As a kid, Halloween is the best thing ever. Free sweets, awesome costumes, carving pumpkins- children everywhere look forward to it, and it tends to linger in fond memories for most of us. The memories of lost childhood wonder with the odd spike of terror, however, are absolutely nothing in comparison to a student Halloween. It's well-known that an average university student will do pretty much anything for an excuse to get drunk (me included- I remember very faintly drinking an obscene amount of green 'something' last St. Paddy's day) and Halloween is no exception. Except this is no ordinary night out. This one includes rivers of fake blood, make-up so thick you have to peel it off by the end of the night, and it usually ends with a pillowcase covered in black hair dye and oddly glittering smudges of green and orange, and sprinklings of sugar.
Despite the mayhem it nearly always causes, I do love Halloween- mostly because every year I get very into the costume side of it all. Over the years I've been Gogo Yubari (Kill Bill), the Mad Hatter, Jack Sparrow, as well as the usual last-minute costume choice of witch, ghost or vampire. My costumes have been getting slowly weirder (if I had a picture of the painted-cardboard-box Optimus Prime monstrosity from a couple of years ago I'd probably burn it) and this year was no exception..
I'm not entirely sure what I was supposed to be. The Mad Hatter? The Cheshire Cat? Even I don't know. I think I just wanted to draw all over my face for a night and get away with it. Halloween make-up was my responsibility on Thursday, and I was quite impressed with my two zombies, faces ripped open and blood gushing with the help of a little cheap liquid latex and a £4 eye-shadow set I panic-bought in Superdrug that day.
The most scary part of the night, however (apart from the moment I got home and caught sight of myself in the mirror), was an unexpected one- the bus. I made the (horrible) decision of jumping on the Oxford road bus around midnight and it felt like I'd fallen into The Nightmare Before Christmas, if instead of disturbing animations, you were surrounded by creepy contact lenses staring into space, and far too many twenty-something boys trying to drown out each others' football chants. My friend, for lack of a seat, perched on the lap of the grim reaper while drunkenly asking a mad scientist with blood in his beard questions, while I watched Shaun of the Dead awkwardly chat up a dead nurse in front of me. This was nothing in comparison to the beer bottle nodding off against a window, Mario and Luigi trying to balance on the stairs, and a group of freshers in a glowing crowd of neon fishnet.
I'd walked into a horror film, and walking out of it was even harder- with what felt like two hundred people in my way, the most embarrassing stagger down the stairs and out of the door took place with the encouraging chanting of 'get off the bus' in the background. Manchester buses are always so charming- at least this meant the football chants were over! Eventually I made my way home, ready to collapse on my bed and put all the make-up and blood away for another 364 days. Of course this was the point I caught myself in the mirror and jumped out of my skin.
Bloody Halloween!
The Nightmare before Christmas © Henry Selik and Tim Burton
