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theparanormalperiodical · 5 years

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Scary Halloween Costumes: Your Guide To Realistic and Really Spooky Costumes (On A Budget)

“In the real world, Halloween is when kids dress up in costumes and beg for candy.

In Girl World, Halloween is the one day a year when a girl can dress up like a total slut and no other girls can say anything else about it”

Set your stop watches people - we’ve got 11 days to prepare for the most wonderful time of the year: Halloween.

And despite the cultural traditions echoing across the world, there is one phenomenon that dominates the rest.

Halloween costumes.

It’s the personalised touch Christmas loses out on, and it's the one day of the year we can awaken our inner child.

And no, I don’t mean the therapeutic kind where you get in touch with your real, raw self. I mean the inner child that wants to pull on a Pennywise cosplay and eat an unrealistic amount of processed crap.

Working out your halloween costume requires thought and consideration. And then giving up on creating a latex prosthetic and slapping on a pair of cat ears.

But at the Paranormal Periodical, we like to do things a bit different.

If you like things spooky and you’re a bit skint, pull up a chair - welcome to your complete guide to realistic halloween costume ideas!

Every year we see the classic costumes: a witch in a black hat; a vampire sporting a single drop of fake blood on the lip; and a zombie with a scrape of blood down one arm.

I’ve decided to shake shit up.

I’ve taken the most common costumes, and gone back to the roots of the creatures. Yep, I’m rewriting halloween, and putting scary back on the menu!

So, if you’re considering being a witch, vampire, zombie, or mermaid, here is your guide to the realistic costumes.

Let’s get spooky!

The Witch

It’s a classic.

It’s the go-to option for women, merely requiring a pointy hat you can grab from Claire’s, and the clothes from your goth phase when you were 14.

Add a smudge of black eyeshadow, practice a cackle, and boom.

You just got halloweened.

But actual witches from way-back-when weren’t so Instagram.

In fact, they were considered the worst kind of women: hag-like, old, ugly, disgusting women. If you can think up a trope for a stereotypically ugly woman - which isn’t necessarily true, I mean, people rock unibrows every damn day - then put it in your costume.

Back in the 1640s, witches were considered poor, crone-like women. That’s a moustache, wrinkles, hairy brows, squinted eyes, and crooked teeth.

Also, they had teats! No, that’s nothing to do with their actual nipples, you won’t have to do anything to your own.

Basically, a point of ID for a witch was a devil’s mark - that’s scars, pimples, birthmarks - anything which symbolised their pact with the devil. Or, they had extra nipples which their animal sidekicks would suckle from.

Speaking of scars, if a witch pricked her finger, and it didn't bleed, the subject was a witch fo sho. And if they placed their hands on a dead body that they had killed, the body would start to bleed.

The final trademark fashion statement comes from one of the witch tests: dunking.

Aside from being stripped to her scanties, the witch’s thumb was tied to her big toe and a rope was cinched around her waist. She was chucked into a body of water - if she floated, she was a witch! If she sunk, she would die!

Yeah, it’s not a good test.

So, how does all that shizz translate to a costume?

Here’s how:

For the signature makeup, go with a heavy brow, and dark, eyelined eyes to perfect the squint.

Then, fake scar it up. I’m talking dots of red on your hands, maybe draw a pink circle on your face for a nipple, and slash a lipstick scratch up your arm.

Or, ditch the red dots on your hands for literal red hands - just like the blood pouring out of your victim’s body. It could be fake blood, it could be red nails, it could even be patches of dark reddy-brown!

Whatever it is, finish the look with the iconic style of a witch:

Follow up with the fashion twist on a black pointy hat, tie a rope around your waist to give shape to the look, and tie some wool or string around your fingers.

That’s right; accessorise your way to authenticity.

The Vampire

This is the unisex approach to halloween.

Couple of drips of fake blood, maybe an Edward Cullen inspired quiff - anything can be a costume if its teamed up with the im-100-years-old-but-look-17-so-its-not-creepy smoulder.

