Google launches interactive tool to help you decide on the perfect Halloween costume

Are you trying to decide what you’d like to be for Halloween? Being yourself or the new kid on the block doesn’t count, and you’ve only got a few weeks left! What are you going to do, perform a simple Google search for the most popular costumes? That could take a while. Luckily for you, Google has compiled all of this data into a new interactive tool called Frightgeist, and you can access it right now!

Upon visiting, you’ll be presented with spooky visuals and sounds and the top costumes nationally. Among them, a witch is still the number one choice – how unoriginal! The second is a rabbit, and I’m guessing one with red eyes. Odd choice…anyways, the dinosaur, and more specifically, the T-rex comes in third, with your friendly, neighborhood Spider-Man in fourth. Taking the fifth spot, and certainly thanks to the success of the Disney+ movie (with pretty terrible writing, if I’m honest), Cruella De Vil.

Other popular choices include the wildly popular Harley Quinn and other DC characters like The Joker and Poison Ivy. As we see pop culture continue to influence Halloween, millions of people are already gearing up to cosplay the Netflix original with 111 million viewers, Squid Game.

I’ll let you check out the site to see what else made the cut for the top 50, but clicking “show more” at the bottom will continue to load results since it’s all being taken directly from Google Search. The most interesting aspect of Frightgeist is the two tools that can be found on the top navigation – the Costume Wizard, and the Costume Map.

The Costume Wizard gives you sliders to adjust the level of spookiness or uniqueness of your costume suggestions, while the toggles let you choose a style that’s classic or modern and a trend that’s national or local. Naturally, I cranked all levels to 100, and came out with “Saw”, but I’m pretty sure Google meant “Billy the Puppet”. I guess there’s just something about killer clowns (from outer space?) that refuses to die. Ask Chucky, he’ll tell you.

The Costume Map lays out all of the most popular costumes in the United States so you can visually search. I love when Google puts fun little tools like this together. It sure takes some of the boring out of a standard Google Search, and the more they find trends and put them together in ways that are easier to digest and disseminate, the more useful the data becomes, I think.

Once you select a map location, you’ll see its national rank, popularity, how it’s trending over time, what other states searched for the same costume most, and even what percent of all costume searches encompasses that specific costume. I guess Frightgeist is meant to make you the most popular trick-or-treater in the neighborhood. That’s one way to hoard all of the Snickers and Reese’s. Now, I just have to ask – what are you going to be for Halloween?

Visit Frightgeist