Hollywood’s Dark Girls Own Halloween: We Love Dressing Up as Women Who Would Ruin Our Lives

Dark Girls Own Halloween: Halloween becomes the time when the women who are emotionally unavailable, vaguely threatening, and dressed in an obscure way become the women we choose to spend the next three weeks looking like, with the exact shade of lipstick, too.

Yes, dark girls own Halloween! Wednesday Addams, Harley Quinn, Lydia Deetz… the list goes on. These are not the women you might introduce to your parents and expect a pass to go out with. Honestly, Wednesday might probably stare at your parents until they regret asking her anything at all; or Lydia might probably have decided that your house is haunted and that she likes the ghosts more than the people living in it. It is vividly odd!

However, every October, these women become some of Hollywood’s most recognisable Halloween choices: their dresses, eye makeup, lipstick shade, hairstyle, and the deliberately chaotic styling find their way into costume parties, Instagram pictures, Pinterest boards and shopping searches. We somehow like our fictional women a little difficult, especially when we ourselves get to decide how difficult they get to be.

Dark Girls Own Halloween: The Female Characters We Want to Be 

Halloween somehow manages to “allow” women to perform femininity in a very different way, accepting a very different demeanour. Wednesday is reserved and cutting; Harley is colourful and chaotic while Lydia is awkward, gloomy and outside the mainstream. They do not share a single personality, and not even the same aesthetic. Nevertheless, they manage to offer alternatives to the same expectation of the female character being charming.

They can be rude, selfish, emotionally distant, “too much”, strange, angry, uninterested in a way that makes others uncomfortable. The characters remain compelling enough for the audiences to recreate their looks even years after they first appeared. There is also a practical side attached, of course: these costumes are recognisable, picture well; someone can wear a simple black dress and two braids for a Wednesday look; someone can have colourful makeup for a Harley look while wearing two pigtails. The costumes are accessible and the attitude gives that extra accessory.

Perhaps that is why the appeal of these characters becomes a little more complicated. We can admire a fictional woman for refusing to be pleasant without necessarily wanting to deal with the refusal in real life!  We can celebrate Harley’s independence while acknowledging the damage in her story; we can love Wednesday being unapologetic while recognising that being deliberately cruel to people is not a good script in real life.

Fiction gives us the distance to enjoy the performance without really having to live it with the real-life consequences. The distance is useful as it helps one explore an aesthetic, attitude, or a version of ourselves that might not translate neatly into everyday life.

The Characters We Dress Up Like

Wednesday Addams has become Halloween’s unannounced ambassador at this point. Her black dress, white collar, braided hair on two sides and the expressions that suggest she has been forced to attend a party against her will become recognisable. Jenna Ortega’s Netflix character gave a fresh pop-culture moment, but Wednesday has been here all along with the same “personality type”. The costume perhaps works because it does not require a lot of elaboration or explanation. You could spend the evening being all by yourself, barely speaking and still be considered committed to the character.

The appeal of Wednesday also goes beyond just the wardrobe, as she is a girl who does not seem interested in making herself pleasant. She is unapologetically blunt, occasionally cruel and fully uninterested in pretending to enjoy it, and that can be the selling point, perhaps.

Harley Quinn’s appearance changes depending upon the version, thus making her a very playful character with colourful hair, dramatic makeup, playful accessories and her “statement outfit”. She is one of those whose costumes have become almost as recognisable as herself. The red-and-black look, the colourful styling, the pigtails and the dramatic makeup offer choices to dress as Harley without losing the reference itself.

Harley is messy, impulsive, manipulative, and her journey of separating herself from the Joker has become an important part of her identity. She is not simply a woman who behaves badly because that is different! Her appeal is not that terrible things are secretly admirable, but that she is allowed to be complicated, excessive and even unpleasant without the story requiring her to become a “respectable woman”.

Halloween lets people borrow that energy for the evening: you get to be loud without explanations, dramatic without apologising, and even ridiculous without making it your whole personality. Their costumes might not be realistic everyday fashion, but Halloween is precisely where the kind of exaggeration works.

Halloween And Real Life Are Different

The other reason that the dark Hollywood characters remain so appealing even when it is not October is that they have a memorable silhouette, distinctive personality and stories that refuse to sit in the boxes female characters are most often placed in. 

Every Halloween, we wait to become the girl with the braids, the woman with red lips, the one with smudged eyeliner and the one who looks like she has unresolved issues. We borrow their wardrobes, practice their expressions and post the pictures. The costumes then get packed and go back into the wardrobes, makeup is removed, and the women who spent celebrating the characters return to the world they choose to live in.

Perhaps Hollywood’s dark girls own Halloween because they offer us something we can enjoy without having to negotiate with it. We can love their certain aspects without committing to accept everything about them, and the real test is perhaps to deliberate on which qualities of them we carry into our real lives while still being a good human, or do we abandon them completely?

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