But there’s a lot more to the vampire phenomenon that didn’t make it into Nosferatu, nor Twilight.

Vampires were popularised in the 19th century, so most of their style inspo was based on Victorian vibes. But in terms of their bodies and faces, there are some striking features you need to know about:

Vampires were often regarded as have bloated faces and bodies, and ruddy looking skin; these are the supposed effects of blood drinking.

And this blood was also believed to seep out of the mouth - and the nose. But fangs? They were rarely reported.

These features from past vampire sightings have been typically debunked via two explanations: the disease, Poryphoria, a group of diseases which cause blistering and itching in sunlight, and the past’s lack of knowledge regarding decomposition.

So, fancy reworking your Edward Cullen into something a little less up-to-date?

Here’s what you need to do:

Take your fangs and fake blood stash from last year, and do the classic drip from the lip look.

But this time, smear a little under your nose, too.

Speaking of facial features, it’s time to get ruddy - that means giving yourself a flushed look. So, grab some blush - reddy, pink tones, only - and go to town. I’d suggest a patchy look for the deathy vibes.

And make sure you leave your contouring kit in your make-up bag - aim for a bloated, round-faced look. Or, opt for loose clothes or something baby bump-esque to bloat out your half-dead body.

To finish the look, dab on some liquid latex and pull apart to give wrinkly, blistery skin in patches. You can even check out my tips for being a zombie to ensure you achieve the death you aim for!

The Zombie

In more recent years, this has become to go-to for quick costumes, thanks to show like The Walking Dead.

But it’s not the easy part of the look that I love, it’s this: a zombie is an inclusive halloween costume.

Anyone can do it.

You can pull out your FX make-up stash to show your skull’s skin peeling off and limb rotting, or simply pull a face and make a groaning noise.

You don’t even have to buy new clothes! Put on your usual get up, and stick your arms out like a Mummy.

#nailedit

But - if you’re asking me - achieving the realistic death look isn’t an expensive or difficult feat.

Zombies are supposed to be the undead; they’re infected and they’re decaying.

So, let’s go through some of the features of slowly rotting corpses:

A few minutes into death - aside from going cold, and going pale - cells begin to die and leak as they breakdown. Couple hours after the beginning of that process, things start to get shitty...

Yep, piss and poop just start leaking out ya body.

Then, your skin starts to sag, leaving it pale with red patches. Then, that skin shrinks, making your hair and nails appear as if they are growing.

Following this, your skin turns green as you begin to digest your organs. Then bugs, like maggots, take part in consuming your body.

It’s not long before you turn purple, lose hair, and slowly become a skeleton.

And there you have it.

#decayed

Question is, how can achieve this look?

Settle in folks, and let’s get dead.

(Oh, and I can assume you don’t want to be a skeleton with purple skin draping on your bones; so let’s cut to the early effects!)

To get your undead chic on, here’s what’s on your to-do list:

For ya face, make things red and patchy with a dab of red lipstick smudged around your visage. Oh, and don’t forget to moisturise and highlight - think less leaking cells, more dewy finish.

A few patches of grotesque green will further the final look. You could even put gel on the ends of your hair to make it seem wet, or longer, and define your fingernails with brown eyeshadows.

Yep, start contouring your nails - let’s start a #trend.

Ready to take things to the next level? Cut some gummy worms up, and latex ‘em to your face.

Et voila, ya ded.

The Mermaid

Our final option is the current Insta-fave.

Joining the ranks of the pastel-aesthetic is the glittery, highlighted-on-fleek mermaid.

But why be pretty, when you can be pretty damn realistic?

Fact is, nothing is more realistic - and scary - than climate change. So, it follows that any mermaid will probably be struggling in the plastic-filled hot tub that is the ocean.

It’s time to swap the dewy, contoured fish finish for an actual mermaid. Or, well, a dead one.

Typically, a dead human who had been left in the ocean would have several zombie-like characteristics that would be exacerbated by the sea water.

