Vintage Halloween Costumes

 

You know you love it - the old costumes, creepy handmade masks, store-bought princess and astronaut outfits. Here's a real cool catalogue of all the creep-factor of the past - 

Beautiful and Haunting Cemetery Imagery

Cemeteries are memorial parks. These quiet shadowy locations often become a sanctuary for stray cats, birds, and other wildlife that finds sanctuary among trees and grass, regular watering, and rare human contact. 

But they are also the most graceful and sometimes the most neglected and tragic spots on earth. Let's look at how beautifully lonely they can be - 

Vintage Halloween Pinups

 

If you're nostalgic about Halloween, you recall the pinup poses of advertising. Enjoy these!

Spookiest Locations

 

I thought I'd share some spooky places with y'all and see what kind of locations ignite your spine-tingle factor. Just imagine being here at dusk on Halloween - 

Testing Your Fear Factor at Halloweentime

 

The season brings out the troublemaker and avid horror lover in all of us. As kids, we performed many kinds of mayhem, but even as adults, we can't help playing chicken with the unknown. Here's just some of the scariest Halloween practices to explore again (varying levels of fearfulness) - 

100 Male Halloween Costume Ideas

 

There are so many costumes available to men. Often times, they assume the holiday is all about the ladies, but oh what a man's costume can do for a girl's heart rate!

Here's 100 ideas - 

Halloween Wedding

 

Pondering a wedding date, it would seem that this Halloween might be ideal because it comes once in a blue moon - literally! 

Halloween this year is not only on a Saturday but a full moon, a blue moon (second full moon in one month).

The Ultimate Backyard Bonfire

 

Bonfires and scary tales - what autumn should be made of. It may be the start of Fall, but the heat has us beat. An easy and cheap way to usher in the season is a backyard bonfire. Let's escape for a moment into bonfires and nighttime rituals - 

Nostalgic: 1970s Halloween

There were some wonderful Halloween specials in the 1970s. Halloween was just catching fire big time in popularity and nearly every single child trick or treated. I recall going out until midnight and carrying a pillowcase. We were greedy boogers and being part of the baby-boomer generation, there were a lot of us!

CANDY TAMPERING

There is a much darker side to Halloween in the 1970s - the tainted candy fears and sometimes urban legends.

I don’t know about ya’all, but my Halloweens as a kid were totally wild and free orgies in which the children ruled the streets. We carried pillowcases `cause we were cocky son-of-a-bitches and we figured it was going to carry our enormous amount of loot. In my area we knocked on doors until midnight and covered miles and miles of the suburbs. Whoever reached the townhouses knew they had done a huge haul because they were on the periphery of the subdivision.

Even though we were allowed to travel far and alone knocking at strangers’ doors and getting candy offerings from them and sometimes coins or apples (why even answer your door and waste both our time?) we still had to go home and have the candy examined. Then, the kids would begin with all the urban legends of razor blades in apples and ground glass in Bazooka bubble gum and poison injected into Tootsie Rolls. Ironically, it did not stop us from nibbling on the way home. Every candy the parents tossed out that had a loose wrapper caused a sigh of disappointment. Oh, why couldn’t it have been the candy corn, why the Snickers?

The most famous case of actual tampering came from the murder of an 8-year-old named Timothy in the mid 70s, who was actually killed by his father who laced his Pixie Stix with cyanide. And, just as people need to realize, we actually are at more threat by our own family more than strangers (which is why persons of interest are pretty much always a family member--comforting, huh?). This evil man also gave the candy to his daughter and some of her friends, but they hadn’t eaten the candy. This was apparently motivated by an insurance policy on the kid.

A woman named Helen Pfeil in 1964 was tired of older teenagers showing up for free candy so she handed out ant killer poison buttons to those kids. The packages contained steel wool, dog biscuits, and the ant buttons and were marked “poison” and with a skull and crossbones. She told the kids it was a joke and no one was hurt, still she was charged for potential harm.

A great deal of this legend comes from hysteria. Some years, fear of strychnine poisoning made companies and stores destroy packages, but once tested nothing unusual was found. Some children getting sick around Halloween sparked fear of poisoning. Children coming down with infections or dying on that particular day became linked to Halloween and more rumors began.

It’s not to say we shouldn’t continue to look for tampered candy and even better, do like I did and stand at the end of the sidewalk and wave to the person handing out the candy as a show of “I remember you giving my kid candy…”

Still, I have to admit that wicked scene in Halloween 2 where the kid and mom come into the hospital with the kid holding a cloth to her mouth with a razor blade sticking out of the tongue was pretty bad ass and gave me chills. I never did eat those apples on Halloween (but that’s probably because I had a pillowcase filled with candy)!


- Here's a priceless video about safety at Halloween -




Mass manufactured costumes were hitting the stores at Halloween time in the 1970s. Still, a great deal of kids enjoyed cutting eyes into a sheet to make a ghost or painting their faces and wearing a pointed hat to be a witch. What did 1970s kids want to be for Halloween?



















- See if any of these vintage photos resemble you in the 1970s -


























Pick up a collection of 1970s Halloween candy - 





- Some candies were delightfully inappropriate -

Schools in the 70s had no political correctness (thank goodness!) The kids all wore costumes to school and they celebrated Halloween fun.













- The games (can find many of these on ebay now) - 














- The songs of the 1970s Halloween -





We really were given the freedom to express ourselves in Halloween in the 1970s, whether it was costumes in school or knocking on doors late at night. We were surrounded by awesome TV specials and cute songs about Halloween, a huge array of candies, and enough spooky urban legends to keep us on guard and awaiting witches and full moons, monsters and egging.

Nostalgic 1960s Halloween

If you were a kid in the 1960s, your Halloween was getting some serious momentum. The 50s started the craze, the 60s fortified it, ensuring that the 70s would be the last great decade of panhandling door to door for candy.

Nostalgic 1950s Halloween

I'm covering the nostalgia of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s Halloweens in these three days' of posts. Today, let's talk about those who recall the 1950s Halloweens - 

Backyard Halloween

It's getting to be that magical season and the weather in the evenings is quite pleasant. Consider taking your spooky haunting fun to your own yard.

Using Doll Parts to Your Halloween Advantage

 

(set up around a shed where a Brothers Quay "Street of Crocodiles" stop motion doll film was projected against them)

Doll heads and body parts and intact dolls are all great Halloween creep factors. Doll Island in Mexico inspired much of the high level of anxiety around dolls. I used to do my Halloween front windows with tons of dolls lit by flashes of lightning so the kids would catch glimpses for a fraction of a second. 

Homemade Halloween Costumes With European Pagan Themes

Natural elements to make Halloween costumes means giving an Old World magical vibe. We know the usual characters of Halloween - Frankenstein, witch, vampire, etc. What we NEED are self-created personas in an Old World way using goods around us to look very homemade and creepy.