With Halloween only four days away, people are quickly starting to realize that this weekend is their last chance to throw together a costume for the big-time Halloween parties they're all certain to be attending on Tuesday.  This week, I've decided to help out all you folks at home who haven't figured out what you're going to wear yet by giving you some examples of real-life folks who would make for great costumes.

Vlad III Tepes

First of all, fuck vampires.  Fuck irritating blood-drinking techno raves, fuck black-caped Bella Legosi Nosferatus and fuck effeminate pretty-boy Lestat-wannabes.  If I thought any of that shit was really all that badass, I would have put Simon Belmont, Buffy Summers, Blade and Professor Abraham Van Helsing in the Hall of Badassitude a long time ago.

But nobody ever said that Vlad III Tepes was a vampire.  Though his nickname - Dracula - may conjure up images of stiff-legged old men with pointy fangs and a penchant for sleeping in old coffins, Dracula is really just the Romanian way of saying "son of the dragon", and was simply a way of differentiating him from his father, Vlad II Dracul (Vlad the Dragon).  Vlad Tepes wasn't a vampire who spent his days hanging upside down from the ceiling in an unlit dungeon only to venture forth and suck blood during the night - he was a total fucking whackjob who made it his personal mission to take as many people as possible and stick them onto giant sharpened stakes.

See, Vlad the Impaler apparently got a charge out of running his Kingdom of Wallachia with an iron fist and a wooden spike.  Whenever anybody would cross him, he'd just jam them onto a large pointy object Mortal Kombat-style and call it a day.  This was not only a sufficient (if not extreme with a capital X) way of keeping his subjects in line, it was also a pretty effective crime deterrent and worked wonders for homeland security.  Like when the Turkish ruler Mehmet the Conquerer, the man responsible for the conquest of Constantinople, decided it would be cool to move his armies into Wallachia, they were greeted by the sight of thousands of Turkish POWs impaled on stakes.  The Turks were so goddamned freaked out by what they dubbed "The Forest of the Impaled" that hey crapped themselves, turned around and ran like bitches all the way back to Istanbul.

Why You Should Go As Vlad the Impaler:

Because Vlad is the kind of guy that nobody in their right mind would fuck with.  Shit, if it wasn't for the whole "indiscriminate slaughter of soldiers, civilians, criminals and prisoners alike" he'd probably be a Badass of the Week contender.  But holy shit if that wasn't effective I don't know what would have been.

You Will Need:

• A crazy-ass moustache


• Several eight-foot tall sharpened wooden pikes


• A pointy hat

Erzsébet Báthory

If you thought Naomi Campbell was rough on her assistants, wait until you hear about Erzsébet Báthory.  She was one crazy bitch from hell, and many people attribute the origins of vampire myth not to Vlad, but rather to the legend of the so-called "Blood Countess".  She was a prominent, attractive Hungarian noblewoman who lived alone in a giagantor castle, and basically hired a bunch of virgin babes to come work for her - only instead of having them iron her shirts or clean the guest bedrooms she would just kill them and bathe in their blood.  For some bizarre reason she believed that taking a disgusting bath every day would somehow make her skin appear youthful forever.  This hypothesis proved to be incorrect however, as she is currently old and dead.  She probably should have just used like Oil of Olay or something instead of ruining dozens of perfectly good virgins.

Why You Should Go As Elizabeth Bathory:

You should go as Elizabeth if you want people to think you're a psycho, if you really hate virgins, or if you really hate getting old.  The only down side is that you're going to have this conversation about fifteen times:

"Who are you supposed to be?"

"Oh, I'm some crazy bitch who hacked up a bunch of girls in the sixteenth century and then flopped around in their blood like a crazy-ass Orca at Sea World in Hell."

You Will Need:

• A medieval dress


• Virgins


• A couple bags of blood

Bloodmobile Technitian

While the previous two psychos were inspirations for the Dracula/Vampire myth, the Bloodmobile folks are the closest thing you can get to real-life vampires.  Look at the facts:  it's a coven of well-to-do people who travel around to locations where they know there to be a large number of healthy people, and do their best to get as much blood as possible from them.  Sure, the reasons behind the blood collection are a little less nefarious (as far as you know), the method is equally as gruesome.  Sure, you're a lot less likely to get Hepatitis from a sterile needle than you are from some dirty Eastern European dude chomping down on your neck, but everyone out there has their own Bloodmobile horror story or two and nobody this side of the Methadone clinic enjoys getting stabbed with needles.

For instance, when I was in high school, they stuck one of the girls in my class in the wrong place when they put the needle in.  I was just sitting there waiting for the big plastic bag to fill up with my blood when all of a sudden this crazy bitch runs past me at top speed shrieking like a stuck pig and spraying blood all over the inside of the Bloodmobile while being chased after by a Technitian.  That was pretty fucked up and awesome.

Plus, it's my impression that those Blood Techs are a little more sadistic than they let on, and that they actually enjoy sticking you sometimes.  This became apparent to me the last time I went to give blood.  They were watching Hitchcock's Psycho on the TV in the car, and I SWEAR TO FUCKING CHRIST she jammed the needle into my arm at the exact second that the "reet reet reet" part of the infamous shower scene started.  Not cool at all.  Bastards.

