I have had just two memorable Halloween experiences, and both of them occurred on the only night I ever drunkenly trick-or-treated. The first was being attacked by a chihuahua wearing a diaper because she was in heat, and the apologetic owner hopelessly struggling to get her back in the house. The second was a pensioner wielding a cricket bat and advising us to “please leave” before he called the police. Neither of these were particularly reflective of the holiday as I have come to understand it from Hollywood horror movies. But these days, I’m in luck: with the internet relentlessly churning out all manner of ghouls, freaks, and villains for us to recoil at, there’s never been so much Halloween costume inspiration floating around.
Here are some ideas on how you, a helpless citizen-addict of the internet, can capture this uniquely evil zeitgeist moment through the medium of fancy dress.
BILLIONAIRE Bryan Johnson
Your skin is sallow, your lips are strangely wet, your face is also somehow wet—you have come as Bryan Johnson. Dripped out in the kind of body-hugging synthetic top they wear in those executive-class American Psycho gyms, by day you’re a hyper-online type who reads Substack posts wondering what Aristotle would’ve said about venture capitalism. Tonight, you are cosplaying as your own final evolution: a middle-aged bachelor armed with an erection-measuring ruler, parading around the party asking everyone if they “want to live forever.”
Some guy in a balaclava from the Bonnie Blue queue
There are some monsters it’s impossible to understand. Yet if the anonymous perverts waiting dick-in-hand for a go on England’s premiere stunt-based porn star represent anything, it is the dark psychological energy at the heart of the nation most famous these days for giving birth to the United States of America. As far as zeitgeist outfits go, this is low-key inspired, yet in a way that is loyal to the olde worlde conception of the Halloween costume as something that is meant to scare people rather than turn them on. Give it a go and you’ll soon be a walking 10-mile women-free zone cooped up with several sweaty men in a new-build kitchen, taking coke until it makes you sad enough to stop talking about the football. Which, funnily enough, is exactly how some guy in a balaclava from the Bonnie Blue queue spends most Friday nights.
A Human Buzzball
You consume all the viral trends, don’t you? Lost Marys, Labubus, Dubai chocolate, NYT sheet pan recipes—you love all that, and Halloween is an unmissable opportunity to #meaningfully #engage with a #product by dressing up as it and hopefully getting some likes off in the process. This—especially for those with a torso shaped like a perfectly round spherical orb—is actually a great costume, because it’s like a giant advert for the thing that people will have to drink a ton of just to tolerate your gormless brand-obsessed presence.
Shanin Blake
Unlike everyone else at the party, you know Shanin Blake by name, rather than as “that TikTok girl with the bleached dreads and Tibetan singing bowl rapping about ketamine recovery,” because you are online too often. Although you have devoted your entire Halloween night to mocking her, secretly you are inspired by Shanin Blake. After all, you still go to Boomtown every year, even though the original 2011 crew has largely fallen by the wayside. Sometimes you daydream about meeting her there, appearing smiling in one of her videos, and surfing the brilliant new fame and the brilliant new followers into a brilliant new life spent turning the confusion, anger, and horniness of (mostly) men into vast piles of cash. But you never will. Because unlike Shanin Blake, you’re still doing vast piles of drugs.
Ian Watkins’ Alleged killers
You and your best friend have opted to come as Rashid Gedel and Samuel Dodsworth, the men charged with going full Sopranos mode on disgraced nu-metal vocalist turned mega-pedophile Ian Watkins. It is fundamentally too dark a costume for anyone at the function to celebrate, but broadly in keeping with your preoccupation with grooming gangs and regular pronouncements about how there would be no sex offenders if you were “in charge.”
Big John
“Baaaash,” you say, cadence just right, stomach artificially distended, fist pumped: “Baaaash.” As you roam the streets en route to the party, your shadowy silhouette will round a corner with bulging sacks of Chinese takeaway food hanging from each arm, giving onlookers the impression that they are encountering a giant, walking scales of justice, which is more or less Big John’s role in British society these days. Other “British Chaos” agent options this Halloween include Dannyboy83, the dearly missed Mikey Menace, and the Ibiza Final Boss, at least 30 of which you’ll find in every town and city across the United Kingdom on October 31.
CHEATING Coldplay couple
“You have to do the face!” the girlfriend is saying, and so the boyfriend joins her in standing behind their mocked-up cardboard frame of the Coldplay Jumbotron. Together, they merrily approximate the look of skeletal fear on that poor cheating couple the moment Chris Martin trained his panopticon eye upon them. You know the moment, right before the woman turned around with a strange new alloy of exhilaration and shame curdling in the pit of her stomach, and the man somehow folded himself into the ground. The Halloween couple will repeat the trick several times throughout the night, with exaggerated enthusiasm, until the party ends and they travel home wordlessly in the Uber and both think about sleeping with other people.
Jeremiah from The Summer I Turned Pretty
There is always a guy who is handsome and therefore comes as that year’s “handsome guy.” The character might change, but fundamentally, they have come as handsome. This year at the Halloween party, the guy will don a curly wig and tell you he is “team Jeremiah,” which will mean nothing to you, but notice how a borderline quirk chungus-type appears to playfully argue the case of “team Conrad” with an ebullience that foreshadows their eventual shag around 3AM.
Follow Nick Thompson on Instagram @niche_t_
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