Halloween is getting more and more popular every year.

Like the Vietnamese Le cung co hon, Halloween is about ghosts and the dead. But it’s much more frightening and fun.

Tran Thi Tuyet Nhung said her initial curiosity for the event had grown into something like I-can’t-help-going-to-Halloween-parties-every year.

“I remember my first Halloween at a bar in Nha Trang City. There were horrible ghosts, a Dracula, moving skeletons and a King of the Underworld,” Nhung said. “Then I realized that behind all the scary faces and clothes were young people having fun.”

Duc said the popularity of Halloween in Vietnam had surged over the past five years.

The very first Halloween parties in Ho Chi Minh City were organized by bars and restaurants to cater for foreign customers to “ease their homesickness,” he said.

“Somehow it quickly caught on with the young here.”

Twenty-three-year-old Le Thi Nguyet Thu, a TV producer, remembers her first Halloween with a group of students from HCMC University of Architecture last year.

“The disguises and decorations weren’t very sophisticated but the music was great,” she said. “Everybody moved to the music.”

Another Halloween aficionado, 20-year-old Bui Lan Oanh, a marketing executive at Unilever Group, also said good music and young people’s enthusiasm give local Halloween parties their charm.

“(At a Halloween party) it’s exciting that a stranger will catch you, frighten you and ask you to take a picture with him and then he takes off his mask to show he is no stranger but your best friend.”

For Nguyen Ngoc Thu, an editor for a media company, Halloween is a good opportunity for her to learn about the culture of her foreign friends.

And she said there was something exciting in a Halloween party that the serious Vietnamese Le cung co hon – usually an old people’s affair – lacks. The clothes may be a little bit expensive: at many stores, a “death set” for children costs up to VND400,000 (US$24) and a female mask around VND150,000 ($9).

“It’s just one day a year and it makes you happy so the prices aren’t a problem,” Thu said.

Reported by Thanh Van