How-To Halloween: Homemade Zombie Costume

Halloween can be an expensive time of year, especially when it comes to costumes. Store-bought costumes can leave you out of pocket for quite a large amount, particularly costumes designed for adults. If you’re looking for a cheaper alternative to the store-bought costumes, creating your own is perfect. Not only can it often save you money, but you can have a lot of fun in the process!

One of the most simple and impressive-looking homemade costumes is the traditional zombie costume. Made using a few spare pieces from around your house and a minimal amount of bought supplies, creating your own zombie look can be extremely easy to do!

You Will Need:

• Old clothes
• Scissors
• Fake blood
• Large paintbrush
• Newspaper
• Lighter (optional)
• Mud (optional)

Method:

1. Firstly, choose your base clothing. As you’ll be destroying the clothes, it is best to either choose old clothing or clothes bought from a charity shop. Zombies are everyday people, so you can choose anything you want – a dress, a skirt, jeans, a shirt, old school uniform… the possibilities are endless! Set these out on a bed of newspaper as things are going to get messy.
2. Next, take your scissors and make a few very small cuts in the material. Zombies struggle to move well and constantly cut themselves and catch their clothes, so try to strategically place these cuts on the arms / legs of your clothing. Once you have made these small cuts, get your hands in there and start tearing! This will fray the material and create a more natural look than the straight cuts that simply using scissors would create. You can also do this with the hems of shirts and skirts.
3. At this stage, you can also use a lighter to create singe marks in the material. For this, ensure that you have water nearby and be very careful. Hold the lighter as far away as possible, but still have the flame touching the material. Leave it for a few seconds, and then place the burned area straight into some water to cool it down. This works best on white items of clothing.
4. Once you are happy with the cuts and any singe marks you have created, start on the fake blood. Taking your large paintbrush, load it up with a fake blood of your choice. Apply this firstly to the neck of your shirt – think about where blood would drip if you were to eat a person! A good pattern to follow for this is to create a ‘V’ shape starting from halfway across your collarbones on the shirt. Don’t worry about this being perfect or tidy -- the messier, the better! After this is done, take the paintbrush, load it up with some fresh fake blood and flick it at the shirt. This will create a ‘blood spatter’ pattern.
5. At this stage, you may want to think about what your zombie has been doing. Zombies virtually never have a chance to shower so you’ll want to look muddy, and your clothes will too! The easiest way to do this is to either rub mud into certain areas of the clothing, or to just put everything on and roll around in some mud. This will cake the mud to certain areas of the shirt and although it looks strange when you’re creating the costume, is a quick and effective way of making your clothes look grimy.
6. For your shoes, stamp around in some mud to make them look grimy. If you can, add some tears to these as well. Using canvas shoes such as Converse can be particularly effective, as old Converse shoes can be easily torn.
7. Add any finishing touches that you want – if you have the cash, white or red coloured contacts can be a brilliant addition – and get your face ready. A simple pale or greyish face can suffice, or if you want to go all out, you can create a full face of zombie makeup. Throw some fake blood on your face, perfect your best gormless face and go out and eat some brains!

Tips

• Don’t forget about your hair! If you can, go without washing your hair on the day you choose to wear your costume. Roughly backcombing your hair can also add to your costume, as it gives your hair a crazed, non-brushed look.
• You may want to add some fake blood around the tears in the material of your costume. This will appear as if your zombie character has cut themselves and torn their clothes by catching on something painful.
• Don’t restrict fake blood to just your face! Add some under your nails, on your hands and even in the bare skin areas of your costume. A mix of fake blood and mud under your nails will make your zombie character look as if they have been digging around for victims.
• Don’t forget that any exposed areas of skin will have to be paled to create that unhealthy, ill look. This can be done easily by applying liberal amounts of talcum powder to your skin. This affects your natural skin colour, but does not look as if you’ve just painted yourself white.

Special thanks to losing control. and Audrey T for editing!