How internet memes took over Halloween: Inside the holiday’s latest costume evolution

In October 2008, a group of bloggers, vloggers and internet enthusiasts met at Fontana’s, a now-shuttered bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “Dress up as your favorite meme or viral video star,” read the (electronic) invitation to the event, sponsored by archive site Know Your Meme and Urlesque, an internet culture site that shut down in 2011.

“HallowMEME,” as it was known, only lasted as an annual tradition until the early 2010s, but the change it signaled, or helped foster, not only remains with us — it’s more powerful than ever.

After all, a specific meme-centric event seems unnecessary when internet-inspired costumes have become the norm. This year, according to Google “Frietgeist” — a spooky-themed site that tracks the most popular costume ideas — viral Australian Olympic breakdancer Raygun is the second-most searched costume in America. TikTok is also awash with explainers on how to dress up as Moo Deng, the Thai pygmy hippo that, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, is the one of the internet’s current obsessions. (Online marketplace Etsy even has a landing page dedicated to hippo-inspired looks.) Other costumes one might expect to see include the Oompa Loompa and the mysterious “Unknown” from Glasgow’s disastrous “Willy Wonka Experience,” which went viral when it ended up resembling Fyre Festival, and perhaps a context-heavy coconut falling out of Kamala Harris’ tree or JD Vance’s beloved couch.

Halloween is now a digital-first holiday. Even if you’re not dressing up yourself this year, you’re probably consuming the #content of those who are. There has been a noticeable move away from spooky or even Hollywood-inspired costumes toward meme-inspired looks. These internet-savvy costumes reflect a desire for attention, as well as to show the world that we’re “in” on the joke, and make clear that both social media and Halloween are more culturally relevant than ever.

I grew up in Scotland — a country that can reasonably claim to have invented “Hallowe’en,” and as a child I remember adults complaining about a gradual move away from handmade horror-themed costumes towards mass-produced pop culture costumes, which was blamed on the “Americanization” of the holiday. Lisa Morton, author of “Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween,” says this shift had been underway for well over half a century before internet memes entered the fray. It was during the 1950s that costuming became a major retail business in the U.S., for instance, as costume companies like Collegeville and Ben Cooper bought the licensing rights to film and television characters from Superman to Donald Duck. (At the time, she adds, “only around half” of costumes were “spooky-oriented.”)

Then, in the 1970s, according to Morton, the queer community played a significant role in making Halloween a celebration for adults, too: “Before that, Halloween was almost exclusively for kids. Then counterculture groups, such as LGBTQ+ people, came along and said: ‘No, this can be an adult holiday — and we’re claiming it.’ ”

By the turn of the millennium, “sexy” Halloween costumes had become a cultural norm for women in particular. “About ten to fifteen years ago, something like 90 percent of the retail market for women’s costumes were ‘sexy,’” Morton says. “If you were a woman who didn’t want to dress that way, you were kind of out of luck.” Popular culture regularly reflects these trends back to us. In the first ‘Sex and the City’ movie, released in 2008, Cynthia Nixon’s Miranda Hobbes exasperatedly acknowledges the trend: “That’s it?!” she says, aghast as the costume options in a store. “The only two choices for women, witch and sexy kitten.” And in 2004’s “Mean Girls,” Tina Fey’s foundational text about the Millennial experience, home-schooler Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) serves zombie bride at a party where her new friends, “the Plastics,” are dressed as a bunny rabbit, Catwoman and a “sexy” mouse. “In girl world,” she narrates, “Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.”

The rise of the meme costume might be seen as an outgrowth of the trends that prevailed before it, except today the primary aspiration is attention.

“Attention is the most powerful currency in today’s world,” says journalist Taylor Lorenz, author of “Extremely Online” and founder of the new tech and online culture publication User Magazine. “And Halloween is an opportunity to garner as much of that as possible.” In 2010, the first VidCon — a convention of influencers, fans, and online brands — was held in Los Angeles. Lorenz says this was “the beginnings of people wanting to bring online culture into real-life spaces,” which, not coincidentally, was around the same time that subcultures became much more influential online. “We started to see a fracturing with the internet,” she says, “where Halloween costumes started referencing online subcultures, and specific internet moments.”