Your body breaks down much more slowly in water, and salt water - like sea water - would slow the decaying process even more so. A body left in the ocean for 2 weeks will look the same as one left in open air for a week!

So, that’s the red, patchy, dewy finish we already discussed with zombies.

And instead of the pruning you get in a bubble bath, imagine blistering, black skin. Plus, that skin also becomes swollen, and bleached, giving you the bloated, patchy glow that you don’t see in The Little Mermaid.

Oh, and don’t forget your body!

Thanks to accumulating gases, the abdomen swells from bloating.

Fun fact: this is what makes corpses turn upside down and rise with the torso and head at the water’s surface!

So, are you ready to get your mermaid on?

Swap your Ariel wig and beachy waves for patchy, red and green skin, and use latex to create blistered, wrinkled skin in patches.

Simply follow my tips for a go-to zombie look, and like, make it wetter.

Don’t forget to stuff a jumper down your shirt to puff out your abdomen - bonus points for farting out those gases filling out your torso.

Now, go get your fish on!

So: which supernatural being are you vibing with this All Hallows’ Eve?

And which of your past halloween costumes have you been most proud of?

(Mine was my Man-Spider costume from last year...)

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natashabarnes · 5 years

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To preface: Avengers: Endgame shook me to my core and I needed to find a constructive, healthy way to talk about what I am feeling and this seemed as good a way as any. This is an endeavor seeking emotional intelligence. So I’m here to talk about how media can affect us, honest-to-goodness grief, and yeah sure, my opinions and most importantly, Natasha Romanoff. There will be spoilers, obviously. You’ve been warned.

It’s late afternoon on Friday, May 7th, 2010. I’m a super-soon-to-be-college-graduate, and I’ve just missed my bus home. There are few places grimmer than where I currently found myself: the Inter-City Bus Terminal in Reading, Pennsylvania. The good news was that buses from Reading to New York ran roughly every two or three hours most of the day, I was going to be fine. I was going to be late, but I was going to be fine. At the risk of sounding dramatic, I didn’t know it but I had a date with destiny that evening. Since I couldn’t imagine sitting around and waiting in a bleak af bus terminal, I sought refuge a mere block-and-a-half away at the R/C Reading Movies 11 & IMAX. Lucky for me, I was able to schlep my suitcase and (always) large purse over right in time for a showing of Iron Man 2. I remembered Iron Man (2008) to be a whole lot of fun so I sprung for a movie ticket to be able to watch most of Iron Man 2 before I had to catch my bus. I knew nothing about this film going in and I was having a good time up until the moment Scarlett Johansson came on screen as Natalie Rushman (who even me, a noob S.H.I.E.L.D./espionage sector of Marvel, knew was actually Natasha Romanoff, aka the Black Widow). Once she made her entrance into Tony Stark’s personal fitness center, I wasn’t having a good time, I was having a great time…and also a weird time. I was in complete awe of her; I hung on her every word, her every move. Everything about her radiated a sense of intelligence, purpose, intention, and most alluring to me, confidence. Looking back I realize I was seeing the kind of woman I wanted to be; not only did she have every trait I wanted as a person, she seemed to be this unattainable personified perfection. At the time, I wrote off my fascination with her pretty quickly as the voice in my head said “but you’ll never be like that, you know that, right? You’ll never have those things.” I had to leave to catch my bus just as Rhodey showed up to Justin Hammer’s Stark Expo presentation and at the time that was pretty much that.

