Ranging from the stunningly enchanting to the legitimately phantasmagorical, Palm Valley native Serena Bass takes Halloween to a whole new level.
Don’t ask her who she is supposed to be, however, because she doesn’t have an answer for you.
About a week before the holiday arrives, Bass begins a frenzy of piecing together, digging though rubbish and materializing ideas. In the past, she has been an Ice Bird, a puppet being “mastered,” a traveling fortune teller, with booth included, and a tropical jungle.
“One thing about my costuming is I have all these ideas for different things, then, at the last minute, it all goes haywire,” Bass said. “Then I’ll choose something else.”
Her ideas stem partially from practicality — utilizing random bric-a-brac and debris around her house. The other half, however, is derived from somewhere deep the in cavernous depths of creative appetite.
Growing up, the Bass family always made an effort to scale-up their Halloween costumes. Some of her earliest memories include being a nurse and wheeling around her father on a gurney with his intestines out. From that happy childhood, Bass was inspired to piece together her own ideas out of fragments of household salvage. She remembers during her senior year of high school, she made for a very convincing anglerfish, complete with luminescent fleshy lure.
Over the years, Bass added wings, audio enhancements and even stilts to her costumes. “I was not thinking that walking on stilts was going to be hard,” Bass said. But, “Going out, there were like, flights of stairs to go up. Also going to the bathroom was kind of awkward. Because I was higher than all the stalls.”
Par for the course, Bass doesn’t know what this year’s Halloween will look like. But she has some ideas. She is particularly inspired by the revival of Jim Henson’s Dark Crystal on Netflix.
“If I have an idea I like enough, I'll make it work somehow,” Bass said. “I change my mind a lot though.”
With her creative costumes, Bass enters contests hoping to win. But she says she hasn’t won in years past. “I make these elaborate things, and you would think, there has got to be nothing like this. People are going to love it,” she said. “And then, you go to the Halloween costume contest and the girl with the least clothing wins.”
