| I was struggling to think of a good character for a costume leading up to Tidewater Comicon 2025. In April and May of 2025, season 2 of the Last of Us was airing new episodes on HBO. While watching an episode, I got the crazy idea of doing a clicker monster from the show. Between 1994 and 2014, I had participated in local Halloween haunted shows so the idea of doing a scary costume was familiar to me. In fact my journey into costume making started by going to conventions and doing research online for costume ideas for the last few years of Halloween shows. I initially hesitated at the idea of doing something that might scare the little kids at the convention. My previous costumes were always kid friendly. But I thought about all the times I saw a Pennywise, Pyramid Head, Michael Myers, or some other scary character roaming the convention floors so I decided to do it. | ||
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| I made a regular LEGO costume head and sliced off part of the front where the cordyceps fungus would grow. I cut a hole for the mouth so my daughter can see when she’s moving around. Using a Dremel rotary tool, I carved out the teeth from the mouth. I decorated the fungus forehead and added fungus patches around the back of the head with small pieces of scrap foam. I repeated these patches on the torso and hands. My daughter then added a shirt over the torso with tears exposing the fungus patches. | ||
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| I reused the sound box from the Green Goblin costume to add “clicker” sound effects to the costume. My daughter had a 4-button key fob hidden in her hand that allowed her to activate the sounds. When people would take a picture with her at the convention, she would trigger the sound right when the picture was being snapped. Since some people did not expect the sound, it got a nice jump scare. | ||
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Videos of the Clicker costume in action.