When I was a wee lad, I remember Halloween as a time of mystery and danger, the one night of the year when I was allowed to wander the streets with a fake knife through my head and was encouraged to approach complete strangers and ask them for candy. I don't remember all of my costumes, but I do remember often dressing up as one superhero or another before graduating to the darker side of things around, I'm guessing, age 9 or 10. I'm sure there was much I was naive about at the time, but I also remember distinctly respecting Halloween night as a time when we were supposed to pretend that innocence was gone.

Kids today, though, they are just plain innocent; at least that's what I gather from these survey results from Comcast and ActivityTV.com. The poll was intended to cull "the opinions of more than 600 youngsters on all things pertaining to the season of scary", but their answers couldn't be farther from anything considered scary. Apparently the most popular masks were Hannah Montana and President Obama, followed closely by Britney Spears, Star Wars, and the Jonas Brothers. Actually, I take it back, those results are a different kind of scary.

Other hard-hitting question categories included gag-inducing Halloween treats (brussels sprouts taking the win), and Halloween tricks that yield the loudest scream. Now I know that youngsters aren't supposed to have diabolical imaginations outside of horror movies, but "shocking my grandparents by hiding in their closet" is not something I remember doing as a kid during the darkest of holidays. I do, however, remember trying to make it look there were dead people everywhere, but maybe I'm just old fashioned.

I also find it kind of amusing that the whole point of Comcast's kid survey was to drum up attention to the cable outlet's On-Demand slate of horror movies this October, a slate that includes almost all R-rated films that would likely traumatize this softened new wave of Halloween newbies:

* All original Alien movies
* All Friday the 13th movies
* Psycho
* The Exorcist
* The Shining
* Amityville Horror
* The Fly
* Interview with a Vampire
* The Blair Witch Project
* Nightmare on Elm Street
* The Village
* Carrie
* Night of the Living Dead
* The Birds
* Twilight and New Moon exclusives