Zombie

Who doesn’t love a good zombie on Halloween? Who doesn’t love zombies, period? Blasphemous people, that’s who. The zombie costume is a fantastic way to gross out your more squeamish friends on Halloween, and thoroughly impress your less squeamish ones. As with some of the costumes I’ve mentioned before, the more gore applied to this type of thing, the better!

The key to a zombie costume is that you look like you’ve just crawled out of your grave, and because of this the best way to do it is to do it yourself. There really isn’t much point in buying a ‘zombie costume’ just to ruin it because it‘s not torn or dirty enough for your taste. You might as well go through your old clothes and find things that you don’t wear anymore or that you use when you mow the lawn. These clothes will be the perfect type for your zombie costume. After you select what you want to wear the fun part begins. Everything is up to you! You take a pair of scissors to those clothes, and afterwards do whatever you see fit with paint, fake blood, or artificial ‘dirt’. The worse it looks the better your costume will be. It’s really not anything that requires any kind of skill.

Something that might require a little bit of care though is what your face and body look like. Around Halloween time there are a lot of places that sell make-up kits that feature crème based make up for your face and body. They come in sets geared towards different costumes (vampire, clown, Frankenstein) but you really don’t have to get any particular one. Picking and choosing based on the colors offered is generally the best plan. So if you wanted to be a more ‘old movie’ type zombie, you would pick a set that featured lots of greens and grays, but if you wanted to be one of those zombies that has clearly been rotting for a while or has recently had a delicious snack of brains; then you would pick a kit that featured reds, blacks, and grays.

For the really ambitious there are fx make-up kits that include plastic skin so that you can make it look like bits and pieces of your flesh are falling off of your face. Personally, I believe that the grosser the zombie looks, the better the zombie is. Good luck!

You’ve always loved nature, and you often go for walks through the woods behind your house to unwind after stressful days. You think it’s beautiful out there, and serene. So you slip on a pair of sneakers and tie your hair up. You leave your cell phone on the counter, because taking it with you would defeat the purpose of being out among the trees. It’s not that maybe you would get a phone call. You definitely would, and it would be somebody needing something from you, and well, it just wasn’t conducive to relaxation. You leave your house and head towards the trees, you’ve walked the same way enough times that a small path has been forged through the underbrush. You know it well enough that you follow the trail without needing to look down. Your eyes are elsewhere, taking in the scenery.

pile o snakes

A small noise snaps you out of your reverie, it sounded like a hiss. You hate snake outfits, and you always have. They slither and twist in unnatural ways, their scales and patterns, eyes, and of course their venomous qualities put you on edge and you really hope – as your look towards the origin of the sound – that it is not what you think it is. Unfortunately though, you were right. A long, snake as slithered onto the path directly in front of you and it looks like it has the capability to deliver a nasty bite. You stand still, nearly paralyzed by fear for a moment, then begin to back away slowly.

Without watching where you were going however, you do not see the second snake that had come up behind you. You step on its tail, and it in return clamps down on your calf, and injects venom straight through your pant leg. You yell out in pain and quickly reach down to pull it off of you. You throw it into the brush before it gets the chance to clamp down on your hand as well, and take off running towards your house.

After calling 911, you realize that running all the way back home had probably gotten the venom into your bloodstream faster, but you didn’t want to risk another bite from the first snake, or for the one you threw to come back angrier than before. But would a second bite be worse or better than the sprint home? You sink down to the kitchen floor and hope that the ambulance gets there in time.

May we reconvene under the blood red moon,
-Black Widow

Grim Reapers

The Grim Reaper; the one who comes to take your life during your final hour. For years this has been a Halloween costume staple. The robe with long sleeves (frayed on the edges), and a hood with optional face camouflage. Of course it wouldn’t be complete without a tall scythe to…. do what with? We don’t exactly know. Possibly for popping off heads, but what does the guy in a grim reaper costume really need heads for? All he should need is your soul.

Regardless, just because it’s been overdone doesn’t mean you can’t do it. With some creativit, even the most common Halloween costumes can gain renewed life and a serious wow-factor. When you already have such a fearsome thing to work with, the options should be endless.

The first route you could take is to work with what everyone commonly understands as being ‘how the grim reaper looks’. Some good ways to spice it up would be to first get a really nice robe. Something that doesn’t look like it was made from cheapy-cheap Halloween fabric, but of some kind of thick heavy material. It should be a little too big on you and have very wide sleeves, to give the illusion that underneath is something made of bones, or perhaps nothing at all. That would raise the question as to whether or not he was some kind of formless entity. The second thing you should take care of is the scythe. If you could find a good tree branch or pole and create your own scythe from it, that would make for something 100 times better than the plastic ones you can buy at the store for a few dollars. After that, you’re basically set. You could add accessories, like a rope or chain belt, or a sand timer hanging from around your neck. Perhaps maybe even a clasp for your robe made to look like someone’s bones.

There’s always the option of being a more casual modern grim reaper as well. You could simply put on black clothes and paint your face to look like a skull. Make sure you still have that awesome scythe with you though, to help fellow party goers differentiate between you and the other guy that just came as a skeleton.