How to Create a Zombie Costume

Zombies have been favorite movie characters for many years, from the 1968 cult classic "Night of the Living Dead" to "Zombie Strippers" some 40 years later. The great thing about being a zombie for Halloween, though, is that you don't have to imitate any particular movie character. You can be any type of zombie you want: zombie bride, zombie drag queen, zombie astronaut, zombie mail carrier, or you can just go as your everyday self, zombified. Zombie costumes can be as simple or as complicated as you like to make them.

Difficulty:

Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Ripped, shredded clothing (or formal
• wear slit up the back)
• Fake blood
• White makeup
• Stage makeup for scars and wounds
• Accessory weapons

1. Figure out how you died. Zombies are, after all, the reanimated dead, so they had to have gotten that way somehow. The more dramatic a death you can imagine for yourself, the more horrific a zombie you'll be, so think shot, stabbed or strangled.

2. Put together an outfit to match your zombie character: bride's dress, suit, uniform, everyday clothes, or whatever you'd like to wear. Then mess it up. Rip the clothing along the way you imagine yourself to have been injured and killed. Perhaps you were the victim of a zombie attack, in which case you can shred parts of your clothing to simulate having been clawed. Perhaps you were already dead when you were reanimated as a zombie. In this case, you could dress in a funeral suit (or dress), slit up the back as this is how corpses are actually dressed for burial.

3. Add some fake blood to your outfit if you opt to have been zombified after having died in a messy, gory way and before having been cleaned up and sent to a funeral parlor. Drip the blood along the areas where you have ripped up your clothing. You can experiment with store bought fake blood, ketchup (for that freshly-killed, still-dripping look), or homemade blood made with dark corn syrup and red food coloring (you can find a number of recipes for this online).

4. Apply a thin layer of white cream makeup or white powder to your face to give you a corpse-like pallor. If you are really skilled with makeup, you can try to create some fake scars and wounds, too.

5. Add some accessories if desired. You can either use something to show how you died (a rope around your neck, knife in your back, etc.) or a weapon you can use in the never-ending zombies vs. humans battle.

Tips & Warnings

• Be careful with the fake weapons, especially guns. You don't want the police thinking you have a real one