For Halloween I Am Going As Myself / Live-Action TV

• ALF did this one, too, with a zipper attached to his fur. It still left guests wondering about his height, though.
• Buffyverse
  • Most demons don't like going out during Halloween because it's so commercialized and kitschy, and consider it the one day of the year they'd rather stay home. In Angel a demon boy mentions that the only time he could go outside with his mother (she was half-human and could switch between the two forms) was on Halloween, which is a humiliation in itself.
  • Lorne often pretends he's wearing a costume to deal with people's reactions to his green skin and red horns. When he got a job as a singer in Vegas, all the dancing girls (the Lornettes) wore green makeup and red horns to match. Incidentally, we also learn that only one member of the Blue Man Group actually wears makeup. There's also the episode where Lorne pretends to be dressed up to read to the children when a case takes the group to a library. The librarian compliments him on his realistic mask but points out that the horns aren't very convincing.
  • In Season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Initiative walk around openly on Halloween in their soldier outfits. Buffy notices them and doesn't think much of it until she encounters them later in the season.
• Averted in the CBeebies series Balamory when Archie managed to persuade PC Plum to dress as a robot for the party, and not as a policeman. Again.
• The leonine Vincent took advantage of this in one episode of the Beauty and the Beast series. Creator George R. R. Martin says that they hoped to do the same thing every season on an annual "Halloween" episode, but that didn't pan out.
• When The Cape attended a costume ball in his full superhero regalia, not only did he successfully blend in, but he discovered that a character he helped in an earlier episode was also at the party in a knockoff Cape costume. He was flattered to have "a fan," although that's odd considering that he himself had adopted the identity of a preexisting comic-book character, so why would he think it was about him? Then again, the comic book didn't seem to be very well-known within the show's universe.
• All over the place in the first Halloween episode of Charmed (1998):
  • Phoebe dresses as Elvira, Piper dresses as Glinda and Prue... smears glitter across her eyes. When they're accidentally transported back to Salem in the 1700s, the coven of Wiccans who summoned them is surprised that witches can move about freely in the future (which raises questions of why they associate a puffy pink dress and crown with witchcraft, but that's another matter). They're given contemporary clothing to blend in, which they wind up wearing to the Halloween party back in the present. So originally they'd dressed up as pop culture's version of witches, only to replace the costume with more accurate witch apparel, falling further in line with the trope.
  • Darryl (a cop) and Leo (a whitelighter who died in World War II) both wear their "first uniforms" as their costumes. Leo's confuses Darryl since he doesn't know all the family's secrets yet.
  • Meanwhile, in one of the many instances of the show creating a rule that is only ever shown to apply once, it's stated that Halloween is the one day a year that vanquished demons can come back to earth. The Grimlocks (the only demons who actually come back) aren't too concerned about hiding anymore (they're already dead, so screw The Masquerade), but no one notices them walking around because it's assumed they're just wearing costumes. The one kid who comments on it gets a Force-Choke for his effort (though, again, force choking is just what Grimlocks do).
  • The Grimlocks themselves consider Belthazor to be wearing a "Cole" costume, which still qualifies, since he has a human form and demonic form he can switch between freely, so his Cole form is still him. No matter where you think he actually lies on the Good-Evil spectrum, his actual costume at the end is an aversion: he goes as an angel.
• In one Halloween episode of Criminal Minds, JJ's son Henry doesn't want to go trick or treating because one of his friends told him it's the only day real monsters can go out and blend in. JJ convinces him to go as his favorite profiler (Reid) so he can figure out which monsters are real and which are faking.
  Rossi: I never thought of that. Good monster logic.
  • Averted in another Halloween episode. The unsub was severely burned years ago, leaving his face horribly scarred. He enacts his revenge during Detroit's three-day pre-Halloween Devil's Night celebrations, but it has nothing to do with being able to move freely. He lives a normal life and holds down a job the rest of the year, and while a witness assumes he's wearing a mask, he's still easily identified as being out of place and stalking one of his victims. He chose the holiday because it's the anniversary of his own disfigurement and because the mischief that generally ensues provides cover for his own activities: he kills by burning his victims alive in abandoned buildings, and Devil's Night has a history of vandalism and arson, which enabled him to get away with it for years before the police recognized the pattern.
• In a Halloween episode of Dark Angel, several of the cast (who were transgenic supersoldiers with barcodes on their necks) tried to pass for people dressed as... transgenic supersoldiers with barcodes on their necks. The response to the costumes varied, some were considered cool, others unoriginal, and some normal humans were using the same costume. The transgenics were actually what they were cosplaying as, and using it as a cover, but some were still told Your Costume Needs Work.
• Doctor Who episode "The Halloween Apocalypse" has an alien called Karvanista, a member of the dog-like Lupari species, arrive on Earth with the intention of abducting Dan Lewis... but because he arrives on Halloween, Dan treats him like a man in a dog costume and refuses to take the threat of abduction seriously. After he completes his mission, Karvanista transmits data on the Halloween festival to the rest of his fleet, thinking they can use it to hide in plain sight amongst humanity.
• Farscape uses this one, when the aliens accidentally land on 1985 Earth. They use the fortuitous happenstance of landing there the night before Hallowe'en to disguise their alien-ness. It doesn't work so well...but a little bit of hallucinogenic dust goes a long way.
