The most hair raising Halloween costumes

Halloween is one of my favourite days of the year, except for Christmas. I adore Halloween. The spooks, the decorations, the snacks, trick or treating, the parties - it really is so much fun and I look forward to it every year. My absolute favourite thing about Halloween is not the decorations or the parties, however. It's the costumes.

Yes, I'm one of those people who is really into dressing up in crazy, wacky costumes. If you give me an opportunity to dress up then you can bet your bottom dollar that I will take that opportunity and run with it. When I say run with it, I mean run with it. Some would say that I go slightly over the top with it. But hey, go big or go home, I say.

Because I love costumes so much, I feel that I am pretty qualified to call myself a fancy dress expert - a ‘dresspert’ you might say. So, I am going to tell you the stories of my fancy dress costume for the past two years, what I'm dressing up as this year and give you some ideas on how to be the spookiest person in the room.

2016 - In 2016, my mum's friends decided to host a massive party for the first time. Of course, it was fancy dress and there was to be a prize for the best costume. This excited me hugely and my mum had the idea for us to do a family costume. We brainstormed some ideas and came up with the idea of basing the costume around the nursery rhyme, Little Bo Peep. Halloween is meant to be spooky and scary so how did we make a cute little nursery rhyme into a terrifying costume? By combining it with BLOOD and MURDER. Instead of Bo Peep just losing her sheep, we decided that her sheep was murdered by a wolf… subsequently, Bo Peep was also murdered. And so, our Halloween costume was born.
From left to right - me dressed as Bo Peep, my dad dressed as the murderous wolf and my mum dressed as a dead sheep.
There was a lot of fake blood and white makeup used in this costume. We also ended up sacrificing multiple pairs of tights, filling them with cotton wool, shredding them and coating them in blood for the sheep guts and brain.
Side note: we won the fancy dress competition. Just saying.

2017 - The previous year’s party had been such a success that they decided to make it an annual thing. That left the task of living up to last year’s costume and making an even better one. Doing a family costume had worked out well for us so far and we made the decision to do that again - only bigger. We enlisted the help of my best friend and my mum's best friend and created my favourite Halloween costume of all time. Let me ask you a question and see if you can guess what we dressed up as. When you think of Halloween, which family first comes to mind? Maybe this will help… ba da da dum *click click.* That's right - The Addams Family. We went the whole hog. We had Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday, Pugsley, Cousin It, Lurch and we even had The Hand. We walked in with the theme tune playing through Bluetooth speakers.
From left to right - my mum's friend’s husband dressed as Gomez, me as Wednesday, my mum as Cousin It, my dad as Lurch with The Hand on his shoulder, my mum's friend as Morticia and my friend as Pugsley.
We spent more money on this costume than we should have really but it was so worth it because it was just so much fun and honestly, what is the point of dressing up if you're not going to give it everything you've got?
Side note: we won the competition… again. Just saying… again.

2018 - So now we're up to date. We think the host got pretty fed up of us winning the competition every year as he made it a bit harder this year by giving us a theme. The theme is The Rocky Horror Picture Show. If you want to be entered in the competition, you must dress as a character from the film. We took this as a challenge and we are going full bore, yet again. Obviously, I don't have a picture of us in the costume because bits and pieces are still arriving but I can show a picture of someone else in the costume. There is only four of us this time as my friend is at university and my mum's friend's husband refuses to take part but I still really like our costume.

I'm so excited to try it on for the first time and see us all together. It's going to be truly amazing. And hopefully, we might win again and we can add a third trophy to our collection. Literally - there are trophies.

Of course, not everyone can afford to spend loads of money on crazy costumes and not everyone has equally crazy friends who are willing to join in the madness. That doesn't mean that you can't still dress up and look super spooky or, if you'd prefer, positively punny.


Here are my top 10  ideas for what you could dress up as this year:

• 50 Shades of Grey - the book was a phenomenon and you can have a phenomenal costume with just a black shirt and some paint swatches.
  

• The Spice Girls - grab some friends, make your hair big like back in the 90s and print out some massive pictures of spice jars. Everyone will ‘wannabe’ your lover.
  

• Samara - you don't even need a well, a static TV or a ring for this costume, just a white nightgown and a long black wig. Plus it gives you an excuse to go bare-faced because no one will see it anyway!
  

• Creepy Porcelain Doll - remember that doll that sits in your grandma's bedroom? Use that for your inspiration. All you need is hair long enough for pigtails, a frilly dress and an eyeliner pencil.
  

• Ghost - the classics are always the best. Time to get that bed sheet out the airing closet again.
  

• Dead Princess - a fan of the Disney movies? Dreamed of working as a Disney princess for adoring children? Not for long! Wait until you've chucked some blood all over you and then see how many kids want to hug you.
  

• Error Message - so maybe you can't be bothered to get dressed up or you just don't want to. That's fine! Ruin a white top by writing ‘Error 404: costume not found.’ You'll get an A for hilarity but an F for effort.
  

• Bubble Bath - use those lungs of yours to blow up a load of balloons, safety pin them to a white top and buy a shower cap from Poundland. Just make sure to avoid anyone dressed as a cactus!
  

• Pop Art Character - wear basically whatever you want and put a load of dots all over your face like you've got chicken pox. If people don't know what pop art is, just say you're a chicken pox victim (or play a game of charades with a bottle of Coca-Cola and Vincent Van Gogh.)
  

• Barbie - follow Aqua’s example and be a Barbie girl in a Barbie world. You don't have to be plastic but your costume can still be fantastic. Rita Ora did it in 2014 so you can do it too. Go on, Barbie, go and party (ah, ah, ah, yeah!)