The best-costumed of times, the worst-costumed of times
Halloween can be hellishly embarrassing
Christian Hardy
A&C Editor
Paul Bogdan
A&C Writer
If you were to go to pick out a Halloween costume at Value Village or Wal-Mart, the rows upon rows of “Sexy Vampire,” “Sexy Pirate,” and “Sexecutioner” costumes would leave you thinking that all it takes to wear a costume is to dress up as something sexy. If this is your idea of a Halloween costume, then you’re doing it wrong.
Dressing up like Snooki for Halloween is not the same as wearing a costume.
A great Halloween costume doesn’t have to be sexy, or even scary, but it does need to be creative. Thinking outside the box can lead to a legendary costume idea.
Sometimes a good idea can go bad though, and everyone that night will wonder what the fuck you dressed up as. This is OK. Halloween can also be a learning experience.
At the Carillon, we’ve seen some memorable Halloween costumes over the years. And so, the arts and culture staff wrote a short list of the best and worst costumes we’ve ever seen or worn ourselves.
Christian Hardy: First, I’ll start with the bad. The most embarrassing Halloween costumes that I’ve ever worn were ones I wore as a teenager, from ages fourteen to sixteen. In that span of time, I dressed up as the following people for Halloween: Jason Mewes (as Jay in the movie Mallrats), the clown from Slipknot, and Violent J of the Insane Clown Posse – which I chose to be instead of dressing as Fred Durst, because being the singer of Limp Bizkit wasn’t enough of a Halloween costume already. Somewhere in the back of my mind, the memory of these costumes are filed under “secret shame.”
The best idea for a costume that I’ve ever worn didn’t actually come from me, but from the friends I shared a house with in Kelowna in 2005. At that time, our household was obsessed with Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. One of my roommates decided that it would be hilarious if everyone dressed up as a member of the Channel 5 Evening News Team. Based on the hierarchy of the house, we assigned roles to everyone. I got to be weatherman Brick Tamland (played by Steve Carell in the film). We partied all night and shouted catchphrases from the film to each other and to everyone within earshot. We were not annoying to be around, at all.
Paul Bogdan: I think one of the simplest but best costumes I’ve ever seen was worn by a kid that I used to go to school with. He was of Cameroonian descent, and all he did was put on a plain shirt that said “Axe Chocolate”.
The best costume that I’ve personally sported on All Hallows Eve would be my banana costume that I fashioned out of coat hangers and yellow fabric. The coat hanger frame went down to about my waist, was appropriately curved out right around my crotch, and was accompanied by yellow spandex leggings. Wearing it to school that day was quite an episode; the looks of disgust and horror on my teachers’ and classmates’ faces were nothing short of gratifying.
The lamest costumes have to be those ones based off of Scream that everyone seemed to go nuts over when that movie first came out; there were always at least twenty billion of them each year when I was younger. Could no one really think of any better costume ideas other than what everyone else was wearing? I have a special dislike for the ones that had the pump that made fake blood pour down the mask.
One year I went trick-or-treating with someone who wore a mask like that. When we returned home, he tossed his mask on the floor upon entering. The combination of the impact and frigid temperatures that night caused the mask to break and ooze a nice puddle of fake blood onto the carpet. It looked like someone killed a small animal in my living room.
