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Halloween Costumes Only Gen X Will Understand
Forget witches and vampires. This year, dress as a broken Stretch Armstrong, an overstuffed Trapper Keeper or the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! Champion
9-minute read
For Gen X, the real horrors of Halloween are VHS late fees, embarrassing Olan Mills portraits and the possibility that your mother is listening in on the other phone.
Peter Arkle
The hottest Halloween costume trend of 2026 is apparently dressing like you never outgrew your childhood.
According to a new report from Promizi, a coupon and deals website, this year’s most popular costume ideas lean heavily toward recent nostalgia. Kids and adults alike are dressing like Mr. Potato Head, Buzz Lightyear and Doctor Doom. They’re all perfectly respectable choices, but if nostalgia is really the theme of 2026, we can do better — and go farther back. And that means somebody from Gen X probably should’ve been consulted.
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I’m not saying our nostalgia is better than your nostalgia. But we’ve got an entire childhood of questionable toys, outdated technology and dangerously inadequate parental supervision to draw from. Why dress like a beloved movie character when you could dress as the childhood experience that probably explains why you’re in therapy?
If you want a Halloween costume that costs next to nothing and makes your Gen X friends laugh before you’ve even explained it, we’ve got a few ideas. Your kids or grandkids might recognize what you’re supposed to be, but only someone who survived the 1970s or 1980s will understand why it’s funny.
1. The VHS Tape That Wasn’t Rewound
In the world before streaming, we had to go to Blockbuster to rent physical copies of movies we wanted to see. If they weren’t returned by the deadline, the late fees started adding up. And is it even worth explaining to our kids what “rewinding” was?
Make it yourself: Cut two large rectangles from cardboard and paint them black. Add two circular tape reels made from paper plates, a little black ribbon to represent the magnetic tape, and a handwritten label identifying you as a VHS copy of The Breakfast Club. Connect the cardboard pieces with straps so you can wear them over your shoulders, sandwich board style. The finishing touch is an oversized sticker reading “Be Kind, Rewind.”
2. The Pizza Hut BOOK IT! Champion
Back in the 1980s, Pizza Hut’s BOOK IT! program gave us a good reason to plow through another Sweet Valley High or a Stephen King novel. Finish enough books, and you could march into Pizza Hut with your reading certificate and order your very own Personal Pan Pizza for free. If your little brother wanted some, he could go read his own damn book.
Make it yourself: Wear your finest ’80s school clothes, preferably a striped polo shirt with a popped collar tucked into corduroys, and make an oversized BOOK IT! badge out of cardboard. Decorate it with gold stars to show off your reading prowess. Make a championship belt out of cardboard, with pictures of paperback books on the sides and an oversized personal pan pizza in the middle. Insist on celebrating your victory at a restaurant with red plastic cups and stained glass lamps.
3. The Substitute Teacher Rolling in a TV Cart
You knew it was gonna be a good day at school when a substitute teacher showed up pushing an enormous TV cart. Go ahead and put those textbooks away; nobody’s learning fractions today. Instead, you’d spend the next 50 minutes watching a documentary about how drugs can ruin your life. Half the class would fall asleep, and the other half would cheer when the substitute couldn’t figure out how to work the VCR.
Make it yourself: Start with a brown cardigan, sensible shoes, oversized glasses and a clipboard you never actually look at. For the cart, use a lightweight rolling trolley or repurpose a small wheeled suitcase, adding a cardboard shelf on top. Make a boxy television from cardboard, complete with rabbit-ear antennas, a fake VHS player and an enormous tangle of wires. Whenever you enter a room, announce, “Your regular teacher is out today, so we’re watching a movie.”
4. The Olan Mills Double Exposure Portrait
Remember when getting a family portrait meant dressing in your Sunday best, driving to the mall and letting a stranger arrange your head at an angle no human neck was designed to achieve? The resulting photographs were magnificent, especially the double exposures, where a second, ethereal version of your face floated above your shoulder. Were you smiling at the camera or gazing thoughtfully into the afterlife? Nobody knew. But your parents paid extra for that effect, and the portrait hung in the living room for the next 25 years.
Make it yourself: Start with a turtleneck or an aggressively patterned ’80s sweater, preferably in burgundy or teal. Cut a large picture frame from cardboard and paint it gold. Wear it around your shoulders, framing your face against a mottled blue or brown backdrop. Then print an oversized photo of your own head, preferably looking wistfully toward the heavens, and attach it above your shoulder using wire or a lightweight cardboard support.
5. The Trapper Keeper That Wouldn’t Stay Closed
Before backpacks had 17 compartments and kids stored their homework in the cloud, there was the Trapper Keeper. It had everything a Gen X student could want: a wildly colorful cover, pockets for all your important papers and a Velcro flap that announced to the entire classroom whenever you opened it. Unfortunately, by October, yours was so overstuffed with crumpled homework and forgotten permission slips that closing it required the upper body strength of a professional wrestler.
Make it yourself: Grab two large pieces of cardboard and decorate them with bright ’80s geometric designs, neon lightning bolts or a majestic unicorn galloping through outer space. Connect them with shoulder straps so they hang over your front and back, leaving one side open like an enormous binder. Stuff the opening with loose papers, pencils, old homework assignments and at least one permission slip your parents were supposed to sign three weeks ago. Every time you bend over, let a few papers fall out. Don’t pick them up. That’s tomorrow’s problem.
