Why Are So Many Kids Halloween Costumes So Inappropriate?

A while back, my kids and I attended my town’s annual Halloween parade and costume contest. I was the Cat in the Hat, my son was Sam I Am, and my twin girls were Thing 1 and Thing 2. Our costumes were painstakingly handmade, down to the Styrofoam green eggs and ham. Sure enough, we won a $50 savings bond that by my retirement could be worth as much as $53.75.

But standing proudly onstage next to an 8-year-old boy squirting blood from his eyeballs and a 12-year-old bloody zombie bride, I thought, “Whatever happened to pirates and hobos?”

My personal favorite Halloween outfit was a 1976 Superman costume — basically a shapeless plastic body apron and short vinyl cape. It had none of the super-sculpted muscles or soft cloth you see in every Superman costume now, even the ones for toddlers and pets. My costume also inexplicably came with a red Lone Ranger-style plastic mask. I wore it gamely, because what was a 1970s Halloween costume without some sharp piece of plastic cutting painfully into your skin?

Just as puzzling: Many costumes for little children are based on movies the Motion Picture Association says “may be inappropriate for children under 13″ — Wiggles-free flicks such as The Dark Knight, Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars III, Star Trek, Transformers, and two of the last three Harry Potter movies.

If a costume of The Dark Knight’s homicidal maniac The Joker is too tame for your child, never fear! There’s a kids costume for Michael Myers, the sadistic serial killer of the R-rated Halloween movies.

Putting an R rating on those movies is like putting a Surgeon General’s warning on heroin.

There’s also a Leatherface costume for kids based on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Oh come on, you might say, isn’t Leatherface more or less Bob the Builder with an attitude?

Other inappropriate costumes include:

“Pinhead” from Hellraiser
“Jason” from Friday the 13th
“Freddy Krueger” from A Nightmare on Elm Street
“The Joker” from The Dark Knight

I have nothing against horror — in fact, I love it. In 1980, my mother, a devout fan of the genre, made one of the most dubious parenting decisions since Joan Crawford shared with her little girl a certain distaste for dry-cleaning hangers. She brought her two young children to see The Shining. My brother and I begged to see it, then screamed and hid our faces like kids trapped in a hell-bent roller coaster. Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy this was not.

Scarred by that experience, I could have grown into the kind of kid other children hide their pets from, but I simply inherited my mother’s taste for good scares. I knew I was hooked when, as a movie usher in 1984, I was so mesmerized by the new Wes Craven film A Nightmare on Elm Street that I volunteered for ticket-ripping duty just to be close to the poster.

When my son came home one day expressing enthusiasm for a series of spooky kid stories called Goosebumps, I was thrilled. “I really enjoy horror fiction,” he said in his “I’m smart, see?” voice. But this doesn’t mean I’m buying him the SAW V mangled victim costume anytime soon. He’s better off carving pumpkins with dull knives, gathering gobs of candy, and pulling Halloween inspiration more from R.L. and J.K. than from my coveted nightmares.

That said, I am clearing room in my 2016 event calendar for some appropriate father-son fright night bonding if he’s game. The Grudge 8? The Peoria Witch Project? The Hills Have Ears, Too? Bring it on.

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The author of the acclaimed collection “The 40-Year-Old Version: Humoirs of a Divorced Dad”, Schwartzberg is an award-winning essayist and screenwriter. His work can also be read in the new anthology “The Good Men Project“

Tagged as: Children's Halloween Costumes, costumes, halloween, leatherface, mike myers, texas chainsaw massacre