Failed vampire hunter Halloween costume
Published by Manning on June 29th, 2015
This costume was really simple but it makes me laugh so I’m posting it!
The way I described my costume depended on who I was talking to. For nerds, I’d say I was “Manning Belmont, least talented of the Belmonts” (get the Castlevania reference?). To non-nerds I’d just say I was a failed vampire hunter.
Anyway, this was my last-minute costume for Halloween 2008. I came up with the concept for the shirt with bats and blood and remembered I’d recently trash-picked a nice plastic torso mannequin, which turned out to be really helpful for this. I put my white shirt on the mannequin and started painting/gluing. The blood is acrylic paint, applied with a brush, and then when the paint was dry I superglued the bats onto it. While painting I noticed pretty quickly that the paint was going through the shirt onto the mannequin, so I cleaned the paint off and added a layer of newspaper to protect it.
My vampire-hunting accessories include a few store-bought pieces: the cross necklace, whip, and plastic garlic; not even all that is enough when you’re going up against Dracula! A friend helped me make a couple wooden stakes out of wood from Home Depot with holes drilled through them so I could easily attach them to my belt with twine. I glued a bat to a barrette and attached it on the back of my head, and I attached another bat to my forehead with liquid latex. I also used some white creme makeup to make myself even paler than usual, and added some stage blood where the bats were biting my head/face. See my post about makeup, liquid latex, fake blood, etc.
This was one of the few years I didn’t opt for colored contact lenses, but fortunately this photo gave me red eyes! Perfect!
About Manning Krull
How to make a 4-foot paper maché alligator
My violin skull mask, Mardi Gras 2015
Three-headed paper maché dragon sculpture
Leave a comment