My wife came home from the supermarket yesterday and reported “absolute mayhem” as the coincidence of half-term and Halloween had meant aisles thronged with fond parents struggling under the burden of pumpkins and their children, for whom consuming their body weight in confectionary tomorrow night is merely the lower limit of their aspirations. It’s all a long way from the ancient festival of All Hallow’s Eve, where we used to celebrate “Ghoulies and Ghoosties, long-leggety Beasties, and Things that go Bump in the Night”.

A recent news story predicted that this year Britons were likely to spend more than £500 million celebrating Halloween, making it the third largest retail event after Christmas and Easter (eat your heart out Black Friday, to employ a suitably gory turn of phrase). But here at The Conversation we like to concentrate on the scary side of Halloween and have assembled a suite of suitably hair-raising pieces for your weekend pleasure.

If you thought witchery a thing of the past, think again. Not only are occult practices thriving in the modern era, but practitioners also appear to be adopting modern methods of communication via “WitchTok”, a thriving community on TikTok where short videos sharing spells, incantations and assorted necromancy have notched up an impressive 18.7 billion views. As part of our Insights series, author and scholar of 16th-century literature Rebekah King considers similarities with the early modern period in which the evolution of the printing press led to an explosion of interest in witchcraft and assorted devilry.

Another aspect of the occult that has long caught the popular imagination are fairies, which today tend to be fun, sparkly beings – perhaps best exemplified by Tinkerbell in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. But Tinkerbell had her dark side too, recalling the malevolent fairies of early folklore who stole children, blighted cattle and drove people insane. And if all this puts you in the mood for some suitably creepy viewing, we’ve provided a guide to the best Halloween scares you can watch from the safety of your sofa.

This week we also celebrated the 60th birthday of Private Eye, considered how China combined authoritarianism with capitalism to create a new communism, and explored the role of the military in Sudan, which has just experienced another coup.

From our colleagues around the world, meanwhile: why Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples fits the definition of genocide, the gradual erosion of abortion rights granted by Roe v Wade in the United States, and the reluctance of Australia’s biggest companies to commit to zero emissions by 2050.

Do make time to listen to this week’s Conversation Weekly podcast – this week we looked at the rise of the degrowth movement among economists who believe abandoning growth is the only way to save the planet.

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