Horror Roundtable - Week Seventy
Describe your worst Halloween costume.
One year, as a small child, I went as Steve Austin from THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN. It was one of those cheesy, plastic facemask deals with the pull over vinyl outfit. It made me itch and the mask smelled funny. It was truly, truly a miserable costume.
I didn’t really have the wherewithal to do anything fancy or elaborate during my college years. Worst of all was probably one October when I was dead broke and ass-deep in classwork, and hadn’t planned to do anything at all, but then some friends offered me a few bucks to haul my karaoke machine across campus for their party. How could I say no? Of course I was obligated to get a costume at that point, but there were only a couple of days left before Halloween, so I had no choice but to hit the discount costume warehouse. The only thing there that fit both my budget and my mighty girth was a cheesy black-and-white striped prisoner suit. Weak, yo.
In second grade I went as “Michaelangelo” from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles… only my parents couldn’t afford a real costume so I made it myself. The shell was the top to a cardboard box flattened out and colored like a turtle shell, we died a pair of sweatpants green and cut up an orange towel as my mask. My parents always remember it fondly but I just remember it as the year I had the ghetto ass Halloween costume. I never got the official merchandise when I was a kid, which is probably why I waste so much damn money on it now. Such is life though I guess.
Sean T. Collins - Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat
I like to think that when I do dress up, the results are pretty bangin’–just by way of a for instance, my “douchebag” costume from last year, featuring an offensive t-shirt, stonewashed jeans, and a skeevy mustache was sufficiently douche-tastic to make my wife refuse to look at me until I’d shaved the ’stache off. So I’d have to say that my worst Halloween costumes come from the years when I don’t have one.
Jeff O’Brien
As a kid I made a robot out of an old cardboard box that a giant picture tube TV was shipped in. Went all out, dials and gauges and buttons and the works. Two steps and I turtled and could not get up. Could not go out until the bottom of it was sawed off…
Getting drunk on Halloween night should only be done AFTER you apply your zombie make-up. Sadly, I didn’t learn this lesson until just last year. I was… enthusiastic… as I applied the make-up, that much is sure, but about ten minutes after leaving the house I wanted to take a pumice stone to my face and scrub until skull showed. Most uncomfortable night ever.
Growing up poor, but loving Halloween, it was always a matter of homegrown improvisation. I would make my own fake blood and patch together costumes from whatever I could find. Like one year, when I was 8 or 9, I wore a bathrobe and covered it in blood and pretended to be a guy who murdered his wife early in the morning. I even carried a bloodied newspaper. But the worst was in 1989, I think I was maybe 10, when I really wanted to be the Joker. Batman had came out earlier that summer, and I was obsessed, so I raked a few neighbor’s leaves and got enough money to buy some white face paint and some lipstick and really fucked it up when I put it on. Also, for the costume, I wore jeans and a bright green button-up shirt. I kind of looked like a deranged clown on his day off. I got made fun at school, especially when a kid came dressed EXACTLY like the Joker,in full costume. It sucked so bad that I didn’t even go trick-or-treating. In retrospect though, I realized, like in all things I do, that I was simply ahead of my time–look at Heath Ledger’s interpretation of the Joker in the upcoming Batman sequel, all crazy and smeared. If that had been the Joker then, I would have had it made.
When I was a kid I would constantly beg my mom for really scary and expensive monster masks sold at a local toy store. Of course my mom (who hated horror movies) always wanted to dress me up as a princess or clown and we could never afford the good costumes, so we had lots of nasty fights which usually ended with her buying me a costume that I didn’t pick out for myself. The worst costume she ever got me was a cheap plastic Mary Poppins outfit made by Disney. I can remember telling my mom that it was awful and looked nothing like Mary Poppins. I had to wear the hideous thing to school for our annual “Junior Halloween Parade” where the teachers would parade the young kids through the high-school where the older kids would vote on who had the best costume. When my class got to the first high-school classroom all the teenagers started laughing. I suddenly realized they were all laughing at ME and pointing at my crappy Mary Poppins costume. Naturally I started crying and ran into the bathroom where I refused to come out. My teacher had to call my mom to come and pick me up. When my mom arrived I refused to talk to her on the drive home. On the bright side, after that traumatic event I was able to wear just about anything I wanted on Halloween and my mom helped me make a ghost costume out of a bed sheet that night so I could go trick-or-treating since I refused to go outside again in the Mary Poppins costume.
Dave - Rue Morgue’s The Abbatoir
Probably the cheap, shitty plastic Spider-Man costume bought from Zellers when I was a wee lad. Not only are those half-assed costumes ridiculous, the mask edges were sharp and chafed my face, the elastic holding it on snapped and stung my hand, and, worst of all, it got all humid and smelly from breathing in it all night. Yet, when I inevitably sat on it and it shattered, I was still sad.
Ben Cooper has a lot to answer for. Thanks once again to all the lil’ trick or treaters who make up the Horror Roundtable. And, as always, if you have your own costume horror story you’d like to share please do so in the comments below.
October 29th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
When I was 9 or 10 I wanted to be a werewolf, so my mom, who’s a frustrated artist, clipped the hair off my stuffed Chewbacca and did me up Lon Chaney style, and with some minor touch-ups around the eyes, nose, and mouth, I looked AWESOME.
And yet, in retrospect, it was the worst costume of all time. I just looked up that Chewbacca doll on eBay, and apparently I werewolfed myself right out of an early retirement.