Prepare yourself this Halloween for a procession of pint-sized trick-or-treaters like none you've encountered before. If the companies that gamble on offering the right mix of costumes are correct, visitors to your doorstep will include a grisly array of waist-high killer clowns brandishing blood-soaked machetes, deranged convicts and zombie ninjas armed with knives.
Add to that the full roster of fictional killers who gave people nightmares during the '80s and '90s - Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th and Chucky, the murderous doll from Child's Play - now available in sizes that can fit a five-year-old.
These costumes make last year's popular Scream mask filled with fake blood seem almost tame.
Earlier this month, Amber Boettcher brought her six-year-old daughter Addi to a Halloween store near their home in south-eastern Minnesota. They were looking for pompoms to add to Addi's homemade costume. But their shopping trip ended abruptly when Addi saw the array of gory outfits on sale for kids.
"She freaked out," Boettcher says. "The store was so gross and scary that we left."
Gory Halloween costumes aren't new, of course. And Halloween decorations have gotten just as intense: Spirit Halloween offers a disturbingly realistic mechanical version of the possessed girl from The Exorcist for your front lawn, and Paper-Mart offers plastic severed hands splattered with fake blood packaged as though they've been wrapped at a butcher shop, perfect for decorating the buffet table at a Halloween party.
But in a year when Abraham Lincoln was depicted as a vampire hunter and zombies are everywhere, gory costumes that were once reserved for preteens and teens are now available in ever-smaller sizes.
Party City's Boy Skinned Alive costume will fit "most children over four," the national chain's website states. Even costumes that were once benign now have violent twists: The sweet, simple sock monkey is now a bloody zombie sock monkey with razor-sharp teeth, sold in sizes small enough for kindergartners.
"For the last couple of years, darker is where it's been at," says Melissa Sprich, vice-president of Halloween merchandising for Party City. For babies and toddlers, Sprich says "darker" may mean dressing as a devil rather than a cheerful dinosaur. But for other ages, many parents are seeking vampires, zombies and "the Freddies, Jasons and Chuckys" even for kids too young to see those characters on screen.
The companies that license these characters' images determine how small the costumes can run, with some drawing the line for horror characters at sizes six to eight or 10 to 12. But while "six to eight" technically refers to ages six to eight, many boys wear that size at age five.
David J. Skal, who has chronicled America's fascination with horror since the 1990s in numerous books, including The Monster Show, says he's surprised at the level of "monster-ization of children" this year.
He points out that for centuries, frightening masks and "scary stories have been used to pass on a kind of coming-of-age message to children that the world is not always a safe ... place."
Researching his history of Halloween, Skal spoke with people who grew up during the Great Depression, and remembered dressing up as what they called "hobos and bums." At that time, "people were very concerned that the whole social fabric was coming apart. The idea of the rise of the unwashed masses kind of has a parallel with our fascination with zombies," he says.
Chris Alexander, editor-in-chief of the long-running horror magazine Fangoria, says in the 1930s, characters we now see as relatively harmless like Frankenstein's monster or Count Dracula were unsettling moviegoers just like Chucky or Michael Myers.
But, Alexander points out, those characters were effectively defanged through decades of adaptation before they became dress-up fodder for preschoolers. Frankenstein's monster morphed into bumbling Herman Munster and Dracula eventually translated into Count von Count on Sesame Street. Even Alexander, who edits a horror magazine and makes low-budget horror films, says the current crop of costumes is too gory for him to consider buying for his own five-year-old.
"My office is a nightmare come to life," he says, "but I would never dress my child up as Freddy Krueger or Jason. ... I'm quite shocked when I see it."
Party City's Sprich notes that the popularity of retro horror characters like Chucky is part of a larger wave of nostalgia for the era when today's parents were kids. The Ghostbusters and video game characters Mario and Luigi are also hot right now.
Today's parents are revelling in that nostalgia, and their children are likely to feel empowered when older kids and adults are shocked or impressed by the edginess of their costumes, says Cynthia Edwards, professor of child psychology at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina.
"Part of the thrill of Halloween for little kids is that you put on a costume and you become the thing. If you dress up as a fairy princess or a pilot, you are a fairy princess or a pilot for a couple of hours. But that's when you get to the question, if you dress up as a really horrible thing, what is the kids' perception of that?"
A single day spent surrounded by horror imagery probably won't have lasting impact on kids, Edwards says. But some children will be unsettled by dressing up in realistically gory costumes or by seeing classmates dressed that way.
What can be especially confusing for kids, according to Fangoria's Alexander, is that "parents, by and large, will say 'no' to horror and say 'no' to gore for kids all year long. But once a year they have no qualms about taking them to stores with body parts everywhere and animatronic dead things coming at them" to buy disturbing costumes.
Then, he says, without offering kids any way to put all of this disturbing imagery and play-acting into context, "as soon as Oct. 31 is over, horror is buried again."
