THE HALLOWEEN ARCHIVES
ARCHIVE No. 002 · COSTUMES & CUSTOMS
THE MASKS
The strange plastic faces that defined Halloween for a generation.
There was a time when becoming someone else for Halloween came in a cardboard box.
Inside was usually everything you needed.
A brightly printed costume.
A thin plastic face.
And an elastic string.
For children growing up in the 1960s, 1970s and into the 1980s, the ritual was familiar. You walked into a department store, five-and-dime or drugstore sometime in October and found stacks of costume boxes waiting for you.
Through the cellophane window, a face stared back.
Batman.
A witch.
Frankenstein.
A princess.
Spider-Man.
A clown.
Characters from television. Characters from movies. Monsters. Superheroes. Celebrities.
You picked one.
And on Halloween night, that face became yours.
Today, photographs of children wearing these masks can look genuinely unsettling. The frozen expressions. The tiny eyeholes. The painted smiles. The strange proportions of an adult character molded onto the face of a child.
But to the kids wearing them?
They were magic.
And for decades, they were simply Halloween.
I. HALLOWEEN IN A BOX
Commercial Halloween costumes existed well before the 1970s.
Collegeville Costume Company grew from a Pennsylvania flag manufacturer that began producing inexpensive costumes in the 1920s. Ben Cooper, Inc., founded in Brooklyn in 1937, would eventually become one of the largest Halloween costume manufacturers in America.
By the postwar decades, companies such as Ben Cooper and Collegeville had helped transform the Halloween costume from something frequently assembled at home into something that could be selected from a store shelf.
The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History describes Ben Cooper as one of the country's largest costume manufacturers for more than 50 years and notes that its Halloween costumes were sold through major retailers including Woolworth's.
The formula was wonderfully simple.
Take a character children already knew.
Turn the character's face into a lightweight molded mask.
Pair it with an inexpensive printed costume.
Put both inside a cardboard box.
Halloween was ready to go.
And television made the possibilities nearly endless.
Instead of simply becoming a ghost, witch or devil, children could become the characters occupying America's living rooms.
Superheroes.
Cartoon characters.
Movie monsters.
Television personalities.
By the 1970s, Halloween had become another place where popular culture could step off the screen and into everyday life.
Even if the transformation involved considerably more imagination than accuracy.
II. THE FACE IN THE WINDOW
The mask was the important part.
Before the box was ever opened, it was already looking at you.
Many of these masks were thin molded plastic, painted with a simplified version of a familiar face and held in place with a narrow elastic band.
There was something inherently strange about them.
Human faces move constantly.
Eyes blink.
Mouths change.
Expressions disappear almost as quickly as they form.
These faces did none of those things.
The smile stayed a smile.
The eyes remained permanently open.
The expression never changed.
Put one onto a child and something familiar became subtly wrong.
A smiling cartoon character standing underneath fluorescent store lights was harmless.
The same smiling face appearing at the end of a dark driveway on Halloween night was something else entirely.
Perhaps that is part of the reason photographs from this era can feel so eerie now.
The masks erased individuality.
A row of neighborhood children could suddenly become a collection of identical frozen faces staring toward the camera.
Nobody designing them necessarily intended that effect.
They were inexpensive children's costumes.
But time has a way of changing things.
What once looked playful can eventually look uncanny.
III. THE COSTUME UNDERNEATH
Then there was the rest of the costume.
Today, dressing as a superhero usually means attempting to resemble the superhero.
That wasn't always the objective.
Many mass-market costumes from this period featured a brightly printed smock or suit that essentially announced the character you were portraying.
A superhero costume might contain the superhero's own face printed across the chest.
Sometimes the character's name appeared prominently as well.
It was less:
This is exactly what the character wears.
And more:
In case there is any confusion, I am this character.
Accuracy wasn't really the point.
Recognition was.
These costumes were inexpensive, accessible and designed to turn a child into something extraordinary for one night.
The transformation didn't need to survive close inspection.
It only needed to survive Halloween.
IV. WHAT IT FELT LIKE BEHIND THE MASK
Memory has preserved another part of these costumes particularly well.
The discomfort.
The elastic strap could pull against your hair.
The mask could shift while you walked.
Breath and body heat could collect against the plastic.
Peripheral vision could be poor.
