Halloween provides an opportunity for homeowners to have a scary front yard. This does not mean the green lawn is marred by weeds or leaves but rather by certain decorations:

Mabon is one of a number of homeowners in and around the Chicago area who aren’t satisfied with simply slinging a fake web and plastic spiders across the front yard or spending a small fortune buying ready-made jump-scare creations. They share another important trait: the need (or maybe the obsession) to create something that wouldn’t look out of place in a professional haunted house or on a downtown stage…

When the sun goes down, Mabon’s house is transformed into a Halloween-themed faux nightclub, complete with booming music, colored lights and even a velvet rope. Mabon and his wife, Dawn Armstrong, even plan to dress up in black “Security” t-shirts to escort the V.I.P. kiddos along a red carpet to the candy stash on the big day…

Scattered upon the season’s withering plant life, the couple have erected a macabre art gallery: a thrift store still life to which Spata has seamlessly added a severed Medusa head; a copy of the Mona Lisa, her smiling face replaced with a skull and the painting’s title renamed “Moaning Lisa.” A dead shrub has become a netherworld creature — a nightmare of spiky, jutting limbs and platinum blonde hair…

Four faceless evil spirits — think the Ringwraiths from “The Lord of the Rings” or the Harry Potter Dementors — appear to float like smoke above the flowerbeds around Byrne’s otherwise perfectly normal Ravenswood Manor bungalow.

The largest evil spirit, which looks as though it is oozing out of the bungalow basement, is 16 feet long.

Halloween provides interesting social space to explore themes not always talked about or displayed. This extends to lawns, which homeowners in suburbs or city neighborhoods often keep prim and proper. For this portion of the year, the homeowners are allowed to fill what might be a lush, immaculate fall lawn with symbols of death, fright, and the macabre.

What might be truly scary is if the lawn is devoted to Halloween too early or too late. Imagine a full Halloween lawn that starts just after Labor Day. After all, if Labor Day is the unofficial end of summer, stores carry Halloween goods way before the day, and Halloween is the next major holiday, why not start early? Or, what if someone chooses to keep large Halloween displays up well into November, perhaps even past Thanksgiving and into Christmas decorations season? I am sure HOAs are on this.

Or there might be a point where the Halloween decorations pass from frightening to truly scary. What might neighbors and communities consider going too far? When does the lawn display go from celebrating the holiday to upsetting the neighborhood’s character?

All of this is part of the negotiations Americans engage in with their front lawns. On display for neighbors and people passing by, there are expectations what they can look like and be used for. Halloween may push the boundaries but there are still boundaries with ideas about the good or proper lawn.