6. The Phone Cord Stretched Into the Next Room
Before cellphones, the only way to have a private conversation was to stretch the family phone cord as far as it would go. You’d drag the receiver out of the kitchen, down the hallway, around a corner and into a closet, where you could finally talk to your boyfriend without your little brother making kissing noises. The cord was usually so tangled that it had knots in places you couldn’t explain. And just when the conversation got interesting, your mother would pick up the extension in her bedroom. “Who are you talking to?” MOM! HANG UP!
Make it yourself: Find an old beige telephone handset at a thrift store, or make one from cardboard and a paper towel tube. Attach a long, coiled telephone cord, or use lightweight, flexible tubing to make your own. The longer and more tangled, the better. Wear your favorite ’80s clothes and spend the party trying to stretch the cord into another room. Every few minutes, shout, “MOM! I’M ON THE PHONE!”
Stretch Armstrong could survive being pulled in every direction by a bunch of unsupervised kids. But pull too hard and he’d spring a leak. Forty years later, some of us can relate.
Peter Arkle
7. The Outstretched Stretch Armstrong
If you were a kid in the late ’70s or ’80s, you probably spent a few afternoons trying to rip Stretch Armstrong apart limb from limb. Introduced by Kenner in 1976, the muscular blond action figure could stretch his rubber arms to ridiculous lengths and somehow return to his original shape. Until, of course, you pulled a little too hard. Then Stretch would rip, oozing a mysterious amber goo that resembled pancake syrup. You’d run to your mother for help, and she’d ask why you were trying to dismember a perfectly good toy she just bought you for Christmas. Fair question, Mom. But you should’ve seen how far we got his arms apart.
Make it yourself: Start with a blond wig, a skin-colored shirt and dark wrestling trunks. Stuff a pair of nude-colored pantyhose with cotton or fabric scraps, then attach them to your sleeves to create absurdly long, floppy arms. Put a large bandage on one arm, with a little amber-colored cellophane or fabric sticking out to suggest the goo leaking from inside. At the party, ask two friends to grab an arm and gently pull in opposite directions. Then yell, “You broke me!”
8. The Hot Pocket With a Frozen Center
For Gen X latchkey kids, coming home to an empty house meant making their own after-school snack. And few foods were more unpredictable than a Hot Pocket. You could microwave one for the recommended 2 minutes and somehow end up with a pastry that was hotter than the surface of the sun on one end and still frozen solid on the other. Your first bite would remove several layers from the roof of your mouth. The second would give you brain freeze. And because you were 12 and hungry, you’d eat the whole damn thing anyway.
Make it yourself: Find a long, narrow cardboard box and decorate it to look like a giant Hot Pockets package, cutting holes for your head and arms. Get a brown oblong throw pillow to serve as the pastry and attach it to the front of the box. At one end of the pillow, tuck in some red and orange fabric for the boiling-hot cheese and pepperoni, with a little blue or white fabric for the still-frozen center.
9. The Columbia House Debt Collector
Remember when Columbia House offered you 12 cassette tapes for a penny? You could get Van Halen, Def Leppard, Prince, maybe even a little Phil Collins, all for less than the price of a piece of gum. Of course, there was some fine print about buying more albums at regular prices. Forty years later, Columbia House would still like to have a word with you.
Make it yourself: Put on a cheap suit and carry a briefcase stuffed with old cassette tapes. Make a giant cardboard penny and pin it to your lapel. Carry a clipboard with a stack of fake bills stamped “FINAL NOTICE” in red ink. Add a name tag that says “Columbia House Collections Department.” Spend the party approaching people in their 50s and asking if they ever fulfilled their minimum purchase requirement.
Peter Arkle
In the ’80s, a man with a frying pan warned us that drugs would scramble our brains. Now we’re voluntarily dressing as the egg. Any questions?
10. The “This Is Your Brain on Drugs” Egg
In 1987, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America introduced us to a guy who was really angry about eggs. He held one up to the camera, cracked it into a sizzling frying pan, and explained that this was what drugs would do to our brains. Then he stared directly at us and asked, “Any questions?” We had several, starting with why this man was so upset about breakfast. The commercial ran constantly, and if you grew up in the ’80s, you probably still hear that egg sizzling in your nightmares.
Make it yourself: Cut two large, uneven, egg-white shapes from white poster board, big enough to cover your chest and back. Add a bright yellow circle in the middle for the yolk, then connect the pieces with straps over your shoulders. Wear white clothes underneath and carry an old frying pan from a thrift store. Every time someone asks about your costume, point to the pan and say, “Any questions?”
11. The Last Kid Picked for Dodgeball
Remember standing against the gym wall while two team captains picked their friends, then the athletic kids, then the kids who could at least run in a straight line? If you were still standing there, congratulations: You were about to become a human target. Dodgeball was basically a sanctioned opportunity for the biggest kid in seventh grade to throw a red rubber ball at your face as hard as he could. The sound it made when it connected still haunts us. And the gym teacher’s medical advice was usually some variation of “Walk it off.”
Make it yourself: Dig out some embarrassingly short gym shorts, tube socks and an old pair of sneakers. Wear a white T-shirt with red circles made from fabric paint or felt to show where you’ve been hit. Use some red face paint to add a giant dodgeball-shaped mark to your cheek. Whenever someone makes a sudden movement, flinch and cover your face.
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