Happy Halloween! doodle is Google's Halloween surprise for visitors across the globe. Halloween is a yearly celebration observed worldwide on the last day of October, the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows, hence the name all-hallows-eve, which got shortened to Halloween.

The doodle shows a street with a series of houses. Visitors can trick-or-treat by clicking on the door of each house. Clicking each door reveals a surprise, just like in real-life trick-or-treating. In this case, there's an octopus behind one of the doors, a spooky pair of eyes behind another, while yet another has a skeleton. Of course, no neighbourhood, real or virtual, would be complete on Halloween without pumpkins carved into jack-o'-lanterns.

But in a year when Abraham Lincoln was depicted as a vampire hunter and zombies are everywhere, gory costumes that were once reserved for preteens and teens are now available in ever-smaller sizes.

'For the last couple of years, darker is where it's been at,' says Melissa Sprich, vice president of Halloween merchandising for Party City. For babies and toddlers, Sprich says 'darker' may mean dressing as a devil this year, rather than a cheerful dinosaur. But for all other ages, many parents are seeking vampires, zombies and 'the Freddies, Jasons and Chuckys' even for kids too young to see those characters on screen.

David J. Skal, who has chr.