Let’s skip ahead. It’s the evening of Wednesday, April 24th, 2019. Thanks to the kindness of my best friend/basically sister, I was able to see Avengers: Endgame a day early. I’m a mess. I’m soaking wet from the collar bone up and my eye makeup is every place on my face with the exception of my eyes. I’ve been sitting for over three hours and somehow I’m out of breath, my sweat is cold. My status of Full Blown Mess was credited to the fact that I had to watch Natasha Romanoff die violently, fiercely, and courageously. The shock I felt that night was all-consuming. I kept saying to my friend through hard sobs, “I just thought she’d be safe. I really thought she’d be safe.” So many people I know at this event found me after the fact to check in with me. Am I okay? Do I need anything? The only answer I came up with on the fly was “I will be, it hurts now. But I’m just…so proud of her.” More on that later, but basically, people were so kind and if I had to be a mess, at least I was among people who also cared and understood where I was coming from. While my friend engaged in a last bit of work for the day, I sat waiting, attempting to calm down by staring at costume designer Jany Temime’s recent Instagram post where she selfied with Scarlett expressing excitement about working on the upcoming Black Widow film. I reminded myself that this night was not goodbye, just a very jarring “see ya later.” Of course the present is not necessarily made easier to bear just because more (and potentially the best) is yet to come.

What a difference nine years made. I’d gone from casual move-going fan who’d only read Spider-Man comics when I had time to being a hardcore, ride-or-die fan of Marvel Comics and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. My library had grown exponentially, along with my knowledge of these characters, and let’s not overlook my closet’s growth after falling into the deep pit of cosplay. I can’t exactly put my finger on the “when” of it, but at some point I stopped stifling the portion of my heart that belonged to superheroes and let them take over with complete abandon. I’d always had a heavy habit of trying to be what other people wanted me to be. Though I may have lived very independently, in retrospect my choices and interests were so often chosen for the satisfaction of other people (I am not assigning blame to anyone but myself on this one). Superheroes serve as a perfect example of a passion of mine I chose to shut down for so long. Once I leaned into that passion, I felt so much more complete. It’s no surprise that Natasha Romanoff was the character I ended up being most passionate about.

Natasha is a strong woman who spent a lot of her life in the service of others across moral and political spectrums. She followed their orders always and has plenty of regrets about her past. Maybe I was self-projecting, but throughout my dedicated years as an MCU viewer and Black Widow comic reader, I always saw Natasha’s arc as two parts:

1) a woman coming to terms with what she’s been and what she’s done seeking to move forward in a more universally beneficial direction.

2) a woman learning who she is, what she wants and choosing to act of her own volition.

Obviously the two are deeply connected. While her past experiences may have made her moral compass more grey than that of her peers, she’s a woman who wants the Right Thing To Do to be the choice she makes of her own agency. There’s a beautiful deleted scene from Captain America: The Winter Soldier where Nat speaks to Nick Fury for the first time in confidence after discovering he faked his death and did not include in on the secret. “I needed to keep the circle small. You would have done the same thing,” he says. “I know,” she replies, “that’s a problem.” A scene she has with Steve Rogers discussing trust that made the final cut achieves a similar idea. In past appearances in the MCU, Natasha had expressed a desire to make amends for her past and seemingly had started to do so through her work with S.H.I.E.L.D. and her participation the Battle of New York. These moments in Cap2, as the fandom frequently refers to it fondly, are less about her outward actions and more about her inward struggles. What she seems to learn by the end of the film is that letting people in is a key part of her goal of a truer sense of self. By the time we meet her in Captain America: Civil War, within the first hour of the film she delivers one of my favorite quotes as the family around her begins to split apart, “Staying together is more important than how we stay together.” Nat’s journey continued to be one of finding self-possession, self worth and using that greater sense of self to give back to others, both the found family around her and the innocent she can protect.

