It's the last week of October, and with it Halloween, or as my neighbours think, time to put up the Christmas decorations. I wish I were kidding.
So, in the spirit of Halloween and all things horror, I have the current Red Eye authors talking about their Halloween costumes growing up/what/who they would dress up as this year.
As a child I always dressed up as a witch, which wasn’t very
original, but I don’t think they had the same range of costumes back
then. I did love my witch’s dress, though, and wore it every year to the
school Halloween disco. These days, if I was going to dress up for a
Halloween party it would have to be the corpse bride from Tim Burton’s
film of the same name – wig, veil and all. 
I don't think I ever really got to dress up for Halloween when I was little: we didn't really do Halloween parties or trick or treating, so I still always feel a bit like I had a bit of a Halloween-deprived childhood!
Last year, I went full Slytherin: tie, robes, wand (Draco's -naturally) and all, and that was fun. Particularly when someone else
came as a Gryffindor and we spent all evening throwing stuff across the room at each other. Of course I won. Well. Technically, it wasn't actually a competition - but I still feel like I won anyway.
Given the choice, I'd love to to a Halloween party as Sweeney Todd - I loved the look of the Tim Burton version, and I've always been a big fan of the shirtsleeves, waistcoat and lethal razors sort of style. And if I started singing... well, that would complete the horror, wouldn't it?
When I was growing up, Halloween was a purely American thing, it
simply wasn't celebrated in the UK (a-hem, yes, I'm showing my age
here…). So I never dressed up for it at all. If I was going to a
Halloween party today, however, I think I'd go to the absolute extreme:
the whole zombie corpse blood rip gore broken limb gouged eyeball
festering nightmare…! Hee hee heee!
If I was going to
pick a particular person or character, I think – just to be
Halloween-ishly weird – I'd copy that line (who said it?) from that film
(which one?) when someone turns up dressed normally and says they're a
serial killer “because they look like you and me.” That always makes me
laugh.
That's going to bug me now. Which film was it? Addams Family, maybe?…
I don’t remember specific costumes as such, but when I was growing up
my parents would decorate our house for Hallowe’en. Surfaces would be
covered in black bin liners, cobwebs hung from the lampshade and there
were all kinds of spooky treats. This year, in order to celebrate all
that is ghoulish and ghastly, I think I’d celebrate Hallowe’en dressed
as FIFA’s Sepp Blatter.
When I was a kid we didn’t have Halloween. That time of year was all about Guy Fawkes and blowing up your old Airfix kits with all the fireworks you and your mates had managed to stockpile; we are lucky to be alive…
All I knew about Halloween came from the American comics we bought, or the Sunday newspaper comic supplements my dad used to bring back from his trips to the States, as well as my favorite magazine back then: Famous Monsters of Filmland.
By the time I had kids, Halloween had arrived in the UK, big time, and so I got to do what I’d’ve liked to have done with them. My favorite was getting them done up as mini-vampires. I live in the States now and this year I’ve been invited to a Halloween party and it’s been suggested I should go as a writer of my choice, so I shall attempt a resurrected Edgar Allan Poe, because he wrote some of the spookiest stores ever. I have a feeling I shall look like a cast member from The Walking Dead.
Can you remember what you dressed up as when you were younger? If you're planning on dressing up this year, what/who are you going as?
If you want to know more about Tom Becker and Dark Room, tomorrow he's featured on Heather Reviews
