Some households costume up for Halloween as characters from a shared universe. Elsa, Anna, and Olaf. Black Widow, Captain America, and Ironman. This 12 months, my youngsters’ costumes couldn’t be extra totally different: my youngest little one goes as a manga superhero, my oldest little one is just too cool to decorate up, and my center little one goes as a duck. Not precisely cohesive! 

Jokes apart, Halloween costumes have turn into a type of cultural index for us in the US. What our kids costume up as displays the themes, developments, characters, and historic moments of the 12 months. 

This month, we’re analyzing the highest Halloween costumes by 12 months—not precisely scientific, however seasonal and enjoyable. Take pleasure in! 

First, we loaded 5 “prime Halloween costumes” lists into Domo. 

To measure costume reputation, we discovered 5 lists of prime Halloween costumes by delivery 12 months and pulled them into Domo. We sourced lists from Reader’s Digest, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, POPSUGAR, and Give it Love. The 12 months I used to be born, Reader’s Digest says the highest Halloween costume was Michael Myers…the serial killer.  

Then we categorized the info to see which spheres have influenced costumes essentially the most. The characters on these lists got here from motion pictures, toys, Broadway, comedian books, and the music world. Even politics—Richard Nixon was apparently a prime costume in 1974, the 12 months he resigned the presidency.  

Taking a look at our classes, we see that movie-based costumes are by far the preferred. Politicians are least standard, with solely three entries.  

Subsequent, we checked out manufacturers or themes of costumes. 

Understanding that the costumes we select recommend one thing in regards to the tradition at massive, we determined to zoom out and contemplate the preferred themes represented. Superheroes, Batman, Disney, and Star Wars come to the highest. To create this visible, we used a brand new bubble chart that was a part of Domo’s October 2023 function launch. 

We’ll word that, though Disney now owns each Indiana Jones and Star Wars, the Disney class refers to characters from the primary franchise: Mickey Mouse, Elsa, Princess Tiana, and many others.  

If you happen to’re questioning, the “Brady Bunch” theme refers to particularly Marcia and Jan. Sorry, Cindy.  

We additionally checked out repeats of the identical costumes throughout lists and throughout years.

We needed to perform a little information cleansing, after all, to align with how every listing names issues. For instance, Cosmopolitan listed “Tony Manero from Saturday Evening Fever” and Reader’s Digest listed “John Travolta (properly, kind of)” in 1978. These are primarily the identical costume, so we labeled them collectively as “Tony Manero (John Travolta) from Saturday Evening Fever.” Rubbish in, rubbish out, as they are saying.  

Right here’s what we discovered: Spider-Man was the most-repeated costume, displaying up 5 totally different instances throughout our lists. Captain Jack Sparrow additionally had a powerful displaying, as did Ghostface, Batman, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Massive props for longevity to Morticia Addams, who confirmed up in 1967 and 1991.  

See each prime Halloween costume—by 12 months, theme, class, and frequency. 

Lastly, here’s a detailed compilation of all of the rankings. We’ve additionally included a bit of image thumbnail, too, since an image tells a thousand phrases. You possibly can filter, search, and export.