5 True Crime Fiction Adjacent Halloween Costumes
Let's do some deep cuts
I am an unabashed Halloween fan, and thought I don’t know much about either the history of or current trends in horror cinema, I sure love spending my October watching new scary movies and revisiting old favorites. So though most of these costume ideas are not *technically* from true crime or crime fiction texts, it’s not much of a horror movie if there’s not some crime going on!
As an homage to my “costume” freshman year of college, in which I pinned some greenery to my shirt and declared I was dressed as Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane, all of these ideas are so obscure, esoteric, and abstract yet mundane that you can pretty much throw anything on and make a convincing argument that you’re dressed up. So without further ado . . .
One microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan
Nick Cave’s haunting sexy ballad is pretty much the theme song to Screams 1&2, my favorite films from my favorite horror franchise. This ear worm of a lyric has been rolling around in my head since I watched these movies over the past week, and I’ve marveled at how resonant the lyrics are with the plot of the film. Whose plan are we talking about? Ghostface? Unlikely: this slasher villain is notable for how clumsy and half-baked are both their murderous plans and execution thereof. Some ancient and enduring force of evil manifesting through Ghostface? Eh: the movies seem fairly uninterested int the conservatism that usually governs the resolution of horror plots. I think it’s more likely a combo of director Wes Craven and screenwriter/creator Kevin Williamson, who use the characters’, and the audience’s, assumptions about and affection for horror tropes to manipulate our expectations throughout the movies to entertaining and thrilling effect. So with this one, you can go literal (steampunk horror vibes) or specific (Gale Weathers serves some iconic looks), but be sure to listen to the source material to gas yourself up.
Jack Torrance’s unhinged manuscript
From another favorite, The Shining. Though Stephen King’s antipathy for Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of his novel is both notorious and well founded, if you take the film on its own terms, you can’t deny that it taps into everything that makes Kubrick Kubrick: unsympathetic protagonists, evocative iconography, and pitch black comedy. That’s where this costume comes in. As a writer who struggles with procrastination and revels in performing productivity, I laugh every time Jack’s wife Wendy sneaks a peak at the manuscript he’s been fanatically and secretively working on during the months they’ve spent as the sole caretakers of a spooky mountain resort, and sees pages and pages of only this:
Like, it’s horrifying, but also relatable. Print out a dozen or so lines of Torrance’s contribution to the autofiction trend, slap it on a sweatshirt, and you’re good to go.
A tasteful arrangement of blue Baptisia australis flowers so you won’t get Purged
Another horror franchise that is, in my opinion, much smarter than it has to be is the Purge films. The anthology series has so far spanned five films and a TV series, and has many visually arresting elements. But a creepy mask is a little too on the nose for this list. Instead, consider a costume that invokes the pot of blue flowers that families place outside their doors to signify their support for extrajudicial killings, and perhaps a subtle plea for Purgers to take their state sanctioned violence elsewhere.
I’m curious how this particular flower got chosen. You have to imagine that sales of blue Baptisia australis would skyrocket around Purge Day. Did Big Flower designate it for some nefarious reason?
Sheriff Ronald Cravens from the opening scene of Blair Witch 2
The sequel to the influential found footage film is generally reviled, but I’m actually quite a fan. It, along with the sequels to Scream and Saw, is explicitly about the act not only of watching a horror film, but of watching the first installment of that particular series. The movie opens with a compilation of interviews with Burkittsville, Maryland, residents enduring a wave of true crime tourists who have seen the first “documentary” chronicling the deaths of the film students from The Blair Witch Project. One notable local is the sheriff, who shouts this immortal line at a group of thrill seekers stomping through the Black Woods Forest, “Go home! There ain’t no gottdamn Blair Witch!” (The whole scene is pretty great, but his moment comes at about minute 1:30.)
John Kramer: Architect about Town
When I heard that Saw X was going to be a prequel, a not-insignificant part of me hoped it would be a paperwork movie about Jigsaw’s life before he started all the trapping and moralizing, when he was simply a successful civil engineer and architect.1 Carry around some plans, maybe even don a posh cloak, and you’ll be capturing the human spirit of Kramer before his attempt to navigate the American healthcare system turned him into one of horror’s most sadistic and bloodthirsty villains.2
I’ll close with a shot of one of my favorite low-fi high-concept costumes: a superfan of the Only Murders in the Building podcast, aka, an Arconiac. Happy Halloween to all who celebrate!
Spoiler alert: It isn’t. At all. But it’s still one of the strongest movies in the franchise.
Also relatable.