My first Halloween at university, I stood at the front door of a party dressed in a bald head wig, with strands of hair pulled through several snipped holes, so my head looked like the ripped apart skull of a particularly bedraggled doll. I’d painted on a huge clown mouth, sunken black eyes and was wearing a body stocking, handmade by stitching together every pair of tights I owned. My boyfriend at the time had got to the party early, so I arrived alone, my sprouting tufts of hair and clown mouth so horrifying that on the way a woman shielded her children from even looking at me. The door to the party was opened by a sexy zebra. That sexy zebra is now married to my ex boyfriend. They have two children.
The point of this story is that, if given the choice between a life of sexy pre-bought costumes and terrifying homemade romantic failure, I will still – and always – choose the latter. I would rather spend my days dancing alone in an insane hand-stitched and horrifying outfit than bow to the capitalist pressure to look attractive. As we greet the risen spirits of the deceased, and the veil between this world and the afterlife is at its thinnest, this is the hill I will die on. Halloween is for weird, shonky, homemade costumes, unwieldy props and looking stupid. A few years after Zebra-gate I turned up to a club wearing another body suit and five enormous tin foil pins, to look like a voodoo doll. Within minutes the pins had disintegrated in the crush of dancing bodies and I was asked, at least twice, if I was a gimp. I regret nothing.
Making children stupid halloween costumes is one of the few truly creative outlets still available to parents. One year, I sewed my son an enormous venus fly trap hood, complete with cardboard teeth; another, I made him a snake costume with lashing fanged tongue using a green bedsheet and an old sock. Have these costumes ended up costing more than a shop-bought number? Absolutely. Once you include labour and materials some of them probably cost more than my wedding dress. Did he enjoy wearing them? Not at all. He wanted to trick or treat wearing the same maroon tracksuit bottoms and black jumper he puts on most mornings for school. But that is not the point. So much of modern life is about commodification, convention and consumerism; and Halloween, with its history of folklore, rebellion and facing up to mortality is one of the few opportunities to break away from ordinary life and be weird.
Of course, many parents do not have the time, or skills, or resources to fashion their own high-spec Pokemon or devil or Iron Man. But charity shops this week are bursting with brilliant hand-me-down costumes, or the unlikely garments that, pulled together in the right way, could make a cracking pirate, or princess or zombie. A £20 Amazon polyester onesie is never going to light up a child’s imagination the way simply cutting holes in an old pillowcase and transforming into a ghost can. No highstreet outfit will ever be as fun as ripping apart a second hand shirt and sellotaping bolts to your neck. If you have any make up, a T-shirt, a free newspaper, old tights and some poster paint, you can be pretty much anything; a witch, a zombie, an undead bride of Frankenstein’s monster, a spider, a cat, a wolf, Gengar, a K-Pop demon hunter, a devil, probably a data centre if you had enough grey paint. Probably my most successful and truly terrifying halloween costume was the year I painted a SA100 form onto an old pillowcase, hung a biro around my neck and went as filling in your tax return. It cost me nothing – and you can check HMRC about that.
But here’s the real lesson of Halloween. Not just that we are mortal, haunted by the spirits of grief, loss and regret (remember the sexy zebra story); but that we each have an imagination. As human beings, we are fascinated by the dark, the mysterious, the unconventional and the macabre. In a world of shiny, pre-packaged luxury consumerism, we each have the ability to make something funny, unsettling, original and unique and to walk out into our own twilight streets to celebrate being alive. Thrilled with the sense of disobedience, darkness and delight, we can rampage through the world, looking and behaving like all the things we’re told to be scared of. We can rise up, be silly and share the streets with our neighbours. So this Halloween, pull yourself away from the siren song of click and collect; be human, be excited and make something weird instead.