Halloween Costume Tips From Scream’s Costume Designer

Avery Plewes has always loved Halloween. “Halloween was my favorite holiday as a kid,” she tells POPSUGAR. “Before I was a costume designer, I was so into it. I would go all out.” However, now that she’s designed costumes for some of the biggest horror movies in the business — including 2022’s “Scream 6” — she’s less inclined to dress up, given the fact that she spends the whole year crafting elaborate costumes for the screen.

That also means she has a huge amount of Halloween costume expertise to share with the rest of us. Plewes took a particularly deep dive into Halloween icons of yore while costuming “Scream 6,” which takes place during one long, bloody Halloween weekend in New York City. “I wanted to design as many costumes for the background as I could to make it feel as realistic as possible, and also to have the audience get lost in the Halloween of it all,” she says. In particular, Plewes had to go all out for a terrifying scene that takes place on the subway, where the real Ghostface blends in with countless costumed riders dressed as everyone from the Babadook to Julia Fox. “That scene was like my child,” she says, describing it as a moment of “crisis” for the characters.

“Fake blood always helps, in my opinion.”

While most of the costumes in legacy franchises like Scream have to be put together perfectly, Plewes had to make sure the subway riders’ costumes looked a little more haphazard. In movies, “when you’re reproducing a look, you always want it to be as accurate as possible,” she says. “But for this, I had to unlearn that because often with Halloween, it’s like, ‘Oh, I have a shirt that kind of looks like what Freddy Krueger would wear.'”

Fortunately, that means she has plenty of simple tips to offer the rest of us when it comes to putting together quick and easy tributes to our Halloween characters of choice, including the “Scream 6” characters themselves. If you’re planning on dressing up as a character from the movie other than Ghostface, Plewes suggests pairing that more ordinary look with a scary character from the subway scene for a unique couple’s costume.

When it comes to actually deciding on a costume, Plewes’s advice is to follow your heart. “I always think people have the most fun when they pick a costume from something that’s meaningful to them — and also comfortable,” she says. “I would always personally lean into either a franchise or a movie or something that I really enjoy, because putting the costume together will be more fun that way.”

Ahead, check out Plewes’s tips on how to dress as some of the many characters featured in “Scream 6″‘s subway scene.