The king of your nightmares

The horror movie genre wouldn’t be complete without the slasher film legends of Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, and Michael Myers.

Jason as a boy ‘drown’ at camp while the two teenagers who were supposed to be supervising while he was swimming were off somewhere having sex. The films center around either his revenge for the death of his mother (who killed those teenagers in revenge for the death of her son and was beheaded) or just gore for gore’s sake. If you were to dress as Jason for Halloween, all you would need are some casual clothes, a jaceket, a hockey mask, and some kind of weapon to kill with. A machete is generally the best choice.

Freddy was a despicable man who murdered children, but the law was not able to punish him accordingly so the parents of those children (and others) trapped him in a building and burnt him alive. Instead of simply being killed though, he became the stuff of their nightmares; literally. He manages to continue existing in the dream realm, but if he is in your dream and he hurts you; you will wake up with the same damage he inflicted. The look of this man is possibly the most fear-inducing of the three and hardest to replicate without wearing a mask. His skin is peeling and scorched, revealing muscle underneath, he wears black pants, normal black shoes, a red and green striped sweater, a black fedora hat, and his right hand is covered by a glove which razor sharp blades attached to each finger.

Michael Myers killed in his movies simply because he was insane. Insane, and possibly evil from birth. He wears a dark colored jumpsuit and a white mask with light brown hair attached. Bring a knife with you to the party for this one, he gets in stabby moods sometimes.

Of course all of these men/monsters are well known enough that merchandise has bubbled up around their movie empires and there are plenty of places to purchase all of the items I mentioned. This is one of those cases where it would be so much easier and cheaper to buy the costume, that attempting to make it yourself just seems silly.

The beginning of the movie Halloween is set in 1963 where a young boy by the name of Michael Myers (then aged six) takes a knife from the kitchen and murders his seventeen year old sister while their parents are away. The parents return and find their daughter murdered and their son in a trance-like state. Not know what else to do with him, they send him to a sanitarium where a child psychologist by the dame of Sam Loomis works with him for eight years in an attempt to figure the boy out or help him in some way. By the end of the eight years however, Dr. Loomis is completely convinced that there is no helping the boy because he is clearly pure evil. He tries to ensure that Michael stays locked up but when the time comes for him to be tried as an adult, and they make the move to transfer him to another institution he escapes and returns to his home town (after killing a truck driver and stealing the jumpsuit we see him wear in the film).

Michael Myers

The remainder of the film is what pioneered the way for most other slasher films that would follow in the next two decades. Needless to say, a few teenagers were brutally murdered, and that even after being stabbed two times with household objects, and once in the chest with a knife he was still going strong. It wasn’t until the end of the movie when he was shot six times did it seem like he might stop killing. However, after being shot he fell off of the second story balcony of the house, and by the time the main characters looked outside to see the body, he was gone.

The movie was good enough to warrant seven sequels, and inspire many many other fantastic horror films.

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

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!