Halloween: Top 5 Favoritest Costumes

I love Halloween. It's my favorite holiday, for a variety of reasons. I love the candy, and usually come out the other side in a bit of diabetic distress due to my inability to keep from sampling. (Those peanut-butter taffy Mary Janes will be the death of me.) I love the ritual of trick or treating, the door-to-door demanding of sweets by adorably macabre youngsters that only the most curmudgeonly could deny. (If you sit inside with the porch light off and ignore the doorbell on Halloween night, I'm sorry to have to tell you this: you're a bad person.) I love the all-night horror movie marathons on TV and the outrageous scary flick DVD sales that leave me broke but happy.

I also love the fact that it's the last great Pagan Festival on the books. (That "All Saint's Eve" is not fooling anyone.) The ancient history, the cultural tradition, the idea that you can go out and have a blast without having to worry about your eternal soul or sinful nature. (Of course in recent years my youngsters have routinely brought back in their pumpkins at least one religious tract about the evils of the holiday and how God is watching you, clucking His tongue disapprovingly at all your devilish merriment. It's the kind of thing that makes me want to egg somebody back to the stone age--but I resist, praise Beelzebub.) Churches always speak out against it or have competing "Fall Festivals," but they're uniformly lame and not worth your kids' time. Get out there, get treating, and get scared, that's my motto.

But of course mostly I love the monsters. Vampires, werewolves, ghosts and creatures. As a kid, picking out my Halloween costume was the most important decision I made all year. I was never one to be a Power Ranger or a Super Hero or something like that--for me Halloween was about the fright, and the one requirement of any costume was that IT HAD TO BE SCARY. Otherwise you might as well just be playing pretend in the back yard. I've lost the photos of most of my childhood costumes, which were largely of the plastic-tunic and rubber-band mask variety (Wolf Man, Frankenstein's Monster, the Creature from the Black Lagoon--all in a handy square box! God, I miss those), but in the past several years I've had some fairly good costumes, all in the name of refusing to grow up. So here I present to you my Top 5 Favoritest Halloween Costumes Evar--with pics!

(click the pics for larger images)

#5: Gore-Streaked Ghoul


This was my costume a couple years back at work. Even though it was just a rubber mask (with gore added post-purchase), gloves, and black clothes, I think the effect worked out pretty well--especially once I perfected my shambling, flesh-hungry, lunging walk. I stayed in character all day. And into the next day, too.


#4: Wednesday and Puggsley Addams



This was the first year back in Arkansas after our sojourn in Baton Rouge, and at the last minute Sarah and I decided to throw a Halloween party for all our friends. We didn't have costumes, but in a stroke of brilliant inspiration my lovely wife came up with this idea, which was not only something we could do with some clothes and makeup we had, but also a tandem costume! Double-score! I loved this, and you can see that at the time the Puggsley image fit my body type.


#3: Punkin


This is the earliest known picture of me on Halloween, and I love it. Though my costume is more conceptual here, you can see the joy and excitement in my chubby little face, even at such an early age. Tell me who makes the better jack-o-lantern: me, or the gourd? I rest my case.

#2: Hello, Nurse!


Another tandem costume, and also Sarah's idea, I think. I'm the mad surgeon, she's the psycho nurse. You can't see it here, but she had torn fishnets to go with that sultry, dangerous-looking, incredibly sexy outfit. I had bought the fake scrubs and put a bloody handprint and splashes on them, using Caro syrup and food coloring. If I ever host a Friday Night Frights style public access cable show, this is gonna be the look, with foaming beakers and electrical doohickeys in the background. And the Psycho Nurse as my cohort, naturally.

#1: The Hunchback of the Morgue



Okay, so at this time I didn't know about the incredible Paul Naschy and his film of the above-mentioned title, but this is nostalgia so that doesn't matter. This is my favorite costume EVER. I mean, just look at me. Just look at this freakin' costume, see how freakin' awesome I am. Very simple--one of my dad's shirts, a pillow strapped to my 8 or 9 year old torso with a couple of belts, hair teased out, Mom's blue eye shadow and some other makeup, and some plastic fangs. As soon as I looked in the mirror, I BECAME THE HUNCHBACK. I was SO into this costume, when my cousin Amber showed up to go trick-or-treating with us in our neighborhood, I came bounding out of the house like Quasimodo right at her, and she panicked and ran back to her Mom and Dad's Blazer, cowering in the back and screaming at the top of her little lungs. Thinking of the horror in that little fairy princess's eyes as she looked upon my grotesque visage, I can honestly say I don't know that I've ever been prouder of myself.

So there you have it, a little look into the psyche of a psycho. So tell me, anyone who's reading this: what are some of YOUR favorite Halloween costumes past?