Tiny bar flies started gathering around me.

My new club companions – literally the bugs – were the only ones drawn to my costume. The mush of barfy vegetables and glue poured down the front of my pink T-Shirt with “PARTY BARBIE” stamped on it was starting to smell.

It was another Halloween and marked another costume flop.

The year before I had a blue sash strung across me reading, “Miss Plastic Surgery 2006.”

Forgetting my short stature, the telltale sash was lost in a sea of bodies. Instead, all people saw was my over enthusiastic facial expression, kept in place by see-through medical tape.

My friend Kumal, dressed in amazing tight bell bottoms and a glorious afro, was having the time of her life. “Beyonce” people called out as they made the connection between beauty and the Austin Powers get up.

I got stares too. They were confused stares. People were afraid to comment on what was possibly my natural appearance. Most opted for a quick charity smile and then fled.

Although sometimes isolating, I’m proud of my overly complicated and quirky costume failures. You see, Halloween’s creative spirit is under threat.

Witches, once proud of their wart-ridden noses, find themselves locked in closets. White-faced moaning, groaning zombies and their friends who met bloody deaths no longer drag their lifeless bodies through the night.

Those creepy, witty or conjured creations, once queens of the dark event, are little more than endangered species.

A uniform army of nondescript vixens is gaining power. Each year they gear up on over-prescribed weapons – thigh-high stockings, liquid-filled pushup bras and don’t forget the “innocent” angel wings. Blushing, this new cutesy army spits on imagination. They’re killing my second favourite celebration, a chance to show off one’s creativity – a fashion show of wit.

I understand its growing power, as a teenager I felt the massing army’s wrath. My one-legged can-can girl or the bird attack victim got laughs but lost the eyes of crushes among an ocean of panties. The emotion of feeling wanted is one of this new army’s most powerful tools.

No one can really pinpoint when the thongs ... I mean throngs of fishnets and turbo-boosted busts started their sneaky extermination of Halloween.

The rumblings have been around for a long time, Capilano University psychology instructor Ellen Domm said.

In the 60s and 70s, the world’s June Cleavers threw their aprons aside. Hair loose and bra-free they broke from their cookie-cutter homes to claim their rights, including those over their bodies.

But somewhere along the line, the sexiness of being powerful and in control of one’s body got mixed up with centre spreads and 16-year-old singers on stripper poles. Somewhere along the line, Halloween, and all its gooey, creative glory, was smothered by naughty maids and nasty nurses.

“In order to be sexy and hot [a lot of young girls think] they have to be raunchy,” Domm said. “That it’s the only way to be sexy.”

This Halloween, with sanitizers and a giant vaccine in hand, I will stand tall in my Swine Flu Terminator outfit and salute the few remaining Halloween soldiers fighting for the flame of creativity.

It’s time raunchoween feels our wrath.

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Rebecca Aldous is a reporter with the North Shore Outlook.