Influencers and celebrities have been central to Halloween becoming more of a digital spectacle, and also more meme-centric. The Kardashians, for example, take Halloween very seriously and stage editorial-style photoshoots each year in elaborate costumes. Last year, things got very “meta” when Kourtney Kardashian dressed as her sister, Kim Kardashian, in the floral gown she wore to her very first Met Gala in 2013. (The dress spawned countless memes, including comparisons to “Mrs. Doubtfire”). Kim says these jokes brought her to tears at the time, but Kourtney’s costume confirmed its power as an instantly recognizable image.

Lorenz thinks that influencers have embraced Halloween, in part, because fall is a time of heavy consumer spending. “Fall content performs really well, kids are going back to school, and internet usage that has fallen in the summer rises again in the fall,” she says. “Halloween is right in the middle of the biggest money-making time for influencers, so a viral costume is a great way to get attention on your content.”

Halloween is becoming digital-first among “normies,” too. I first noticed this around 2016, when Donald Trump was a surprisingly popular costume choice. Trump symbolized the convergence of politics, entertainment and internet power — a spectacle that produced an endless stream of memes. (That year, my roommates and I dressed as a zookeeper, a baby and a gorilla, as a tribute to Harambe, —the silverback who was shot dead in Cincinnati Zoo and somehow became an internet sensation.) Last year, TikTok put out a press release instructing users how to maximize their Halloween experience on the app. And despite the fact that in-person customs, such as trick-or-treating, have been steadily declining in the U.S., Morton tells me that the post-COVID-19 years have been some of the biggest ever for consumer spending. Costume companies once dictated what people wore, but now that social media is creating its own characters and jokes, they are playing catch-up.

“E-commerce sites have such fast production timelines now, which they can use to turn around meme costumes,” Lorenz says. Companies like Spirit Halloween — which went viral in 2022 when social media users jokingly suggested their own hyper-specific costume ideas — can “respond to pop culture references much more quickly.”

The rise of meme costumes can also be seen as a desire for relevance, says Anastasia Denisova, author of “Internet Memes and Society” and senior lecturer at the University of Westminster, giving “a sense of camaraderie and exclusivity” to those who unite around them. Whether you’re posting online or incorporating memes into a Halloween costume, such references confirm you’re “in” on the joke.

This is particularly pronounced in the LGBTQ+ community, which has been influential in shaping both modern Halloween and present-day meme culture. Last year, my feed was flooded with the “I hate gay Halloween parties,” meme, which poked fun at the trend toward hyper-specific queer costumes and the love of obscure references. If costumes can “define the community that you are a part of,” as Morton says, what is more aspirational in today’s world than being part of a group who are more in-the-know than everyone else? That also may explain why the memes that inspire costumes keep getting more niche: As soon as everyone gets a joke, it’s time to look for a new one.

Of course, there is also anxiety that comes with the drive to find the ultimate meme-inspired costume. While Morton and Lorenz both point to Halloween as a “safe zone” for exploring what scares us, or to test the limits of good taste, the same internet that provides the memes can also be highly unforgiving about their deployment. “Memes have been known to ruin people’s reputations. Anyone can grab a picture, add a caption, post online and things can spiral out of control quickly,” Denisova says. “[Memes] are ironic and often sarcastic, which can sometimes make them mean, inappropriate or offensive.”

Still, the ubiquity of social media is only one part of the explanation for the power, and perils, of the meme-inspired costume. It wouldn’t have been possible if the centuries-old tradition weren’t already so adaptable.

“We are definitely seeing a huge shift happening with social media,” Morton says. “Halloween is unrecognizable compared to even 50 years ago. It just keeps morphing and changing its identity.”