The annual Halloween freakout is just getting underway.
It’s that time of the year when the celebration of all things horrible, frightening, and dead is suddenly upon celebrants who have yet to pick a costume or ghastly ornaments to shock and horrify trick-or-treaters.
They panic and rush out to their local costume shop or Halloween specialty store to satisfy the urge to become a superhero or one of the living dead.
“Halloween is like anything else,” said Missy Morrow, owner of Party Corner at 200 Victoria Road S. “The longer you wait the busier it gets.”
As soon as Thanksgiving ends, she said, the festival of fright begins, and her store starts to heat up with people looking for plastic severed limbs, gruesome Frankenstein masks, or artificial blood. “Every day that goes by, it gets slightly busier. Then it’s like Christmas eve, where everyone goes, ‘Oh no, it’s now.’ Then we see a lot of last minute shoppers.”
Zombies are, once again, huge this year. People want to be zombies, and they want zombie-themed horrors on their lawns. Gore is also popular, especially gore make-up.
“Because everybody is watching all of these shows like Face Off, and looking at tutorials on the Internet, trying to be very creative with their makeup skills,” Morrow said. “We’re selling a lot of prosthetics and specialty makeup. I find people are getting more interesting and more creative. There are a lot of cool special effects makeup going on.”
And, as usual, sexy costumes for females are big. Morrow said women look for an excuse to “dress up sexy” for Halloween, when it’s more acceptable.
Bobbie-Jo Bigelow is the owner-manager of Halloween Alley, a pop-up store at 575 Woodlawn Rd W. It opened in September, and will be open until just after Halloween, selling only Halloween merchandise.
“It’s starting to pick up now,” Bigelow said. “I anticipated that once the Blue Jays season was over it would get much busier. Everybody was in baseball mode.”
Bigelow said her shop doesn’t just sell Halloween costumes, it helps people with fitting and makeup.
“They come in and say, ‘I’m a disaster, fix me.’ And we do what we can for them,” she said.
Superheroes, and the supervillain Harley Quinn, are huge this year, she said. And there appears to be a trend towards animal morphing – combining two animals into one costume.
“They don’t want to do just a straight tiger, but more like a tiger-monkey,” she said. “And Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are so popular with the kids.”
Halloween, Bigelow said, is a big celebration because it’s that special occasion when kids and adults can both get into it, and participate together.
“It brings you together as a family,” she said. “You can have fun, scare people, and party.”
Around the city, Halloween decorations are going up on homes everywhere. Some of the efforts are elaborate, with entire front yards taken up by ghoulish graveyards, swinging witches, and giant spiders.
