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!

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.

Cyborg Boy

Robots are part of our daily lives, the Roomba for example is a tiny circular robot that vacuums your carpets while you aren’t home. Androids, are essentially robots that are constructed to look like human beings (and sometimes act like them as well) but have no human components. Cyborgs are part human, and part robot. There are endless Halloween costume possibilities in that alone.

We all have some kind of technology around the house that we either don’t use anymore because it is obsolete and we haven’t bothered to throw it away, or we recently have gotten ourselves a shiny new model to occupy our time. These old and unimportant bits of technology can be broken down and the interesting looking parts can be used to create your costume.

One way to go is to buy silver pants, a silver top, and some silver body paint; and have at it. If you cover your skin well enough it will look like you’re an android, and gelling down your hair to make it appear more hard and unrealistic would help as well.

Or, using those parts I was talking about, your could construct what looks like an ‘open panel’ on your body. You could tear a hole in whatever clothing you were wearing to reveal that just underneath your synthetic skin are mechanical components.

Using plastic, paint, and variations of tubing or wires you could create a mechanical ‘arm’ that goes over your own to give the illusion that you are nearly completely human, except for when you lost that arm in a dystopian cyberpunk laser gunfight, and had to replace it with the scrap metal and technology you had on hand.

All of these would make for really original and interesting costumes for you on Halloween night. If you can, include little details that people would need to see up close to fully appreciate. This might draw people across the room straight to you, because they want to get a better look at your costume and take in the details. Then you could use that opportunity as a way to start conversation. By being an android, robot, or cyborg this Halloween, you can’t loose!