Heidi Klum has spent a week posting close-ups of glossy, flesh-colored prosthetics on Instagram, and her followers still cannot agree on what she will become at her 25th annual Halloween party in New York on Saturday, October 31.
The first clue landed on Saturday, October 24: a tight shot of gel-coated pieces, part pink and brain-like, part pitted and yellowish. “What’s my costume?” the 53-year-old model wrote, adding a one-week countdown and her #HeidiHalloween tag.
A second teaser followed on Wednesday, October 28, this time a short video of prosthetics that look like fungus, captioned with a three-day countdown.
The fan guesses so far
Commenters have offered a long list of theories. None is confirmed:
- Monstro Elisasue, the creature from the 2024 body-horror film The Substance
- A Clicker, the fungus-covered infected from The Last of Us
- Vecna from Stranger Things, or a Resident Evil monster
- Something from the sea: a coral reef, a sea cucumber, even Ursula
The teasers also show why her reveals are hard to call early. Klum rarely just wears a character’s outfit. Her looks tend to be built from sculpted prosthetics, body paint and special-effects pieces that hide almost all of her face, and the planning runs for months before Halloween night.
So the close-ups she has shared show only small sections of the finished look, not a full preview. Fans are, in effect, trying to identify a monster from a few square inches of its skin.
Klum herself has given only one firm hint. In September she said the look would be “bloody,” and she later described her approach this way: “We go gory, and we go there.”
Why the reveal matters to her fans
Her special effects makeup artist, Mike Marino, has called this one “one of the most elaborate costumes ever made.” He added: “It’s so difficult to do, and just the complication of it is really challenging.”
That fits a run of escalating builds. Here is how the last few years stack up, by the costume she revealed each Halloween night:
2018: Princess Fiona from Shrek, with husband Tom Kaulitz as Shrek. 2022: a full-body earthworm that left only small patches of her face visible. 2023: a peacock, with performers forming the tail display. 2024: E.T., alongside Kaulitz. 2025: Medusa, complete with a scaled body and snakes.
Put the clues side by side and a pattern shows: the 2026 pieces are organic and wet-looking rather than feathered or scaled, which is why the fungus and body-horror guesses keep rising to the top of her comments.
Klum has said her love of dressing up began with Karneval in Germany, where she grew up. “When I moved to America, I immediately fell in love with Halloween and the spookiness of it,” she said in a 2018 interview. “All that was missing was a fantastic party.”
That party began in 2000. The answer to this year’s puzzle arrives on the night of Saturday, October 31, in New York City.
Image: A Continuous Lean from New York City, United States, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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