With all of this in mind, Avengers: Endgame is my favorite MCU film and features my favorite Natasha Romanoff content we’ve seen so far. From the moment the film begins, she is a woman hell-bent on remedying the greatest tragedy in the history of the world. Long gone is the woman we met in her first two films who did the bidding of an organization and/or focused mainly on giving back to those she felt she owed. In Endgame, Natasha aims to save the world, to bring back everyone lost, to restore families. We first see this when she agrees to find Thanos with the team and reverse the snap. When that mission fails, we skip ahead five years and that’s when I personally really lost it. In five years, Natasha has never stopped trying to fix the world. Let’s be clear, every other member of the original six Avengers most definitely has stopped trying to find an antidote to The Thanos Problem. Sure, Steve is trying to fix things in a different, more practical way, but there’s still an acceptance of the circumstances in his actions. The sight of her alone broke my heart and filled me with a sense of honor. This is a woman we have always seen in control and put together and when we find her she is a noble, beautiful wreck. She’s abandoned most self care, wearing only her depression clothes, and surviving off hope and peanut butter sandwiches desperately communicating with allies around the universe. These people make time for her but are clearly losing patience with her and her insistence that not only can this be fixed, but that it is all of their responsibility to do so. And in case it wasn’t obvious enough how much she’s changed, this scene gives us what I believe will be (for now at least) Nat’s most iconic moment on screen. “I used to have nothing, and then I got this…this job, this family. And I was better because of it. And even though they’re gone…I’m still trying to be better.” Nat sums up her entire character arc in this one delicate and stunning moment showing just how strong allowing herself to be vulnerable has made her. Loving has only made her braver, caring has only made her more tenacious, and giving has made her unstoppable. She is, in this moment, the woman she always wanted to become.

Remembering the aforementioned scene is absolutely necessary when absorbing Natasha’s choice later in the movie to sacrifice her life so that her team can get the soul stone. Her entire life has lead her to this moment. Yes, killing off the only female from your original team is a bold move with a LOT of weight attached to it, and one that can definitely be seen as shortchanging her, but I just can’t see it that way. Natasha Romanoff made the ultimate heroic choice, one that the rest of the film hinges on. My brain can’t navigate the concept that fans have been robbed of her unnecessarily without also hearing a diminishing of the selfless choice she made and the course she followed in the time we’ve known her and beyond. It’s only when I think of the alternate concept of Clint dying for the soul stone that I feel completely, hypothetically swindled (though while we’re talking about him let’s also not forget how excellent it was to see a man and a woman with no blood relation platonically love one another unconditionally). Please don’t misunderstand, if you are angry, I respect that, we all deal with stuff different ways, this is just my take. Natasha Romanoff earned that moment. Is it devastating to watch? One thousand percent yes, but what I felt even more deeply than the devastation was pride. I am so proud of this character that in no way can I bring myself to see this choice as abuse or mistreatment of her character. In that moment, she was magnificent. Natasha Romanoff died valiantly, unafraid, and of her own free will so that everyone else could live. Natasha is a hero of the highest standard, full stop.

Entertainment Weekly recently featured a half-hour interview with the original six Avengers to promote Endgame. I was more than moved to hear Scarlett speak about Nat’s arc and confirm what I’d been absorbing as an audience member for years. “She’s come into her own as a woman saying ‘who am I and what do I want and what do I need out of my relationships and also out of my own self’ and she’s someone who is understanding her own self worth.” Without going into deep detail, watching Scarlett’s performance as Natasha has affected me in a way I can only describe as profound. Every MCU film she appeared in had at least one moment that hit a nerve inside me in ways equally gentle and harsh, but still every nerve was hit with the reassurance of knowing that if she could change, I could too. Catalysts for personal growth can come from anywhere and at my most lost somehow I remembered that moment sitting in a theatre watching Iron Man 2. Something in my brain told me to follow that feeling I had watching her, not in an effort to emulate her completely, but to see an example of someone one who is “my own woman–first, last and always.” Natasha taught me that self love, self worth and opening yourself to others are traits more powerful than lightning, stronger than a suit of armor and they’d protect me more than a shield. In the years I’ve watched and read this character, my life has changed for the better in every way. She’s been a gift to me and the gratitude I feel is overwhelming. I may have saved myself, but Natasha taught me how. As fans I think we all love having more media to look forward to, especially when that media features an inspirational figure for us. Before Endgame I’d frequently have passing thoughts reminding me that someday the time of Scarlett’s particular incarnation of Natasha will be over. Who would I be without this character? After Endgame, I’m less afraid of that future. No matter what form of this character I will have in my life, I will always follow her example and I will try to be better.

#black widow #natasha romanoff

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