As the horrifying (and commercialized) All Hallows’ Eve inches closer and closer, millions of Americans are currently planning for their participation in the cultural ritual of costuming. One can dress up on Halloween for many reasons: many young children do so in order to entice their neighbors into giving them as much candy as possible, while many college students do so in order to justify an alcohol-filled adventure ending with them vomiting themselves awake at 2 p.m. in a stranger’s dorm. Whatever the reason someone has for dressing up on Halloween, you can’t enjoy the holiday to the fullest without doing so. Adopting the guise of spooky characters from Dracula to Freddy Krueger allows you to truly get immersed in the fun of Halloween.
So, after deliberating and working on my costume instead of working on my Herald column like I was supposed to, I came to a final decision for what or whom I would dress up as. Would it be a ghoul? A goblin? Any sort of character or beast that one would consider on-theme for the holiday? Alas, it was not to be. This year, I shall don the guise of Spamton G. Spamton, the physical embodiment of a spam email from the indie video game Deltarune. After getting over the fact that I, a grown man, am that enamoured with a video game targeted towards teens (one that I would highly recommend playing yourself, after its sister project Undertale), you may ask: what the hell does that have to do with Halloween? And I would answer: absolutely nothing! I, like many others this year, have gone on the bewildering path of having your Halloween costume having nothing to do with the theme of the holiday whatsoever.
This certainly isn’t a new phenomenon. For as long as the holiday has been influenced by modern commercialization, the options one has for what to dress up as for Halloween has extended well beyond the scope of what we would consider to be Halloween-themed. On the tamer end of this spectrum, characters who are villainous or “scary” by nature yet aren’t necessarily themed towards the holiday have always been popular choices—pop culture figures like Darth Vader and the Terminator come to mind. Yet on the farther end of this spectrum, you have popular choices that do not seem related to the theme of the holiday whatsoever, like Marty McFly or Willy Wonka. If there was ever a point when dressing up for Halloween definitively no longer matched the theming of the holiday itself, it certainly wasn’t recent.
Perhaps what distinguishes dressing up as Spamton G. Spamton in 2025 from dressing up as another character in the late 20th century is the level of popularity, and therefore the level of marketability, between the two. The popularity of the Undertale and Deltarune games are certainly dwarfed by that of the original Star Wars saga in its heyday. The movies resulted in a wide amount of official merchandise being made and sold, ranging from toys, clothes, lunch boxes, and of course costumes; if someone wanted to dress up as Luke Skywalker for Halloween, they could simply go to the store and buy a costume professionally made with permission from the rightsholder. In contrast, while Deltarune’s team has produced some merchandise, the game’s popularity simply doesn’t justify character costumes being mass produced. I certainly could not find a ready-made Spamton costume to buy.
So, like many Halloween enjoyers planning to dress up as a character that doesn’t have a ready-made costume available, I’m in the process of making my own. I’ve bought several different pieces from different sources, planning to use items from a fake Pinocchio nose, to clown makeup, to fake glasses drawn on with colored Sharpies. Perhaps this is what separates traditional Halloween costuming from modern Halloween cosplaying: putting the onus of outfit design on the consumer takes power out of the hands of rights owners who would otherwise control how their characters are depicted in popular culture. In an age of late-stage capitalism corrupting every aspect of society that it touches, including popular holidays, could cosplaying be a method for lessening the influence consumerism has over the Halloween season?
At the same time, cosplaying could very well be a means for consumerism to increase its influence over the Halloween season. Buying outfit materials from multiple sources instead of just one is often difficult for people who don’t live near too many physical stores, unless of course they rely on massive virtual stores like Amazon, whose anti-union, anti-consumer and anti-environmental behavior has been widely criticized. Additionally, cosplaying culture can very well worsen the wealth disparities that plague the holiday: it’s no secret that money plays a role in how much Halloween can be enjoyed, from the candy to the decorations, and the freedom that comes with cosplaying is very much tied to the amount of resources one has for it. Cosplaying has been, since its advent, one of the endless ways economic globalism manifests.
So, when it comes to deciding how to go about dressing up for Halloween, which is the better route to go: costume or cosplay? While we certainly can’t separate either of the two methods from the sins of modern capitalism, we can still make informed decisions on how we impact the wider world when we celebrate the holidays. Reusing old items and supplies, as well as buying locally instead of from globally-reaching online vendors, can both decrease your personal involvement in harmful consumerism while increasing your enjoyment of the Halloween season as you make it more personal to yourself. Cosplaying can very well be a part of this effort. When I reused old clothes and arts supplies for my Spamton costume, I metaphorically put a part of myself into it, making the costume more personal to myself than it would have been if I simply bought it from a store. Sure, it may be low-quality and far from professional standards, but the fact that I made it myself makes it priceless.
Perhaps this is why dressing up for Halloween has drifted so far from what we would consider Halloween-themed. Dressing up as someone or something else can allow a person to channel their personality through that character, perhaps embracing certain parts of themselves they would otherwise find difficult to accept. While it may seem like an odd choice, cosplaying as Spamton may very well allow me to embrace aspects of mine that I wouldn’t otherwise like as much, such as height and odd social quirks, allowing me to imbue my own interpretation of both the character and myself into the outfit. This power would remain in the hands of others if I simply bought a costume from the store, preventing me from truly enjoying the holiday to the fullest. Indeed, this is the true theme of Halloween: after spending 364 days in fear of both the world and ourselves, we spend one night appropriating those fears into our social presentation, allowing us to get closer and closer to accepting our respective realities through mockery of them.