Pretend you have a bad fever and you’ve taken too much cold medicine. You put on a werewolf costume just as the dextromethorphan starts to make the room’s colours fluoresce and walls drip, and then you look at yourself in a mirror. You see the Snarling Werewolf staring back at you.
This half-body werewolf costume was sculpted by Mario Chiodo for BuyCostumes.com as part of their Nightmare Collection. It was almost too trippy for me to post. Its exaggerated, almost reptilian features certainly don’t match my personal werewolf template. It has horns. Horns on a werewolf. At first I scoffed, just as you are likely scoffing – but hang on, my judgemental friend. Learn a lesson with me.
My dismissal undermined the fact that just eight months ago I gave a 45-minute presentation at Howl Con on the subject of “the canonical werewolf”. My thesis: there’s actually no such thing as a “proper” werewolf because they’re not actually real, so they can look however, and that fact is actually extremely fun and cool. Sure, I wouldn’t personally put horns on a werewolf. But I wouldn’t put black olives on a pizza, either. Maybe you’d do one of those things, or even both, and I’m cool with that. It’s a big world!
All of Chiodo’s designs for the Nightmare Collection have a hallucinatory Jim Henson / evil Muppet thing going on. As a child of the 1980s, I can testify that this aesthetic is 100% effective in inducing nightmares in small children, and that, of course, is 90% of any costume’s purpose. Ember The Red Dragon looks like it’s right out of The Dark Crystal, and full disclosure – if I see you on the street in this giant spider costume I am going to hit you with my car. Spiders are problematic.
Whether or not you’d deface a pizza with bitter black trashfruit or put equine ears and a crocodile grin on a werewolf, we can all agree that this Snarling Werewolf is a distinctive and expertly-sculpted vision. It’s available exclusively at BuyCostumes.com for $399 USD, which is much cheaper than a visit to the hospital for taking too much Dimetapp.