If you read Tuesday's post, it's clear that I have a fondness for really old Halloween costumes. These are the costumes that existed before the mass produced vinyl bib and plastic masks with the rubberbands that proliferated in the 1950s-1970s from companies such as ben Cooper and Collegeville.
Halloween costumes from the 1920s - 1940s had a look about them that was almost like some weird tribal ceremonial costumes. The materials used as well as the crudeness of craftmanship lends these costumes a lot of power, and photographs of children wearing these costumes radiate an unsettling creepiness that almost erases the human element completely and lend the images a quality that truly seems to capture that mysterious fluid nature of Halloween where the realms of the living and the otherworldly have overlapped.
If, like me, you are drawn to images such as those shown in this post you should purchase Ossian Brown's book Haunted Air which collects dozens of images like these and presents them beautifully. Haunted Air is a photo album without labels which further lends the images strange air of mystery as if they are relics that slipped into our world from somewhere else and have been meticulously collected over time. Bookended by an introduction by David Lynch and an afterward by Geoff Cox, Haunted Air should be part of the collection of anyone passionate about Halloween and its history.
The book is on my Christmas list ;)
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