The art of Halloween

Halloween offers a rare opportunity to explore the relationship between identity, imagination and self-expression. Through costumes, makeup and carefully constructed details, the familiar can be transformed into something entirely different. What appears to be a night of spectacle is also an exercise in visual storytelling, where silhouettes, colors and textures communicate character and mood. Behind each transformation are creative minds who approach Halloween as an art form, turning the it into an expression of imagination and beauty.

The keeper of costumes

Jonathan Choufani, 35, owns a unique costume shop in Jeita. In early October, it disappears behind hanging capes, witch hats and rubber masks. The building was once his grandfather’s tailoring atelier, and Jonathan kept the old sewing machines even after the stock changed.

“My grandfather stitched wedding dresses,” he told The Beiruter, running a hand over a velvet vampire cloak. “I stitch vampires. He would have found it hilarious, then he would have criticized my seams.”

He remembered his first Halloween order, forty costumes, half of them too small. “I was convinced nobody would come. By my 25th I was sleeping in the back room because customers kept knocking.”

Trends shift with every blockbuster and streaming hit, but the pieces that move fastest are the personal ones. “Lebanese customers want to wear a story,” he reflected. “Someone asks for a pirate, but with a Lebanese twist. I sew it a little differently and suddenly the pirate belongs to us.”

His shop is also a small stage. Teenagers rehearse their characters in front of the mirror. Parents become children again. “When an adult tries on a cape and stands taller, that is my favorite moment of the season.”

The face painter of fear

Marina Akiki, 27, described her kit like a surgeon’s tray, scar wax, fake blood in six shades, liquid latex, glitter. October is when it all comes out.

“I was fourteen when I melted a candle onto my arm to see if I could fake a burn,” she recalled. “My mother walked in, screamed, then asked me to do it again slower so she could watch. That was the moment I knew.”

Today, Marina is an SFX makeup artist whose calendar fills weeks before the 31st. She shares her work on social media and accepts appointments at her home studio through direct messages. At the peak of the season, she transforms up to fifteen faces in one night, from cracked porcelain dolls to zombie brides.

“Halloween is the only time people ask me to hurt them on purpose,” she explained. “Last year a client sat in my chair and asked, ‘Make me look like I’ve been dead for a week.’

Her artistry relies on anatomy. “A wound is only believable when it respects the face,” she explained. “A gash across a cheekbone must follow the muscle. I layer purple for bruising, yellow for age, red only at the very end. Blood is the punctuation afterwards.”

The pumpkin whisperer

In a studio in Achrafieh, students hunch over orange pumpkins with tiny knives in hand. Dan Choueiry, 29, teaches them the art of the carve.

“Pumpkins are hard to find here,” he told The Beiruter. “My first class, I imported them. The students named them. One girl refused to carve hers because she claimed it had a personality. I told her that was the whole point, carving is how you set the personality free.”

Dan teaches two courses, pumpkin carving and Halloween painting. In the painting sessions, canvases fill with crooked moons, black cats and haunted forests. His favorite assignment is a cedar tree with owls hiding in its branches. “It is Lebanon’s symbol, but at midnight,” he added.

Beyond technique, he sees his classes as a kind of therapy. “People arrive stressed, carrying worry on their shoulders. After an hour of scooping seeds with bare hands, they are giggling. Children teach the adults how to be silly again.”

Halloween is ultimately an exercise in reinvention, where even the simplest details become expressions of imagination. It is a tradition that transforms the eerie into the extraordinary and fear into a celebration of art.