• Used in The Flash. Almost everyone at the police costume party was going as The Flash despite the fact that nobody actually knew what he looked like beyond the red and gold blur. Naturally, when the real Flash showed up, his costume was deemed bland and unimaginative. Even the Trickster picked the wrong Flash, targeting Officer Murphy instead. The illusion crumbled when the real Flash used his powers.
• Friends: Zig-zagged in "The One With The Halloween Party". Rachel and Joey both seemingly have forgone costumes. Rachel says that she is a pregnant woman who wants to wear her new dress because soon it won't fit anymore. Then, Joey reveals that he actually is wearing a costume: he's dressed as Chandler.
• In the episode "The Night the Cylons Landed" of Galactica 1980 the Centurion was mistaken for a guy in a Halloween costume.
  • In Battlestar Galactica (1978), the crew finally reaches Earth on Halloween, so everyone assumes they're regular humans despite their unusual clothes.
• Played not for laughs in an episode of Grey's Anatomy. A guy with some facial imperfection tries to get Dr. Sloan to give him an operation as charity. On Halloween. His convincing line was On the way here, seven people have asked me what my disguise was about. So far.
• In the iZombie pilot, Liv attends a neighborhood Halloween party as a zombie, but she does add some "flesh decay" makeup to her face since most people are used to seeing her normal "extremely pale with white hair" appearance and just assume she's emo or goth.
• Reference in one episode of Judge Judy, wherein Judge Judy remarks (after scaring some common sense into a witness), "I don't need to dress up for Halloween, I just go as me."
• On Legends of Tomorrow, the team travel to 1988 to help save a young Ray Palmer. At the conclusion, they show up in their full uniforms (including new member Zari in costume for the first time) to help the younger Ray trick or treating.
• Lucifer. When Maze takes Trixie out trick-or-treating, the latter expresses disappointment that she doesn't have a costume as well. So Maze tells her to turn around, then drops her glamor to reveal a half-decayed face. Trixie is delighted with the result, to Maze's visible relief.
• Invoked in The Middle's seventh-season Halloween episode when Axl's friend suggests that the mysterious trick-or-treater in The Grim Reaper costume they keep seeing might actually be Death since Halloween is the one night of the year Death could walk around like that without anyone thinking anything's amiss.
• Played straight in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. Zordon's assistant robot Alpha Five loves Halloween because he can go mingle with kids as if it's just a costume. In one episode, Zordon specifically told him to go to the Juice Bar to look after the party guests, knowing that he wouldn't raise any suspicion.
  • In the same episode, Bulk and Skull congratulate themselves on their "punk" costumes... which they don't seem to notice are made of their normal, everyday clothes.
  • Also from that episode, the Monster of the Week (A Frankenstein's Monster, naturally). Including a hilarious bit where a lusty teenage girl drags it off to the dance floor.
• This trope was used as early as the black-and-white TV show The Munsters. During a Halloween episode, star character Herman Munster (who looks like a large Frankenstein's monster) dresses up as a knight to go to a local Halloween Party. During the costume contest, he removes the visor on his helmet, causing everyone around him to remark on how creative he was to "wear two costumes."
• Dicky in Nicky, Ricky, Dicky, and Dawn went as himself to the school's Halloween Dance in "Scaredy Dance".
• One episode of Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation had Mikey hosting an animal-themed rave, with guests supposed to show up in costume, allowing for this trope to happen. There was even a moment of Your Costume Needs Work.
• Downplayed in People of Earth, Don’s a Human Alien but when he’s out in public he tries to dress like a fairly normal human, at a UFO convention he wears the same outfit◊ as on the ship, like the other White alien cosplayers.
• Not quite an example of this trope, but in one episode of Poirot ("The Affair at the Victory Ball") Hercule Poirot was supposed to go to a fancy dress party as a famous person. So naturally he went as himself.
  Hastings: I still don't think they'll let you in; I thought I made it clear the Victory Ball is a costume do.
  Poirot: Hercule Poirot does not wear costumes.
  Hastings: Everybody does. The whole idea is to go as someone famous.
  Poirot: Precisely.
  Hastings: Oh. I see.
• In one episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Sabrina throws a Halloween party that gets crashed by monsters from the other realm. None of her high school friends think it's strange.
• Sanctuary: When the Big Guy joins Henry to Comic-Con San Diego, Magnus comments it's "one of the few places he actually blends in".
• This Saturday Night Live sketch has the Clintons holding a costume party for Halloween and all of the attendees are notable Democrats. One person attends wearing a Barack Obama mask. At the end, the attendees all remove their masks and the man wearing the Obama mask turns out to actually be Barack Obama. (Not a cast member, the actual person.)
• Ronald Reagan did this in a Halloween episode of Spitting Image, claiming there wasn't anything scarier than a senile old man in charge of nuclear weapons.
• Similarly, in a Halloween episode of Supernatural, the demon Samhain is able to walk around amongst all of the trick-or-treaters with no one taking notice of the injury he's sustained to his stomach, or all the blood that's seeping from it.
• The Halloween episode in the first season of The Vampire Diaries had Vicki, just transformed into a vampire, coming to a Halloween party in a vampire costume. Later, Elena claimed that the blood on her costume was fake blood.

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