The eyeholes were not always generous.
And eventually, many children did what generations of trick-or-treaters would recognize immediately:
They pushed the mask onto the top of their head.
The transformation was temporarily over.
At least until the next front door.
This wasn't merely a modern complaint about an old product.
Government safety warnings from the period specifically addressed masks.
In 1975, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission warned that Halloween masks and disguises should not restrict a child's vision or breathing.
By 1978, the Commission was going even further, suggesting that face cosmetics could be safer than a loose-fitting mask that might obstruct a child's vision.
Which means that while children were roaming dark streets wearing molded plastic faces...
the federal government was effectively reminding parents:
Make sure they can actually see.
V. THEN THERE WAS FIRE
The masks weren't the only concern.
Halloween in the 1970s still involved a considerable amount of actual flame.
Candles burned inside jack-o'-lanterns.
Decorations surrounded doorways.
Children approached porch after porch wearing costumes made from lightweight materials.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission repeatedly advised parents during the decade to look for flame-retardant costumes, masks, beards and wigs and to avoid flimsy or billowing materials that could encounter an open flame.
The Commission also warned against placing candlelit pumpkins where passing costumes might brush against them.
The advice provides a revealing snapshot of Halloween at the time.
A child might be wearing a mask that limited visibility.
The costume needed to be visible to motorists.
The fabric needed to stay away from fire.
And the neighborhood was filled with glowing pumpkins containing actual candles.
Halloween was supposed to be frightening.
Some of the danger apparently came free with the costume.
VI. THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE BOXED COSTUME
None of this stopped children from loving them.
That may be the most important part of the story.
Adults looking back see cheap plastic.
Children saw transformation.
That cardboard box contained the possibility of becoming someone completely different for a few hours.
The Smithsonian preserves a Ben Cooper costume from around 1983 consisting of exactly the sort of pieces an entire generation remembers: a plastic mask, vinyl costume and cardboard box.
The character was B.A. Baracus from The A-Team.
That single object captures something larger than Halloween.
It captures an era when television, movies, merchandising and childhood collided inside one inexpensive cardboard package.
Whatever appeared on television that year could appear on the sidewalk that October.
Popular culture didn't merely influence Halloween.
For many children, it became Halloween.
VII. WHY THEY LOOK SCARIER NOW
Look at an old photograph of children wearing these masks today and something strange happens.
The image feels older than it is.
A photograph from 1977 can look as though it belongs to some forgotten ritual from much further in the past.
Part of that comes from the photography itself.
Flashbulbs flatten the scene.
Darkness swallows the background.
Film grain softens details.
Then there are the masks.
Perfectly still.
Perfectly artificial.
Smiling whether the child underneath was smiling or not.
Modern Halloween masks often strive for realism.
These didn't.
And somehow that makes them stranger.
The molded plastic face doesn't quite look human.
It doesn't quite look like the character either.
It occupies the uncomfortable space between the two.
A face pretending to be another face.
Perhaps that is why we can't stop looking at them.
VIII. THE COSTUME BOX DISAPPEARS
Halloween costumes changed.
Manufacturing improved.
Character costumes became more elaborate.
Masks became more comfortable and realistic.
Full outfits increasingly attempted to reproduce what characters actually wore.
The cardboard window box gradually disappeared from the Halloween aisle.
But for the generation that opened one of those boxes, certain sensations never completely left.
The crinkle of the costume.
The elastic snapping against the back of your head.
The smell of plastic.
The condensation inside the mask.
The moment your vision narrowed to two little holes...
and you stepped outside anyway.
Because it was Halloween.
And there was candy three houses down.
THEY WEREN'T TRYING TO TERRIFY US.
They were mass-produced children's costumes.
Bought beneath fluorescent lights.
Carried home in cardboard boxes.
A printed suit.
A plastic face.
An elastic string.
Nothing particularly sinister.
Until night fell.
Then front doors opened across America.
Porch lights flickered against the darkness.
And an entire neighborhood of children disappeared behind someone else's face.
For one night, nobody seemed to think that was strange.
Maybe that's what makes the photographs so haunting now.
Not the masks.
The fact that, once upon a time, they looked completely normal.
GRAVE & EMBER
For Those Who Never Outgrew October.
FILE CLOSED · 002