13. Old Halloween Costumes
Today’s Halloween costumes are often trendy rather than scary. Walk through the aisles of your Halloween store, and you’ll see many licensed costumes from Star Wars, the Marvel and DC universes, cartoons, and more. The traditionally scary costumes are often a single aisle and not actually all that scary. The ability to watch into a store and find any pre-made costume, nonetheless a branded character, is a somewhat recent invention. Children used to wear exclusively homemade outfits, many of which were absolutely terrifying.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, store-bought costumes simply weren’t a reality. The vast majority of children had homemade costumes, many of which were cobbled together with whatever extra materials were laying around, especially during times of economic difficulty. Surprisingly, the results of these homemade costumes were often alarming. Simple elements like burlap or flour-cloth sacks were used to make incredibly powerful ghost and scarecrow masks.
Frightening in a different way, many historical Halloween costumes were deeply racist. Blackface was commonplace, with many white Americans going as stereotypical black characters like Little Black Sambo or, even more disturbingly, generic “black” people with exaggerated features and mannerisms. Blackface was also often used to indicate monstrousness or evil in general, as in the case of many historical devil costumes.