My child’s Halloween horror story – at Bunnings

3 months ago 10

Opinion

October 27, 2025 — 3.30pm

The other day, I was ducking into Bunnings with my four-year-old to grab some potting mix when we saw her: dark empty eyes, skeletal arms and wispy grey hair. It wasn’t another mum of small children, though that’s usually an apt description – speaking for myself at least.

It was a Halloween display at the entrance, a ghoulish skeleton holding a chain and covered in spiderwebs, snarling with its dead eyes at passersby.

The Halloween display at Bunnings that alarmed the author, Cherie Gilmour, and her four-year-old son.

My son gazed wide-eyed as I quickly ushered him past. “What’s that, Mummy?” he asked with a tremor in his voice. “Is it a skullet?” (Translation: skeleton.)

Thanks Bunnings, I thought. We’d only just got him out of our bed and back into his own after nights of scary dreams. I make a mental note to send them an invoice for all expenses incurred from fuelling my son’s nightmares – my weekly coffee bill for one. But I’m struggling to understand when it became OK for major chains to display low-budget horror film props like life-sized evil clowns, grinning skeletons and demonic witches with glowing red eyes to the general public, including small children like my son, whose imagination is vivid and endless.

Apparently, Bunnings thinks it’s OK to place a hyper-realistic bloodied zombie on the path to pick up fertiliser, which will inevitably be trodden by small children.

But I’m not the only one. A petition with more than 7000 signatures titled “Protect Children from Distressing Halloween Displays in Shopping Centres” has been circulating. One petitioner wrote: “We wouldn’t let our children be expired [sic] to horror films at a young age, but by placing them at the front of the store you are taking away the choice of exposure and the opportunity to protect children from scary images.”

Last year, at Spotlight, I asked the cashier if anyone else had complained about the black-hooded, deathly ghouls on display that my kids had walked past.“No … maybe one or two people,” she said, looking at me as if I’d filed a lawsuit against joy.

Let’s face it, any criticism of Halloween, our increasingly beloved American (via the Celts) import, is bound to be met with accusations of fun policing, but I don’t care. I’ve been battling PTSD ever since Zoe invited a bunch of us over to her house in year 8 for a surprise (mainly to me) horror movie night. After making it through The Blair Witch Project and The Ring without peeing myself, I pretended to be asleep so I wouldn’t have to watch any more, only to be subjected to the creaking/hissing/screaming/blood-gushing/choking/snarling sound effects that revisit me on particularly windy days when the pipes are being weird.

The creator of the petition, Tim Doecke, wrote an update saying he was surprised at how “passionately and vehemently people are defending the tasteless public display of blood and gore” or telling him “kids should just toughen up”.

There’s evidence that certain types of age-appropriate scariness can benefit kids, acting as an inoculation against real fear. And I agree that some scary scenes in kids’ films are good and can help them rehearse resilience.

But the keywords are “age-appropriate”, and this should absolutely be up to parents to decide what’s appropriate for their own children. There’ll be more than enough terrifying corners of the internet that our kids will be exposed to as they grow up, such as the trend of inserting scary images into seemingly innocuous children’s YouTube clips, let alone turning shopping centres into obligatory haunted houses.

Perhaps people forget that kids are unique in the way they respond to things. My year 8 friends had a great time at the horror movie night, while I checked under my bed and in the cupboards at night for months and haven’t watched a traditional horror film since. The large chain stores might want to jump on the Halloween bandwagon, but they need to be sensitive to their youngest patrons. Otherwise, when tired, strung-out mums whose kids have been jumping into their bed come in looking haggard and filled with rage, they’ll learn what true horror really is.

Cherie Gilmour is a freelance writer.