Halloween costume ideas

Halloween costume ideas aren't hard to come by if you're willing to be a little bit creative. It's understandable if you don't want to go as one of the typical Halloween costumes of lore - whether it be the ghost or mummy, or witch or vampire, or even something more recent like "sexy nurse" or "fireman." Those are all kind of played out, though it should be said that the classics never really go out of style permanently. A good ghost or ghoul will still win you plaudits if done correctly.

That said, it's the outside-the-box Halloween costume ideas that usually win the most praise. Halloween these days is less about spooky stories and more about coming up with a costume that best expresses your individuality. For some that means a modern take on classic Halloween costume ideas, but for others that means going in a new direction entirely.

As an example of what I mean by "new direction entirely," consider that a few years ago I was at a Halloween party where one of the partygoers dressed up as "Postmodernism." That's not a person or a place, or something you can even have a mental image of. It's an abstract intellectual theory that may or may not have any bering on the proceedings you'll indulge in that evening.

I was blown away at the creativity of the idea. This was someone who'd really taken the time and the effort to come up with Halloween costume ideas that were unique and wholly original. "Postmodernism" was something he could play around with, creating his own illusion of what the idea meant and therefore what his costume should be. It was a coup on his part to come up with "postmodernism" as his costume, since the postmodernist movement was designed to deconstruct and therefore undermine traditional thought and convention in the arts. Kind of made it a 100% cinch to be a great Halloween costume with the barest of effort once the first wall - the wall of creative thought and breaking through the barriers of convention - was knocked down.

The inherent irony then is that he used postmodernist theory to create a corporeal (and thererore modern) "Postmodernism" Halloween costume. It worked on so many levels!

If that's not your bag, you can still apply the same type of critical thinking to this year's costume. Maybe rather than going as a critical movement you can go as an artistic movement - you are "pointilism," or Picasso's "Blue Period." Or something else entirely - there's a world of Halloween costume ideas out there for you to discover.