Hell on Halloween

By Matthew Parish

Sunday 1 November 2026

Halloween is an occasion upon which the living dress up as the dead, the beautiful dress up as the wicked and the wicked generally dispense with the expense of a costume. It is a festival of make-believe terror, celebrated by people who have paid considerable sums of money to look as though something dreadful has happened to them. In Ukraine, where dreadful things have become something of a national speciality, Halloween is an exercise in competitive realism.

Last night I found myself witnessing a particularly instructive example of the human condition. It involved a small barman, a very large customer, a beer glass, an allegedly stolen wallet, several improvised debt collectors, a collection of spectacularly beautiful women in inadequate clothing and a platoon of heavily armed police officers who appeared to have mistaken a Halloween party for the opening stages of the Third World War.

The evening began, as so many catastrophes do, with an unpaid bar bill. A substantial gentleman, whose physical dimensions suggested a lifetime of diligent attention to the culinary arts, announced that he could not pay for his drinks because somebody had stolen his wallet. This was an unfortunate development for the establishment, which had apparently been operating under the antiquated commercial assumption that customers should exchange money for alcohol.

The barman, a diminutive fellow whose principal professional qualification appeared to be the ability to remain upright behind a counter, was evidently insufficiently sympathetic to this explanation. The customer responded by throwing a beer glass at him. There was an almighty crash, accompanied by the spectacular distribution of shattered glass across the premises, a development that established beyond reasonable doubt that the evening’s entertainment programme had commenced.

The traditional response to a dispute over a bar bill is to telephone the police, take the customer’s name or perhaps agree that he might return in the morning with the requisite funds. These approaches suffer from the disadvantage of requiring patience, administrative competence and a certain confidence in the eventual triumph of civilisation. None of these qualities was immediately apparent among the gentlemen who subsequently took an interest in the matter.

Instead, the dispute was transferred outside, where a number of men began administering what might charitably be described as an unusually vigorous financial audit. Their objective, as I understood it, was to locate the customer’s bank card and appropriate sufficient funds to discharge his outstanding liabilities to the drinking establishment. The customer was punched repeatedly in the head and his face was smashed against the concrete, apparently on the theory that the more frequently his skull came into contact with the pavement, the more likely his missing credit cards were to materialise.

This was an innovative method of debt collection, although one unlikely to receive endorsement from the European Central Bank. The fundamental difficulty was that no amount of physical persuasion could establish whether the gentleman’s wallet had indeed been stolen, whether he had simply mislaid it or whether he had invented the entire story to avoid paying for his drinks. The investigating committee nevertheless persevered, evidently convinced that sufficient blunt-force trauma would eventually resolve the accounting discrepancy.

Meanwhile, the Halloween celebrations continued.

Everywhere there were beautiful young women in elaborate costumes, or costumes that could more accurately be described as elaborate arrangements for avoiding clothing. Angels mingled with devils, witches with vampires and various other supernatural creatures whose relationship with the textile industry appeared to be tenuous. The general effect was enchanting, if somewhat compromised by the spectacle of a bloodied gentleman being comprehensively assaulted outside in pursuit of a bank card that nobody could find.

This juxtaposition struck me as an exceptionally Ukrainian interpretation of Halloween. In most European cities, the purpose of the evening is to simulate horror while enjoying the reassurance that the surrounding environment is reasonably safe. Here, the horror appeared to be genuine, while the costumes constituted the simulation. The distinction between the two was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.

Then the police arrived.

These were not the sort of police officers one encounters in the more tranquil reaches of the English countryside, where a constable might intervene in a disagreement over a parking space or enquire politely whether an elderly lady had misplaced her spectacles. These were armed Ukrainian police officers wearing helmets and Class IV ballistic body armour, carrying assault rifles and looking prepared to engage an enemy mechanised infantry formation.

Their arrival lent the proceedings a certain military dignity. What had begun as an argument about the price of beer had escalated into a confrontation apparently requiring equipment designed to withstand rifle fire. One wondered whether the unpaid bill had included a service charge and whether the appropriate response to non-payment of that charge would have been the deployment of artillery.

The police, of course, had every reason to take the situation seriously. A violent assault involving broken glass, multiple assailants and a man being beaten against concrete is hardly a trivial incident. Yet there remained something magnificently absurd about the contrast between the original commercial disagreement and the formidable apparatus of state coercion that had now arrived to address its consequences.

One could imagine the incident report. Customer unable to settle account. Glassware employed as projectile. Informal debt recovery proceedings initiated. Dispute escalated to aggravated assault. Armed intervention required. Outstanding balance still undetermined.

It was the sort of administrative sequence that might have delighted Franz Kafka, had he been less concerned with existential anxiety and more interested in the hospitality industry.

There is nevertheless a darker truth concealed beneath the comedy. Ukraine is a country in which violence has become an everyday reality, although the violence of the battlefield and the violence of a drunken bar dispute are very different things. The former is inflicted in pursuit of political and military objectives, however monstrous those objectives may be. The latter can emerge from nothing more substantial than wounded pride, alcohol and the conviction that another human being should be made to suffer for refusing to behave as one wishes.

The problem is that human beings become accustomed to violence. Once violence becomes a familiar instrument for resolving disagreements, the boundary between legitimate force and private brutality may begin to erode. A glass thrown at a barman becomes a justification for a beating, a beating becomes an attempt to recover a debt and the recovery of a debt becomes a grotesque public spectacle in which nobody seems particularly interested in the distinction between justice and revenge.

Yet the most extraordinary feature of the evening was not the violence itself. It was the speed with which the ordinary and the extraordinary came to coexist. Inside, people continued to celebrate Halloween, surrounded by attractive strangers, elaborate decorations and the prospect of another drink. Outside, a man was having his face smashed against the pavement. Between the two stood a doorway through which one might pass from a festival of imaginary horrors into an exhibition of the genuine article.

Perhaps this is the ultimate philosophical significance of Halloween. We spend considerable time and money manufacturing images of evil, imagining ourselves as monsters and pretending to be frightened by the theatrical representation of death. Then, when actual human wickedness materialises before us, we discover that it does not wear a vampire’s cloak, possess horns or emerge from a coffin at midnight. It is considerably more banal. It is a large man throwing a glass at a small man because he cannot pay his bill, followed by other men committing serious violence in the supposed pursuit of financial rectitude.

There is also the melancholy matter of proportionality. A few drinks may cost several hundred hryvnias. Dental reconstruction, treatment for a fractured skull or the consequences of a traumatic brain injury are rather more expensive. The economic logic of the evening was therefore questionable even before the arrival of a heavily armed contingent of the Ukrainian state.

As I write these words, the ultimate outcome remains unknown. I do not know whether the missing wallet was found, whether the customer eventually paid for his drinks, whether the barman escaped injury or whether the police arrested anybody. I cannot even say whether the financial investigators eventually concluded their enquiries or whether the celebrations continued into the early hours with the customary enthusiasm.

I can say only that Halloween has fulfilled its promise rather more literally than I had anticipated.

The devils were out in force, the angels were beautiful, the monsters were real and the police had brought assault rifles to a dispute about beer.

Happy Halloween. Welcome to hell.