The scariest part of Halloween? Dealing with spoilt brats in masks demanding free sweets

I used to enjoy the simple pleasures of goading a Jehovah’s Witness or a Conservative canvasser on the doorstep. These are more sinister visitors

This year, like every year, we all have to play our part in our own little remakes ofHalloween. For real. On our own doorsteps. Trick or treat they call it. Threatening behaviour would be a more honest description of the ritual terror. The play horror is not that amusing, really.

You too may be feeling some trepidation about that annual licensed exercise in junior extortion, “trick or treat". In the name of Halloween, whatever that is, or was, children are given leave to threaten whole neighbourhoods with criminal damage. You, too, may dread the diabolical knock on the door in the appropriately darkening evening time.

For if you don’t cough up some sweets to the crepuscular blackmailers, then the baby Mafiosi will throw eggs at your windows, push dog dirt through the letterbox or inflict thousands of pounds worth of damage to your car (or what they assume is your car if it’s parked near your home).

Serious paintwork damage or cave and give them some Haribos? It’s a choice that should not have to be made.

It’s strange, this modern custom, and never in a good way. Even the nation’s paranoia about predatory paedophiles has failed to quell the rise of trick or treating. It has merely meant that the juvenile gangs are accompanied by protective, indulgent parents who think it is OK to train their brat offspring in the art of extracting money with menaces. Because they look so cute dressed up as the undead.

They don’t. Not while they’re looking at the window box or your nice pot of dahlias with malign intent. Maybe the car is at risk. You never can tell how much harm these trainee necromancers are prepared to inflict on innocent householders for a fistful of bon bons.

What’s even more baffling is that these helicopter parents who spend the rest of the year fussing over whether their kids’ kale smoothie is organic are now all too happy to help them trick or treat their way to type 2 diabetes. No, go ahead and stuff yourselves with sugar. Go hyperactive. Adds to the fun.

It’s at times like this that I wish I had a Rottweiler, or maybe a pit bull-mastiff cross or a Japanese Akita fighting dog. Something powerful and really difficult to stop getting into the street. Some mutt that could swallow one of the little sods in one slavering gulp. There’s a trick for you.

In fact, I’d rather spend the evening in the pub (if there were any that were free of fake spider webs) or sitting all night on a night bus until the warlocks and witches sloped off home, back to munch some candy with Hades.

Trick or treat is, at best, the mass commercialisation of Halloween – and the nastiest American import since tobacco. I am old enough to recall when Halloween entailed nothing more than a few idiots hollowing out a pumpkin (for why?), carving a barely recognisable “face” into it, sticking a candle in, and lodging it in the front window. A reassuringly British sort of spectacle – amateurish, half-hearted and essentially shy and modest. I also seem to remember that in Roman Catholic circles, all this mock-Satanism was rather frowned upon.

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Now it’s very much in your frightened face. Every supermarket has a “seasonal” aisle devoted to the same sort of grim tat required for a juvenile terrorist expeditions – witch costumes, rubber spiders, green slime, flick knives, that sort of thing. There is special scary Halloween food these days too; pizzas with the olives made up to look like eyeballs staring out at you, or the M&S zombie Colin the Caterpillar cake, which gave me quite the fright last time I was in the food hall.

I think I’d prefer a real cadaver to be dumped on the drive, because it’s actually not going to do me any harm. A gang of face-painted six-year-olds with evil in their hearts is a much more terrifying vista of an evening.

The “trick or treat” thing simply makes me even more afraid than usual to open the front door for fear of what awaits me on the other side. I used to enjoy the simple pleasures of goading a Jehovah’s Witness or a Conservative canvasser on the doorstep, always finding them an entertaining opponent. These are more sinister visitors. No wonder we’re living in broken Britain when we teach our children the fine arts of extortion. I feel tricked.