Too Sexy to Be Scary and Too Scared to Look Silly
FashionFashion30 October 2026
AuthorYasmin Fraser
Photos@forhervanity Pinterest
It’s Halloween, since when has Halloween become scandalous over terrifying?
A
s quoted by Cady Heron in Mean Girls (2003), “In girl world, Halloween is the one night a year where a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.”, the iconic scene where Cady shows up to a Halloween party in a creepy Zombie ex-wife outfit whilst everyone else is in scandalous bodysuits and fishnets. The art of dressing up in masks and covered in blood has now turned into sexualised attires.
Halloween dates back to the time where there was a belief that there were boundaries between the living and the dead, and humans and gods, where the “supernatural thrived” during the ancient Celtic time and the festival of Samhain. Costumes have always emerged as a Halloween staple: a time where once dressing up involved scaring away evil spirits, has now shifted into an excuse to dress up and impress people with their appearance and to utilise costumes to provide confidence within ourselves.
Some may say dressing proactively reinforces female empowerment whilst others consider the execution to be harmful and may give the wrong impression. The sexy costume seems to just appeal more to women than men but hey, men can be sexy too!
Many traditional costumes are not as scary and are more trying to fulfil an unspoken rule about becoming sexier. The unspoken rule has come about because of heavy pressures on girls to appear a certain way to gain beauty and social acceptance by society, although I believe that a person can dress however they may wish to. Costumes are an expression of oneself; an articulation of creativity and fun and Halloween is the one occasion where the creative imagination of a person’s mind can fully be free to experiment out of the ordinary.
I now believe that social media plays such an influential aspect of our lives in modern day where we thrive off validation from our likes and comments. Halloween was once a time where people would experiment and explore ways of dressing out of the ordinary whereas now, many women in order to be interesting or desirable, must still dress a certain way. As shown in Mean Girls, Halloween is the one day where many girls can appear in a sexualised way without anybody saying anything about it.
Dressing frighting for Halloween has become more of a questionable choice now: where costumes are about dressing up as movie characters, superheroes, popstars or memes: we see you Superman and Wonder Woman! Many mass markets of commercialised costumes make more money selling these licensed characters as opposed to traditional ghosts and monsters.
Children’s costumes are becoming less terrifying, to define what is real and make believe. As a child, I used to dress up as a scary little witch and many others dressed as werewolves and vampires. However, there may be a certain inclination for teenagers and young adults to dress in a more desirable way to not appear ‘childish’. For many adults, they’re afraid of embarrassing themselves by dressing ‘silly’, with the evolution of social media having provided many to feel more bothered about their appearance.
Has Halloween now become a time where we care more about looking a certain way as opposed to the fear of it all? Society has provided us all with the ideology that we have to look enticing. I love Halloween but has it become another excuse for the pressure of the male gaze to be set upon women, even if not intentionally. I believe it’s now becoming apart of looking ‘perfect’ and seeking validation.
Can we still be sexy and scary at the same time? Yes, a scary character being vampires are sometimes seen as a very sexual yet terrifying fictional character, for example Katherine Pierce from the Vampire Diaries (2009).
Therefore, I think we should wear whatever we like, despite the pressure and social standards and express our individuality through our costumes.
