More than two thousand years ago, in the lands we now call Ireland and Scotland, the Celts believed there was one night each year when the border between the living and the dead grew thin enough to step through, and they called that night Samhain.
The harvest was in, the dark came early, and in that first cold of winter people believed the spirits wandering outside could recognise their faces. So they smeared ash on their cheeks, pulled animal hides over their shoulders and wore the heads of beasts.
The first costume in the history of Halloween was not made so that anyone would turn and look. It was made so that nobody would see you at all.
Nobody wore the first costume in order to be looked at
The custom later took the name guising, and the earliest records of it in Scotland date from the sixteenth century, which makes the habit of putting on another shape at the end of October older than most things we still keep.
People disguised themselves so a passing spirit would take them for another spirit, and if someone you had quarrelled with had died that year, the safest move was to dress as that person and leave their ghost confused about who was who.
The lantern came out of a similar story. Before pumpkins, the Irish hollowed out turnips, set a live coal inside and put them in the window, because the legend told of a man named Jack who cheated the devil himself and so was refused at both gates, left to wander forever with that light in his hand.
Only when the Irish emigrated to America and met a fruit that was larger, softer and far easier to carve did the turnip give way to the pumpkin.
Which means the whole look of 31 October that we now read as fun - the mask, the paint, the lamp with a face cut into it - began as ways to hide yourself, or to push something away.
Two thousand years on, the costume changed sides
Halloween falls on Saturday 31 October this year, and anyone who has walked down Bui Vien or the Nguyen Hue pedestrian street on that particular night knows what happens next.
From dusk, the people who spent three hours gluing on prosthetic scars and redrawing their eyeliner come out onto the street, bars have had cobwebs and pumpkins up since Monday, malls build a corner specifically for photos, and every few steps somebody stops so a stranger can raise a phone.
Not one of them is in costume to avoid being recognised. They gave up an afternoon to become something else, then gave up an evening so that the something else would be seen. The costume has switched sides entirely: from a shield held in front of a face, it became the thing that pushes the face forward.
And whatever gets seen needs somewhere to stay, because a whole evening in costume that leaves behind nothing but a few blurred snaps taken in a crowd may as well not have happened. That is where a photostrip does what a single frame cannot, since it has a border, a month, a row of faces in sequence, and one glance tells you exactly which night it was.
Boothsummer is a photobooth online that runs straight in the browser, so on the night itself you are not queueing in front of any machine in the middle of a crowd. Open the page, pick a Halloween photobooth frame, step in, and if a shot goes wrong you retake it on the spot.
Paint on a face is the hardest thing to photograph that night
There is a contradiction everyone in heavy makeup runs into: the more work you put into a face, the more easily the photo falls apart. White greasepaint takes light hard and blows out into a flat patch with no features left in it, while a darkly drawn eye socket swallows every bit of light and turns into a hole, and a camera looking at a face like that has nothing left to meter from.
A mask locks down something else again, which is expression. When the lower half of a face is covered your smile never reaches the person looking, and a photo where the subject gives nothing away reads as empty no matter how elaborate the costume is. This is also why the best Halloween photos are rarely the ones taken standing still and facing front.
Light behaves the same as on any other night, and everything worth doing when shooting through a dark evening holds for 31 October too, with one thing worth remembering: never let your only light source sit below your chin. Light thrown upward is what distorts a face, and it will swallow the makeup you spent all afternoon drawing.
Four slots hold both the character and the person playing it
A single photo makes you choose: either the ghost, or you. A row of four asks for no such choice, and this is why the photostrip suits Halloween better than any other shape of picture, because it gives you four beats to travel from one end of the evening to the other.
The easiest split is three slots for the character and the last one for the person. Slot one goes fully into the role, slot two pushes the pose a level further, slot three is where you break form or turn to scare whoever is next to you, and the last one is the mask coming off and your own face laughing. That run tells a story with an opening and an ending, whereas four identical poses are one pose photographed four times.
Bigger groups need a different split: each slot hands the stage to one person while the others fall back and become the background, and on the last one everybody piles in. Four slots are a sentence rather than four loose words, so work out the run first and the poses second.
