Without further delay, the top five scariest Halloween costume ideas. Ready your security blanket, and read on.
5. Alien (1979) This movie may only be scarier than Signs due to the fact that, they’re in space. You have to wait for the second movie, Aliens, to see the whole evil. And instead of the aliens coming to destroy the world, they’re just going to destroy you and everyone you know, in space. While this seems less destructive, it gives the old lust for life a kick-start. Plus, monsters with consecutively extending heads automatically rank on a top five list. It’s a little-known rule in the monster hierarchy.
4. Hellraiser (1987) Name a group of sadistic demons after something that sounds robotic and you’ve got yourself a winner. Throw in a weapon equipped puzzle-box to summon them, and even I’ll ignore the incompetent dramaturgy. In this realm, the Cenobites rule, and you don’t even need to watch the dramatic down-turns to appreciate the Cenobites and their S&M theatrics. They would be the coolest Halloween costumes, ever. To top it all off, their leader has hundreds of little pins sticking out of his head. I haven’t sewn a stitch since seeing this film, for fear of inadvertently summoning him.
3. Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) The best horror films come equipped with a foreboding child’s nursery rhyme. The best horror monsters attack you when you’re at your most vulnerable – humanity’s inevitable weakness – the REM cycle. Freddy Krueger does both the rhyme and the prime time attack in one shot. He then forces you to relive this nightmare, seven more times over the course of a decade. Those are some serious monster skills. And when you watch the entire Nightmare on Elm Street film series in sequential order, there’s really no fighting the zzz’s – you’re finished. Freddy will get you, eventually. I’m quite sure of it.
2. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974; 2003) What tops a serial killing dream cycle parasite? I say, a demented serial killer with a chainsaw and his sadistic mastermind brother in the middle of nowhere. What makes this film stand out is not the slasher scenes (mostly because I covered my eyes during these parts). It’s really the creepy and awkward 70s fashion, uncomfortable dialogue, and social boundary crossing that sets the stage for the slaughter, and makes the teenagers deaths almost a relief – at least they won’t have any more bad lines. A thought followed by your recognition of empathy for the serial killers – which lasts about a second before you see the dead people still decomposing in the house. At which point you shut the damn thing off. Congrats to those who finished watching this movie. Your stomachs are iron-clad and your resistance to the fight or flight response is impressive. Although you might consider that psychiatric evaluation you’ve always wanted.
1. Saw (2004) Call me chicken if you like – I didn’t finish this one either. The combination of gore, deadly machines, and puppets was too much to bear. Maximum fear-levels were reached within the first 45 minutes. If you have a personal vendetta against me, please – get a clue, and show up at my door in a scary puppet or clown costume. Again, it’s not so much the movie itself, as the mental images and physical memory of what puppets, mimes, and clowns alike have done to torture the lowly coulrophobics of the world.
Surely I am not the only one who sees the link between the Billy the Puppet from Saw, and the infamous Pennywise? It isn’t even a movie, it was a TV miniseries. Which meant mass visual consumption of the old, “clown in the gutter with teeth” bit. Go talk to the residents of the nearest mental institution and they’ll tell you – clowns are the ultimate in scary.
There is no such thing as a funny, cute, or entertaining clown. They’re just positioning you for attack. Run “horror movies with clowns” through the Google machine and see what you get – a ton of freaky clown movies that you’ll never want to see. And why? Because clowns are infinitely more scary than just about any other monster there is. Their evil comes from feeding on the happiness of children. Which is why, if you are going to try to effectively make someone lose bowel control in the face of fear, you absolutely must be dressed as a clown. It doesn’t even need to be scary, as clowns are innately so.
