This is the third costume I wore this year. I had already been The Headless Horseman at work, and then since that wasn't practical for a club, I was an Onizamurai (demon samurai) at Coven 13's Halloween Masquerade Ball. On Halloween itself, I wanted to go out, but just to a local club, The Shark Club in Costa Mesa. I didn't expect the club to be cool enough to justify the long makeup process (and later cleanup) for the Onizamurai costume, so I settled on this costume, Samurai Killed By A Ninja, which utilized many of the same elements but was much less trouble to put on and take off.
For discussion of the components of this costume previously used in my Onizamurai and Samurai costumes, see those pages.
The major new element with this costume, of course, is the shuriken (ninja throwing star) embedded in my forehead:
Cinema Secrets had two versions of the appliance, one with a rim of skin surrounding the shuriken wound, and one without that skin but with light netting glued to the bottom of the appliance and extending out slightly from the edges. I think the latter was the newer version, but I tried it first, and it totally sucked.
The netting was only glued to the appliance on a thin line around the rim, and with the glue used, the two pieces easily came apart. Trying to shore it up did not work well as a fix. Also, where the netting poked out from the edges of the appliance, it was easily visible against the skin.
Luckily, I'd also bought the version of the appliance with the outer rim of skin, and this provided a good wide surface to glue to your real skin. The edge of the appliance was pretty obvious, though, especially due to the odd lace-like pattern used along the edge. Not a big deal, though, as I just hid the edges with blood gel.
Blood gel, of course, was preferable to liquid fake blood, so it wouldn't
drip down into my eyes. The blood gel did do a little dripping, as you can
see here, due to forehead sweat caused by dancing all night at the club (I
took these photos after I got back), but the drips didn't make it past my
impenetrable eyebrows. 
To suggest I was an undead samurai, having been killed by the shuriken to the brain, I used a small amount of black greasepaint pencil smeared around my eye sockets, and black lipstick applied and then mostly wiped off, to create a purplish dead color. I then patted my skin down with white powder for the corpse-like paleness.
Here's a side view. As with my 1996 Samurai costume, I intentionally didn't get a haircut (just shaved the sides and back) for awhile prior to this, so I could manage the upknot:
And here, once again, are my tabi:
Again, that's really ninja footwear rather than samurai footwear, but hey,
maybe that's why the ninja killed me -- I ripped off the guy's shoes.
The Shark Club's Halloween event was fairly lame (ultra lame compared to the Halloween Masquerade Ball). In the large main room they were playing nothing but horrible hip-hop. In a packed-to-the-gills small side-room, where I hung out all night, they played generic techno. When they had the costume contest in the main room, they didn't even bother to notify the people in the side room. Glad I didn't go to the trouble of putting on the Onizamurai makeup.
Not too many super-impressive costumes, but the guy who I believe won the costume contest had an awesome custom-made Jack Skellington costume, including a perfectly-proportioned over-the-head mask.
Additional shots of my costume (some of them cool, some of them unusably dark or blurry, some of them cool and unusably dark or blurry) are available if you just can't get enough. All of these photos are self-portraits taken with my DCR-PC5 camcorder / digital camera. I had finally gotten around to buying the flash accessory when I took these shots, so they're the first group of DCR-PC5 self-portraits where I didn't have to use goofy flashlight tricks to get a bright enough picture without too much CCD noise. I did still play around with having the overhead lights in my kitchen on vs. off, though. At least some of the shots were taken with the wide-angle lens attachment, so the proportions sometimes look a little funny (as in Halloween2001c-15.jpg).
Dan Harkless
Page created: October 14, 2003
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