It’s time to start brainstorming some ideas for the perfect Halloween costume, and believe us when we say nothing screams scary like The Purge. Ever since the chilling horror film series burst onto the scene in 2013, the pop culture phenomenon has become a Halloween staple year in and year out.
In case you missed the initial hype, the Purge films and television series all revolve around one day every year when, in a 12-hour period, all crime (including murder and wearing white after Labor Day) is legal in a dystopian America. The horror franchise is a huge success both critically and financially and is an easy, affordable, and creative subject for many Halloween costumes.
For the past few years, Halloween-goers young and old have used the Purge franchise and its iconic, creepy, Instagram-worthy masks as their spooky-season inspiration. In a 2018 interview with the Motion Picture Association, “The First Purge” costume designer Amela Baksic dished on where the franchise’s masks come from and the secret to making a perfect Purge mask. “Gerard McMurray, our director, and Sebastien Lemercier, our producer, pointed me in the direction of Cajun Mardi Gras, which has a number of very unusual and inventive masks,” she explained. “I also looked at Haitian carnival masks, which incorporate bull imagery, and have inspired the bull mask used in the Purge party, featured on a lot of posters . . . The key to creating a successful Purge mask, is [a] certain simplicity and DIY quality—not looking too finished or overly designed.”
Get inspired and DIY these terrifying Purge costume ideas ahead.
— Additional reporting by Lauren Harano