Why You Should Go As a Bloodmobile Tech:

Because a hell of a lot of people are far more terrified of doctor's offices and giant five-inch-long needles than they are of some idiot in a hockey mask or a stupid ghost costume.  This set-up might be good for eliciting some real terror, as you snap on a set of rubber gloves, pull out a huge-ass hypodermic syringe and ask for a donation by doing the "come hither" gesture with your index finger and saying, "I vant your bloood" in your best Transylvanian accent.

You Will Need:

• A lab coat or doctor's coat


• Syringes (preferably clean)


• A couple bags of blood

The Mummy of Ramesses II

A while back I wrote a BotW article about how awesome Ramesses II was.  Well Super Tom Fun Guy came up to me a couple of weeks ago and was like, "Dude, if the real Ramesses II was so badass, imagine how awesome HIS MUMMY would be!"

Fucking brilliant.  So let it be written, so let it be done.

Why You Should Go As Ramesses II:

Mummies are awesome.  They rise up out of their graves, shamble around like glorified zombies, and give you all sorts of fucked-up diseases, rots, curses and plagues.  In the unlikely event that you're lucky enough to actually kill one, it's curse will eventually catch up to you and you'll either die in some horrible violent accident or you'll suffer a slow painful death from a mysterious never-before-seen disease.

Ramesses II was awesome.  He built a gigantic propaganda network including several hundred life-size sculptures of himself trampling all his enemies and coined the immortal phrase, "Look upon my works, ye mighty, and DESPAIR!"

Put those two together and you've got a badass Halloween costume.

You Will Need:

• A case of toilet paper with which to wrap yourself in


• Crotch rot


• A well-practiced "mummy groan"

Grigory Rasputin

Grigory Rasputin, the "mad monk" of Imperial Russia, was one of the most bizarre people to ever live.  The guy was a monk-in-training who ditched the monastery to walk the Earth and get busy with everybody from the cheapest hooker in St. Petersburg to the Tsarina of Imperial Russia.  By virtue of the fact that he was the only person capable of "curing" the Tsarivitch's hemophilia, he pretty much had free reign to do whatever he wanted to whomever he wanted at all times.  He got even more babes than Clay, despite the fact that he was at least four times dirtier and was well-known for his indefatigable B.O.  What can I say, chicks dig bad boys I guess.

In addition to being completely off his motherfucking rocker, Rasputin is best known for the fact that he was incredibly difficult to kill.  When a couple of Jackass Russian nobles attempted to assassinate him, they shot him five times (once at point-blank range in the head), beat him up, poisoned him and then finally threw him in a river.  His cause of death:  Drowning.

Why You Should Go As Rasputin:

Shit, Rasputin was a playa before it was cool, dog.  He was straight-up baller with the ladies, but not one of those pussy-ass metros who get all the chicks but look as though they would get knocked unconscious by an overly strong wind - he was just flat-out hardcore in all respects.  Tough as shit, but still pimp enough to get some busy with the most powerful woman in the country (and all of her serving girls, attendants and friends).

You Will Need:

• A crazy-ass beard


• Body odor


• A thirteen-inch penis

Elvira, Mistress of the Night

Growing up, I remember watching Elvira's show every weekend and thinking it was totally fucking awesome.  I pretty much attribute a large part of my love of zombies and super-cheesy sci-fi/horror to Elvira's Movie Macabre, and in my opinion Halloween just isn't right without her.

Why You Should Go As Elvira:

Because Elvira is awesome.  And because I like cleavage.  Send pix plz ok thx.

You Will Need:

• A black wig


• Massive cleavage


• A low-cut dress (preferably black)

Jack Shannon, Viking Warrior

I'm sure that most of you are familiar with our resident madman and Viking Warrior extroardinaire, Jack Shannon.  Well when he's not writing semi-legible updates on the website, Jack spends most of his free time hitting stuff with two-handed swords, punching things for no reason and thinking about how much people wish they were him, and Halloween is the one time of the year when you can see what it's like to be Jack!  Simply put together your costume (with Jack mask), run outside, whack the first thing you see with a battle axe and scream "jogging is for girls!" as loud as you possibly can while thumping your chest with your fist. 

Why You Should Go As Jack:

Because who wouldn't want to be Jack Shannon?  Also, you can re-use your costume from last year.

You Will Need:

• An edged weapon of some sort


• The ability to yell "jogging is for girls!" as loud as possible at all times


• The Official Printable Jack Shannon Mask

The Spanish Inquisition

In the fifteenth century, the Spanish government decided that many people were not living moral lives as good Roman Catholic citizens.  So, they did the logical thing and declared a little something called the Inquisitio Haereticae Pravitatis Sanctum Officium.  This is Latin for, "you're all not officially in the getting fucked by us business".  Several self-righteous pretentious cockasses known as inquisitors then then ran all over the country burning people at the stake for no reason and torturing heretics, non-heretics, livestock and scarecrows to death just for the hell of it, then stealing all the money they could get their hands on and using it to buy hookers and opium.

I distinctly remember one of my Catholic school teachers once telling me that the Inquisition, "wasn't that big a deal" - a view backed-up by the church itself, apparently.  At the time, I remember thinking this was one of the most fucked-up things I had ever heard. 

You Will Need:

• Red clothes


• The Bible


• A comfy chair

Why You Should Go As The Inquisition:

Because...

NNNNNOBODY EXPECTS
THE SPANISH INQUISITION!!!