Gone are the days when an old bed sheet with eye holes torn out was sufficient.

Now parents fork out for specially-made outfits, make-up and a host of spooky accessories for their children to wear as they terrorise communities at Halloween.

Some of them are made up to look so grotesque they make the hideous characters in Hollywood slasher movies look like the Teletubbies. New this year on the Halloween fashion circuit, sports gear - American football tops and cheerleader outfits with scary masks on top. This doesn’t sound like particularly frightening, but sometimes less is more.

One year, a child arrived at our door dressed in a shellsuit with a closely-shaven head and a trickle of blood (hopefully fake, but these days you never know) coming from one eye and another from the corner of his mouth. It was horrible. He was only about four, being supervised by his older brother, who had come in a vest top and a Scream mask and demanded money rather than sweets.

Thankfully, the regular trick or treaters who now frequent our house tend to be nice little children, shyly knocking in the hope of getting a packet of Haribo.

Nowadays it’s as much for adults as it is for children, with outfits ranging from bog-standard witch to saucy Miss Whiplash. The furore over the past two years, surrounding insensitivity towards people with mental illness, seems to have been forgotten with ‘mad’ doctors, scientists and even mechanics (that’s a new one on me - I’ll have to take car when my MOT is due) as popular as ever.

York Press:

Too scary? Helen thinks so

There are not many - one suit has a squishy, blood-red heart exposed through a rip in the material - that wouldn’t terrify an elderly person living alone. And I’d freak out myself if I answered the door to a clown of any sort. I have always found clowns creepy, even as a child. In fact I think I’ve got coulrophobia, the official word for fear of these unnerving characters.

Panda masks are a new addition this year. What’s spooky about pandas? Whose idea was it to turn this cuddly, bamboo-eating bear into an object of terror?

And I resent the use of crows as scary objects. The crow is my favourite bird. We have a pair living nearby which I regularly feed, especially when they are rearing young. They are magnificent, intelligent birds, not at all ghoulish.

The massive commercialism of today is far removed from the Halloween we experienced as children. We would pull the sheets over our heads, shine torches underneath and race around the garden. Other than my dad taking pains to carve what we were raised to believe is a turnip, but is actually a swede, our parents certainly didn’t take part.

Trick or treating - which let’s face it can be quite menacing - had not made it across the Atlantic. Instead, we sat in the kitchen sharing toffee apples expertly made by my mum. She still makes them for children who call at the door.

There were no big parties, no lavish costumes, no terrorising the neighbours.

And I know which I prefer.