Halloween frames in the catalogue pull in several directions
The Halloween label in the photobooth frame catalogue does not follow a single taste, and knowing how it divides saves you scrolling the whole thing. The most obvious direction is the dark and sharp group, where Trick Or Treat builds an entire brick wall hung with magenta neon signage, and Skeleton Crew goes the whole way into an X-ray plate with glowing bones on clinical blue-black.
The second direction runs the opposite way, sweet and bright, like Treats Please with its marker strokes on lilac and slot bottoms that ripple like the hem of a ghost, or Halloween Boo built from layered cut paper with purple bats and the word Boo at the foot. This is the group for a Halloween where nobody intends to frighten anybody, shot in a classroom or a cafe in broad daylight.
The third direction is the most interesting, a group that borrows craft materials from trades with nothing to do with Halloween. Witchy Vibes is drawn as gilded lacquer on vermilion with an owl under a moon inlaid in eggshell, October Nights takes the cobalt glaze of Portuguese azulejo tiles, and Hocus Pocus reads as a piece of moss-green felt embroidered in orange thread.
Haunted House cuts its haunted house as a linocut on pumpkin orange, while Spooky Night fakes exactly the yellowed paper of old offset comics. This group gives a photo an aged look without any filter at all.
A busy frame needs a plain costume, and the reverse
Only one thing in a photostrip is allowed to be busy, and this is where a lot of photos go wrong without their owners understanding why. If you have glued on horns, put on a wig, painted your whole face and layered a cloak over it, then the frame has to yield to you, which means picking one with thin borders and a flat ground so the slot is the only place anything happens.
The reverse holds too. If all you managed that evening was heavy eyeliner and a black shirt, let the frame carry the rest, and the busier ones like stained glass or cut paper will make a minimal look read as fully considered. The frame already does the hardest part for you, which is composition, so there is no reason not to let it do more when you are doing less.
Settle the slot count before you start rather than halfway through, because the number of slots is the one thing you cannot change mid-run. Three slots give wider pictures and suit two people, four suit a group and suit costumes that need several beats to tell.
Coloured light on the street fights the colour on your face
Halloween is the one season of the year when the light on the street genuinely has colour, with orange string lights over the bars, purple wash thrown across mall walls, and blinking strands of every shade wherever you look. That light suits the occasion, but it lays a cast over skin that no camera can lift back off, so your face can come out purple while the white paint turns green.
The fix is in where you stand, not in what you do afterwards. Find a white or warm light nearby, a shop window or a lit storefront will do, turn to face it, and let the coloured lamps sit behind you as background. You keep true skin tone and you keep the atmosphere of the night as well.
Filters deserve a lighter hand than usual on this one night. The retouch layer in the booth runs after the shot, so it can easily soften away the very lines you drew in hard, and a lookup table shifts the whole colour table in one move, which drags the colour of the paint along with it. A Halloween frame is already loud enough on its own, and three more layers on top turn the picture into noise.
Picking fast, by what you dressed up as
Gore and horror belong in the dark group, where Skeleton Crew and Midnight Hour give a photo enough edge without tipping into something childish. Witches, black cats and the classic roles sit better with Witchy Vibes or Hocus Pocus, because the handmade materials in both pull the picture toward folklore rather than toward a horror film.
A group where everyone came as something different wants a neutral frame like Pumpkin Season or Spooky Night, since the less a frame commits, the more roles it can hold at once. And if the evening is a quiet Halloween at home or in class, open Treats Please and Halloween Boo first, the two easiest Halloween photobooth frames in the whole label. Anyone who prefers picking a frame by mood instead of scrolling the catalogue will find that route still the fastest, holidays included.
After the paint comes off
Late that night you go home, take the makeup off, and the expensive mask goes into a drawer until next October, if it ever comes out again at all. Everything belonging to 31 October is built to dissolve by morning, and that was always the point, since Samhain was a festival about a border that thins for one night and thickens again afterwards.
The only thing that stays is the picture. The Celts put ash on their faces so the night would pass without anyone recognising them, while we put on a costume and then want proof that for a few hours we were something else.
A strip of four printed out, clipped inside a notebook or stuck beside a monitor, is the shortest way to still know next October who you dressed up as, and who was standing next to you that year.