The Chronically Online Have Stolen Halloween
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.
