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.

Mermaid

Sirens and mermaids were beautiful creatures that would cause the death of sailors In various ways. Sirens (who were half bird, half woman) lived in fields of flowers and would sit themselves on the coasts or cliff sides that faced the oceans. Their songs would draw in sailors and keep them there basically until they died of thirst or hunger. Once they had heard the song, it was like their very souls had been penetrated, and they simply could not find the will in them to leave. It wasn’t that the sirens forcibly kept them there, it was the strength of the song that was so great. In contrast, mermaids were half woman, half fish and though they also sang, it wasn’t so much their songs as it was their beauty that lured sailors to their deaths. They were also said to either be a bad omen, a notification that bad luck would befall a shop. Or sometimes that they themselves were the bringers of this misfortune. Some mermaids were vengeful creatures that would purposefully drag men down to their watery deaths, while others were more innocent and would simply wish to show these men their kingdom out of love; unfortunately despite the motives, it almost always ended with men being drown.

This Halloween why not be in one of theseabsinthe fairy costumes? The costumes are mainly left up to interpretation so long as two key descriptors are included; the mermaid must have a fish tail, and the siren must have bird like qualities, whether it be wings, or talons or something that distinguishes her as a Siren and not an angel or a harpy. Once that important part of the costume is out of the way, the rest is left up to you. If you chose to be a mermaid you could make a sea-shell bra to wear, or just get a flesh colored shirt and style your hair so that it drapes down over your chest. For a siren costume you could include flowers in your hair or outfit. Have fun with it, and be creative! I’m sure that your costume will be a smash hit this Halloween.