An eight-foot tall 'Towering Terror,' a combination costume and decoration for Halloween found at McCulloch's for the holiday.
With the Halloween season in full swing, Londoners are out looking to find the perfect costume for trick-or-treating and spending time with friends. For this year, like many before it, the current hot item comes from the year’s biggest media sensation. What makes it different from most is that Squid Game —the breakout South Korean drama from Netflix— was a total unknown until it debuted in September.
For Rose McCulloch, co-owner of McCulloch’s Costume & Party Supplies, the show’s popularity right before the Halloween season has proved to be challenging to keep up with:
“Nobody in the industry was given a heads up that something was happening. I do my ordering in March, and we’ve already seen the trailers of the movies coming out that year. This year’s been different: we didn’t know.”
McCulloch has managed to secure orders of the show’s distinctive black masks in time for Halloween. She says preorders for the masks have already been coming in since they were made available, though she does expect to have some in stock when they arrive within the next few days —just in time for Halloween.
Just one of the dozens of displays inside McCulloch’s, filled with all manner of Halloween costumes.
While Squid Game’s breakout success does make it an outlier, the trend of the year’s hottest costume coming from pop culture has become so common that licensed costumes and masks make up as much stock in the store as classics like witches, zombies, ghosts, and ghouls.
“I can remember Batman being the first character we brought in: the black suit from the first Batman movie. Since then, it’s been growing: Marvel, D.C. Comics, you name it. Almost every single movie or cartoon.”
That doesn’t mean it isn’t possible to find those classic costumes anymore: walking through the aisles, there’s plenty of options for all of the classic monsters.
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