Many of this year’s most popular Halloween costumes make sense. One trend tracker’s list includes characters from Beetlejuice and Inside Out, thanks to the respective sequels that recently hit theaters. But at No. 2 sits a costume that’s not like the others: Raygun, the Australian dancer who went viral for her erratic moves during the Olympics earlier this year. Her costume—a green-and-yellow tracksuit—beat out pop-culture stalwarts such as Sabrina Carpenter, Minions, and Wolverine. Raygun is not a monster, or a book character, or any other traditional entertainment figure. She is, for all intents and purposes, a meme.
Halloween has been steadily succumbing to the chronically online for years now. As early as 2013, publications were noting memes’ slow creep into the Halloween-costume canon. A few years later, the undecided voter Ken Bone, who went viral during the October 2016 presidential debate for his distinctive name and midwestern demeanor, somehow went even more viral when the lingerie company Yandy made a “Sexy Undecided Voter” costume. Surely, it couldn’t get any weirder than that. Instead, meme costumes not only persist; they have become even more online. Today, participating in Halloween can feel like being in a competition you did not enter—one that prioritizes social-media attention over genuine, person-to-person interactions.
Costumes beyond classics such as witches or skeletons have long reflected pop culture; that the rise of meme culture would show up at Halloween, too, is understandable. But unlike traditional culture, which follows, say, the steady release of movies and TV shows, internet culture spirals in on itself. When we say meme in 2024, we’re not talking about a straightforward text graphic or even a person from a viral YouTube video. To understand a meme now, you must know the layers of context that came before it and the mechanisms of the platform it sprang from, the details of which not everyone is familiar with.
Meme enthusiasts, our modern-day hipsters, must dig through the bowels of the internet for their references to position themselves as savvy. It’s not enough to be Charli XCX anymore; you have to somehow embody “brat summer” instead. The meme costume is a reference to a reference to a reference—a singer in a Canadian funk band called My Son the Hurricane, for instance, but specifically from the viral video where she was teased (and then heralded) for her emphatic dancing; or the “me as a baby” puppet, a TikTok joke that spawned from people filming themselves to convince children that a video of a puppet named Tibúrcio was them as a baby. When seen in person, the costume-wearer will most likely need to offer a lengthy explanation for their pick. If, by the end, you do understand their costume, the effort probably wasn’t worth it, and if you still don’t, it’s somehow your fault that “Nicolas Cage and Pedro Pascal in the scene from The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent soundtracked by Cass Elliot’s ‘Make Your Own Kind of Music,’ but specifically in its context as a TikTok trend template” didn’t ring any bells in its real-life form (two guys standing in front of you at a party).
This is, perhaps unsurprisingly, terrible for in-person Halloween gatherings. As a rare monocultural touchstone, Halloween should be treasured for its offline traditions. Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa share custody of most of December; Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July have become, for some, political lightning rods. But a holiday for nothing other than dressing up and having fun (and eating candy) is October 31, every year, for everyone. In an era of declining socialization, the holiday gives Americans the opportunity for a shared physical place to be in and people to connect with, whether on doorsteps or at costume parties. For many, this can mean celebrating through children, whose simple and easily recognizable costumes embody the holiday in its purest playful iteration. Do it right, and adults, too, can have the pleasure of riding public transportation next to a grown man dressed as a bumblebee.
The meme invasion threatens the spirit of Halloween. In my experience, an interaction with these meme hipsters—a moment that should be one of immediate recognition and joy—becomes a lengthy, borderline-inscrutable conversation I had no idea I would be saddled with when I tried to make small talk. Instead of connecting, I feel alienated, and not just because I don’t understand. Within seconds of embarking on these conversations, it becomes clear the costumes aren’t intended for my—or any other partygoer’s—consumption. They’re for our phones.
That’s where the costume will be appreciated, and where people can reenact the video required for it to make sense. That’s where the wearer can debut the outfit to an online community that needs no explanation for “JoJo Siwa’s ‘Karma’ dance” or “the concept of ‘demure.’” I, a fellow partygoer, become relegated to the backdrop of a social-media post.
But living life phone-first is what got Americans in this lonely, third-placeless crisis to begin with. If our costumes aren’t for the other people in this room, then what are we all doing here? In what way are we bonding? We’re not just hanging out less but also allowing the pursuit of internet points to ruin the rare times we do.
And yet I, in my pumpkin costume or celebrity getup, am made out to be the problem. Those who dress up as more traditional, recognizable characters get categorized online as somehow cringe, while those whose costumes require descriptions that would kill a Victorian child claim dominance. There is, of course, always the option to just not care what the internet thinks, but that’s starting to feel as delusionally obstinate as refusing to give up a landline phone or pointedly saying “Merry Christmas” in response to “Happy Holidays.”
To give in and play Halloween by the internet’s rules results in an inevitably stressful few weeks of fall. I have to come up with a costume that’s the exact right combination of referential and recent, something that happened online in the past few months but not something that everyone else is going to be. My costume has to signal something about me, whatever inside joke I’m part of, without being a reflection of my actual interests—boring! Even if I get this right, it’ll all be to spend time at a party that’s more “Instagram set piece” than it is “Halloween get-together.” If I opt out, I risk facing a Millennial’s scariest costume of all: irrelevance.
Exorcising the internet from Halloween, though, could resurrect the holiday’s true spirit: a cultural potluck at which all, whether Marvel or monster, are welcome. This isn’t to say that you can’t go as a meme—who am I to deny the Rayguns of the world?—but it is to say that we can drop the one-upmanship that results in a Sisyphean race for online notoriety. Like the ghosts and ghouls that adorn front lawns, Halloween can be brought back to life.