Why Are Celebrities So Obsessed With Halloween?

Every year on Halloween, families and friends alike gather ‘round to tell spooky stories, scary urban legends, and that one piece of fiction with the punch line “humans can lick, too” that will remain the most effective work of art committed to print in history. But while all of Halloween’s dedicated revelers get their rocks off by freaking each other out, chowing down on candy, and hitting the Wizard Punch with reckless abandon, the rich and the famous manage to outdo all of us with better, more intricate costumes and more exciting parties. It’s hard to find even one star or star-esse who is not photographed on Halloween looking totally transformed and out in the streets of bright-lights Beverly Hills. Celebrities, for some goddamn reason, are obsessed with Halloween.

But every day in a celebrity’s life is like Halloween! They wake up, put on a mask, and go out into the world pretending to be somebody they likely aren’t in private. If you’re unlucky enough to be on the female spectrum of celebrity, often that mask is quite literal, or else the “Stars Without Makeup” column in every gossip rag would cease to exist. When you are a celebrity actor, your day job actually very literally entails performing the role of someone or something else from morning until night. When actors return home to their families and closets overstuffed with stacks of cash, they are undoubtedly very different from they are when playing, say, Danny Ocean in the classic casino heist film Ocean’s Eleven. Musicians and entertainers in other performing careers do this acting on a smaller scale. You think Demi Lovato is her real self when she takes the stage for the Today show? Shyeah, right!

We lowlife normals are forced to care about Halloween because it injects some meaning into the time between fall’s beginning and Thanksgiving’s arrival. Some struggle to remember to brainstorm a costume before it’s too late; others seem to not understand that CVS is chockablock with candy from all year ‘round. Still, it’s somewhat obligatory for non-celebs to participate in Halloween. What else are we gonna do — sit at home and whine about it?

Maybe that’s why celebrities cannot get enough. Halloween is a chance for the celebrities both to feel festive along with the plebes bobbing for apples in a mop bucket and to set themselves apart from the world. Heidi Klum’s inability to chill on Halloween is just one more gut shot at those of us who shall go unnamed and who are only five-foot-three and who would never have the wherewithal to pull off a costume as intricate as a frigging human with her skin stripped off. Celebrities go all out on Halloween because we love to ogle their extravagant lifestyles. In some ways, Halloween is the perfect symbiosis between gawkers and famous people. After all, if a celebrity goes big for Halloween and no one is there to see it, did it really happen?

Click through to see some of this year’s most Halloween-loving celebrities in their costumes.