The Monkey: Costuming

In our film, we needed to make four costumes: one for Corey, Ethan, and Garrett's normal characters, as well as "The Monkey."

We started with the designs for the primary, non-killer characters. We took a lot of inspiration form the popular Netflix series "Stranger Things." The show takes place in the 80's, and devotes a lot of its time to developing the mise-en-scene of its era through costuming, sets, and sound design. We made the costumes out of things that were in our closets, and didn't end up having to purchase any other assets.

The main cast of Stranger Things 3 (2019)

 Ethan's costume was a simple pair of faded, 80's style jeans with an MTV shirt. The MTV shirt, which alludes to the popular television station Music Entertainment Television, helped compliment the 80's aesthetic we were going for.

Garrett's costume was a pair of light jeans with a tucked in, child-like t-shirt. With this costume, we were trying to emulate the popular jeans and tucked shirt style that we saw in a lot of 80's material.

An image that served as the main inspiration for Garrett's costume.

The finished products of all three costumes.

For Corey's costume, he went with a pair of white pants, a black jacket, and a pair of Jordans. The Air Jordan brand was an extremely popular emerging brand in the mid-80's, so they perfectly fit our scene.

The last costume we had to worry about was the killer's costume. We had rewritten the script to describe the killer as wearing a monkey mask instead of the white, Michael Myers inspired mask that we had originally described. This was mainly due to Corey's insistance for his killer character's name to be "The Monkey." We went with a simple pair of black pants and a black hoodie for the clothing, which emulated other popular horror movie killers like Ghostface and Hush.

Ghostface in Scream (1995)

The Hush Killer from Hush (2016)

For the mask, we struggled to find a monkey mask for the first night of filming, so we instead used an old clown mask that Ethan had in his garage. When we reshot the film the following weekend at Corey's house, Ethan would come equipped with a monkey mask that he had ordered online.