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.

Clowns

When you think of fearsome movie monsters I bet this one doesn’t pop into your mind, but it is nevertheless something that many people fear. They dress in bright colors, paint their faces, and are meant to inspire joy in children… but more often than not they inspire such deep fear that these children continue to be afraid well into adulthood. I’m talking about clowns, and the movies like IT that gave us terrible complexes about them.

The easiest way to do a clown costume for Halloween is to buy it, to be honest. There are many different ‘clown outfits’ available, and the difference between making yourself into a regular clown and making yourself into an evil scary clown is the face paint. Perfectly painted circles, teardrops, stars and triangles on your face would be sufficient to be a clown, and scary on a very casual basis. But a more smeared or jagged way of face painting (maybe something similar to the joker in The Dark Knight …without actually ripping it off of course) would make for a scarier clown. The more it looks like someone mentally unsound put that make-up on, the more unnerving it will be for everyone you encounter; especially if you make a point to smile big and develop some kind of deranged laugh.

If you really didn’t want to fuss with paint or a wig though, there are plenty of masks available that will scare the living **** out of your friends (or the neighborhood children). Not everyone has Jim Carey’s ability to make wild facial expressions at the drop of a hat, and the makeup can only do so much to accentuate parts of your face. But with a mask you don’t have to worry about how you look underneath. It takes care of all the features for you.

scarecrow

According to Freud, the subconscious was simply a holding tank for all of ones repressed desires and emotions. Jung agreed with him on this point, but also believed there was another level beyond this ‘personal unconscious’ called the ‘collective unconscious’. In this collective unconscious (something that all humans shared) are archetypal figures drive us to go through stages of life, some of which might include being nurtured, accepted, courted, wed, and becoming prepared for death. These archetypes he claimed, are innate and universal, which is the reason why it is not hard to find similarities in all ancient folklore across the globe. It is why we tend to have the same symbols for the same things, and have similar rituals.

The scarecrow costume is one of these archetypes. No, not just something to scare away the crows from your fields or to follow Dorothy skipping down the yellow brick road. The scarecrow represents ‘the shadow’ archetype. The shadow, in dreams is a dark and terrible figure because the shadow is the side of yourself that you do not wish to show to others. All nice people have dark inner thoughts that they choose not to acknowledge or act upon because they identify with this mask of being ‘nice’, likewise all mean and nasty people have a shadow that is nice, which they also choose to ignore. We all have the capacity to be good or bad, but once you make up your mind to be a certain way in society, the shadow is what you have left behind.

The scarecrow is a fearful figure because for most of us, it is all the bad inside that we never want to see. It is only natural that this figure would come up in movies or print as something undesirable ranging from someone with no self confidence who wishes that he only had a brain (wizard of oz), to someone who acts upon his want to see others minds destroyed by fear (batman begins). So the next time that you see a scarecrow in film, books, or even your own dreams, you have a little insight as to why the writer (or your own mind) has put it there.

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