Halloween is traditionally about the fabled creatures of the underworld and the spirits that are said to inhabit that mysterious world between the living and the dead. Ghosts, Ghouls, Zombies, The Grim Reaper and Spirits take many forms in the imagination, and have inspired endless costume variations on what you can do with an old white sheet and a pair of scissors. That imagination has started to run out after all these years, and Halloween enthusiasts have looked for fresh inspiration for their choice of costume.
Witches, wizards, goblins and other mostly evil characters of the fairy story world have long inspired another range of Halloween costumes. Disney fairy story film costume designs have been a popular inspiration for Halloween costumes, such as, to pick just one, the high collared dress of the Wicked Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Endless sources of inspiration have been found in numerous other movies and a long and rich history of fairy story book illustration.
Count Dracula and the Vampires have provided a very popular fresh impetus of ideas with tuxedos and capes for the men and flowing medieval gowns for the ladies, accessorized with bloody fangs and other scary additions. The characters of Adams Family television series have built on this theme. One of the Adams characters included the ideas of the famous Frankenstein's Monster character, with the famous bolts on the side of his neck. Werewolves and other characters from horror movies, building on the Vampire and blood-thirsty Gothic and Transylvanian themes, are popular sources of Halloween costume ideas.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Harry Potter, Pirates of The Caribbean and Spider Man series of movies, have added a strong selection of imaginative characters from that magical world just beyond the physical world that we know. Their detailed movie set costuming designs provide readily identified models to be adapted as Halloween costumes, and have been immensely popular to the generation that has grown up with these movies.
Increasingly, it has become acceptable for Halloween costume design to move away from the traditional spirit, under world, fairy story and magical themes, and to move on to just plain having fun. When you choose your costume based on fun, almost anything goes. Superman costumes have been popular for several generations. Clowns, scarecrows, soda cans, movie characters, tv characters, book characters, stereotypes (such as geeky nerds), and an infinite variety of other sources of inspiration are acceptable. The idea is to be distinctive and witty, to stand out from the crowd, with your choice of Halloween costume. Perhaps this new trend has emerged because Halloween theme costume parties have become very popular. The older Halloween party generation of today is more open to fresh costume ideas than the traditional trick or treater dress up age group. Halloween parties offer one of the few major events in the social calendar where dressing up in a costume is expected as part of the festivities, and they are all about having fun without getting too hung up on following Halloween traditions that few people really take seriously nowadays anyway.
Next time you go looking for a Halloween costume, if you see something clever that is outside the usual Halloween themes, don't reject it out of hand. These days it's all about having fun, and almost anything goes.
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