By returning to the classic roots of scary costumes, we’re presented with easy solutions to all these questions. If you feel stressed out when creating perfectly curated roles for that “Alice in Wonderland” group costume, remember that you can always unburden yourself by turning to vampires, witches and more. These are Halloween classics for a reason: They stand alone and can be thrown together at hardly any cost (for most costumes, fake blood is all you need).

But we don’t have to stop at the aesthetics of Halloween. Once we reintroduce spooky costumes and decorations to the holiday scene, we can take it up a notch by participating in one of the thrilling immersive experiences Halloween has to offer.

Haunted houses and horror movies show us that Halloween spookiness is about more than just nostalgia — it has legitimate psychological benefits, too. By providing a controlled environment with no real danger at stake, scary activities are the perfect opportunity for us to get our hearts racing and blood pumping. They provide a healthy shock to the nervous system in what is, according to psychologist Lee Chambers, a “soundbox for playing with those human emotions you don’t often test.” What better way of getting to know yourself than exploring your fight or flight tendencies in a dangerous situation, all without actually putting yourself in harm’s way?

Unlike the adrenaline-seeking of extreme sports or speeding cars, Halloween spooks are one of the few forms of escapism with no negative consequences. At a busy time like midterm season, we could all use a healthy dose of fear to take our minds off of real-world stressors.

So, if you’re looking for something to do with your friends that is a bit more daring than the Fenway bar crawl scene, perhaps check out Boston’s Wicked Haunt Fest, a new experience in Charlestown that offers four different “haunted experiences” — with insidious themes ranging from graveyard to Pharaoh’s tomb.

Throughout the year, we all experience fear in far more real, less desirable ways. Halloween offers us the perfect way to channel it: into a rare sense of a supernatural magic that takes us out of the mundanity of our every day.

That mundanity, by the way, is far more frightening than a horror movie jump scare.

Samantha Denecour is a fourth-year English and political science combined major and columnist for The News. She can be reached at [email protected].