It is Halloween season! For Halloween lovers like me….early September is definitely not too early to start costume planning, candy buying, and scary movie watching!

But wait, isn’t this a fashion blog? Yes…Scary costume fashion is coming later in the post….but first a little Halloween fun!

Halloween has been my favorite holiday since I was a child, and I am not the only one:

Halloween is the second largest commercial holiday in the country.

It ranks second after only Christmas. Consumers spent approximately $9 billion on Halloween in 2019, according to the National Retail Federation. Spending was down a bit in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but Americans still forked over $8 billion overall, or an average of $92 per person.

If you know me at all you are surely familiar with my love of costumes! And while some people prefer the cute or silly costumes, I tend to lean towards the scary or gory side of the spectrum. Before we get into my personal costumes lets talk about Americas most popular costumes:

According to rent.com:

• Princess and Spiderman rank as the most popular kids’ costumes.
• Adults dress as witches most frequently, followed by vampires and cats.
• The most popular costumes for dogs are a pumpkin or a hot dog.

And lets not forget the Candy!

Looking at 12 years of data, CandyStore.com determined that the most popular selling candy by state was Skittles But,  According to a poll from Monmouth University, more than 36% of Americans say Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are their favorite Halloween treat. It’s more than twice the number of people who chose Snickers (18%) as their favorite. M&M’s ranked third at 11%, while Hershey bars tied with candy corn in fourth place, capturing 6% each.

(Skittles were actually in 6th place) So even if were buying a lot of Skittles, we are most excited to eat that chocolate!!

OK time to get to the scary stuff…We’ll start with movies. This can be very subjective. I chose two of the many lists of the “top horror movies” of all time that I found online and they are both very different:

Harper’s Bazaar listed the following as the “best of all time”:

1. The Shining (1980)
2. Get Out (2017)
3. Paranormal Activity (2007)
4. The Blair Witch Project (1999)
5. Candyman (1992)

Thrillist.com Went a little more with what I would consider the “classics” :

1.  The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
2. The Exorcist (1973)
3. Psycho (1960)
4. Halloween (1978)
5. Night of the Living Dead (1968)

My personal list was tough to narrow down, but I’d have to go with:

1. Nightmare on Elm street 3 (1987)
2. The Evil Dead (1981)
3. The Shining (1980)
4. Poltergeist (1982)
5. Creepshow (1982)
6. Honorable mention goes to Friday the 13th part 4 “The Final Chapter” (1984) because I don’t want to leave Jason off the list.

What are your favorite scary movies? I’d love to hear them in the comments!

OK, now onto my personal costumes!

If you don’t like fake blood, clowns or wound effects proceed with caution!!

I don’t have a lot of pictures of my childhood costumes, growing up in Northern MN it was always tough to make a good costume you could wear with a winter jacket so, this will be my adult costumes…we’ll start in my early 20’s and go from there…

When my son was little I did more “tame” costumes, not much exciting to show….This was the best one I could find LOL!

My brother came to live with me in Florida for a while and that’s when I really got into my “scary” costume groove!! This was my first gory costume. And there are many more to follow…

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The Zombie Ninja costume below won 1st place at the Halloween costume contest at Racing’s North Turn in Ponce Inlet. They always have a fantastic party with a lot of people who really love to dress up!

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