WBEN Extra: Halloween 2012

It's Halloween, but a couple of storm-affected towns in Western New York are postponing the trick-or-treating. Perrysburg will wait until Saturday evening, and Wellsville will turn the kids loose Sunday afternoon.


Elsewhere. Hurricane Sandy is a Halloween trickster, cancelling events up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says he can't imagine it will be safe for trick-or-treating there tonight. Some communities will celbrate this weekend. In New York City, tonight's Village Halloween Parade has been canceled for the first time in its 40 year history. The parade usually draws up to 60,000 wildly dressed adult partiers and some who are barely dressed at all.

The burning question: Full size or miniature?
Full Size
( 8% )
Miniatures
( 64% )
I don't hand out candy
( 28% )

Nearly six million adults plan to dress as a witch this year, and 3.2 million will dress as vampires. For kids, princess costumes take the number one spot (9.7%), with Batman (5.4%) and Spider-Man (4.6%) taking number two and three. When it comes to those planning a costume for their four-legged friends, 12.7 percent of people are sticking with the most traditional of all costumes – a pet-friendly pumpkin. SEE MORE  from the National Retail Federation

Of those buying or making costumes, the average person will spend $28.65 on costumes this year, up slightly from $26.52 in 2011. Source: National Retail Federation

Real estate website Zillow has named Buffalo one of America's best cities for trick-or-treating. And they say our best neighborhood for it is around Elmwood, Delaware and Lafayette Avenues.    OTHER NEIGHBORHOODS? READ MORE

Prepare yourself this Halloween for a procession of pint-sized trick-or-treaters like none you've encountered before.

If the companies that gamble on offering the right mix of costumes are correct, visitors to your doorstep will include a grisly array of waist-high killer clowns brandishing blood-soaked machetes, deranged convicts and zombie ninjas armed with knives.

Add to that the full roster of fictional killers who gave people nightmares during the `80s and `90s - Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees from "Friday the 13th" and Chucky, the murderous doll from "Child's Play" - now available in sizes that can fit a 5-year-old.

RELATED : Adults Providing a Boost for Haloween Retailers

These costumes make last year's popular "Scream" mask filled with fake blood seem almost tame.

Can't figure out how to dress as President Obama or Mitt Romney for Halloween? There's always Big Bird, the other star of the presidential debates. The Yellow One is flying off the shelves after Romney's threat to do away with government support for PBS. President Barack Obama kept the Halloween dream alive  when be brought up the bird again during their second debate. At George and Company in Buffalo, they sold out of Big Bird costumes shortly after the debate, and were making do with similar masks and yellow bird-like noses. Halloweencostumes.com sold out of several takes on Big Bird almost overnight after Romney's remark during the first presidential debate Oct. 3, said a company spokesman, Marlon Heimerl. "In the past this hasn't been a very popular costume, so when Big Bird flew the coop in such high numbers, it was definitely a big surprise," said Heimerl, who would not provide specific sales figures. Disguise Inc., Sesame Workshop's official costume maker, said interest is up among the thousands of retailers it services. The sellers of unlicensed Big Bird, especially sexed-up versions, beware. "The only costumes authorized by Sesame Workshop are with our licensee, Disguise, and we are working with our legal team on having the others removed from the market," said Ellen Lewis, a spokeswoman from over there on Sesame Street. Kimberly Wick, vice president of Costume World based in Deerfield Beach, Fla., also saw sleepy seller Big Bird become a hot seller overnight. The company sells and rents costumes of all kinds and has four stores around the country. "We had Big Bird dancing in front of our Deerfield Beach store and people were honking and going crazy," Wick said. "It's been 20 years since Big Bird was popular." Wick was madly trying to replenish sold-out Big Bird looks among several the company carries for infants to adults. So who's buying - Democrats, Republicans or those pesky undecideds? "Does Big Bird have a left wing and a right wing? I don't know," she said. "I guess we'll find out."

Earlier this month, Amber Boettcher brought her 6-year-old daughter Addi to a Halloween store near their home in southeastern Minnesota. They were looking for pompoms to add to Addi's homemade costume. But their shopping trip ended abruptly when Addi saw the array of gory outfits on sale for kids.

"She freaked out," Boettcher says. "The store was so gross and scary that we left."

Gory Halloween costumes aren't new, of course. And Halloween decorations have gotten just as intense: Spirit Halloween offers a disturbingly realistic mechanical version of the possessed girl from "The Exorcist" for your front lawn, and PaperMart offers plastic severed hands splattered with fake blood packaged as though they've been wrapped at a butcher shop, perfect for decorating the buffet table at a Halloween party.

But in a year when Abraham Lincoln was depicted as a vampire hunter and zombies are everywhere, gory costumes that were once reserved for preteens and teens are now available in ever-smaller sizes.

One example among many: The national chain Party City's "Boys Skinned Alive" costume will fit, according the company's website, "most children over 4." Even costumes that were once benign now have violent twists: The sweet, simple "sock monkey" is now a bloody zombie sock monkey with razor-sharp teeth, sold in sizes small enough for kindergarteners.

"For the last couple of years, darker is where it's been at," says Melissa Sprich, vice president of Halloween merchandising for Party City. For babies and toddlers, Sprich says "darker" may mean dressing as a devil this year, rather than a cheerful dinosaur. But for all other ages, many parents are seeking vampires, zombies and "the Freddies, Jasons and Chuckys" even for kids too young to see those characters on screen.

The companies that license these characters' images determine how small the costumes can run, with some drawing the line for horror characters at sizes 6-8 or 10-12. But while "6-8" technically refers to ages 6-8, many boys wear that size at age 5.

David J. Skal, who has chronicled America's fascination with horror since the 1990s in numerous books, including "The Monster Show," says he's surprised at the level of "monster-ization of children" we're seeing this year.

He points out that for centuries, frightening masks and "scary stories have been used to pass on a kind of coming-of-age message to children that the world is not always a safe and welcoming place." Perhaps, he says, this year parents are especially preoccupied with just how unwelcoming the world seems.

Researching his history of Halloween, "Death Makes a Holiday," Skal spoke with people who grew up during the Great Depression, and remembered dressing up as what they called "hobos and bums." At that time, he says, "people were very concerned that the whole social fabric was coming apart. The idea of the rise of the unwashed masses kind of has a parallel with our fascination with zombies."

Chris Alexander, editor-in-chief of the long-running horror magazine Fangoria, says in the 1930s, characters we now see as relatively harmless like Frankenstein's monster or Count Dracula were unsettling moviegoers just like Chucky or Michael Myers.

But, Alexander points out, those characters were effectively defanged through decades of adaptation before they became dress-up fodder for preschoolers. Frankenstein's monster morphed into bumbling Herman Munster and Dracula eventually translated into Count von Count on "Sesame Street." No such softening has happened with characters like child-killer Freddy Krueger: They are realistically depicted in latex and fabric, then wrapped around little trick-or-treaters.

Even Alexander, who edits a horror magazine and makes low-budget horror films, says the current crop of costumes is too gory for him to consider buying for his own 5-year-old.

"My office is a nightmare come to life," he says, "but I would never dress my child up as Freddy Krueger or Jason. ... I'm quite shocked when I see it."

Party City's Sprich notes that the popularity of retro horror characters like Chucky is part of a larger wave of nostalgia for the era when today's parents were kids. The "Ghostbusters" and video game characters Mario and Luigi are also hot right now.

Today's parents are reveling in that nostalgia, and their children are likely to feel empowered when older kids and adults are shocked or impressed by the edginess of their costumes, says Cynthia Edwards, professor of child psychology at Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C.

"Part of the thrill of Halloween for little kids is that you put on a costume and you become the thing. If you dress up as a fairy princess or a pilot, you are a fairy princess or a pilot for a couple of hours. But that's when you get to the question, If you dress up as a really horrible thing, what is the kids' perception of that?"

A single day spent surrounded by horror imagery probably won't have lasting impact on kids, Edwards says. But some children will be unsettled by dressing up in realistically gory costumes or by seeing classmates dressed that way.

What can be especially confusing for kids, according to Fangoria's Alexander, is that "parents, by and large, will say `no' to horror and say `no' to gore for kids all year long. But once a year they have no qualms about taking them to stores with body parts everywhere and animatronic dead things coming at them" to buy disturbing costumes.

Then, he says, without offering kids any way to put all of this disturbing imagery and play-acting into context, "as soon as Oct. 31 is over, horror is buried again."

From The National Retail Federation:

Of those buying or making costumes, the average person will spend $28.65 on costumes this year, up slightly from $26.52 in 2011.

"A record 170 million people plan to celebrate Halloween this year, according to NRF’s 2012 Halloween consumer spending survey conducted by BIGinsight. Seven in 10 Americans (71.5%) will get into the haunting Halloween mood, up from 68.6 percent last year and the most in NRF’s 10-year survey history. Consumers are expecting to spend more too; the average person will spend $79.82 on decorations, costumes and candy, up from $72.31 last year, with total Halloween spending expected to reach $8.0 billion.

“By the time Halloween rolls around each year it’s safe to say Americans have already spent two months preparing for one of the fastest-growing and most widely-loved holidays of the year,” said NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay. “Retailers know that when it comes to Halloween, new costume ideas for children, adults and pets, and the latest in home and yard décor top people’s shopping lists. We expect retailers to stock their shelves well ahead of time to capture the attention of eager holiday shoppers.” 

When it comes to looking for Halloween costume ideas, consumers say their biggest source of inspiration is what they see in a retail store or costume shop.

• More than one-third (35.7 percent) will look for new ideas in a store.

• Nearly one-quarter (23.7%) will turn to their friends and family.

• Social media will also play a role in choosing costumes: 15.2 percent will check out Facebook for inspiration and 7.1 percent will scour the visually-appealing Pinterest.

• Online searches will also be popular with celebrants: 33.3 percent say they will get their inspiration online.