Skip to content

Horror T-Shirts for Halloween

The masks, the monsters and the slashers. Adult sizing.

Adult sizing. These characters come from films made for adults. They are kept off every children’s section of this site, including the not-scary page, regardless of whether small sizes are manufactured.

Horror apparel has an advantage over most licensed clothing, which is that its designs were built to be legible in a single glance in poor light. A mask is a logo by construction — symmetrical, high-contrast, and readable at a distance — and that is exactly what a shirt needs.

The characters below are drawn from films rated for adults. Several are manufactured in children’s sizes; this site does not carry them on any page aimed at children regardless.

How this list was made. Characters from horror properties whose source material is rated for adult audiences. These are excluded from every children’s section on this site.

Annabelle is the most commercially successful thing in modern horror that barely moves.

Beetlejuice inverts its genre completely.

Don Mancini wrote Child's Play as satire before it was horror.

Universal Monsters

Bram Stoker's 1897 novel did not invent the vampire but it fixed almost everything modern audiences assume about them.

Ripley exists as a woman by accident, and the accident is instructive.

Frankenstein's Monster

Universal Monsters

Mary Shelley was eighteen when she began Frankenstein.

Freddy Krueger is the slasher villain who talks.

Ghostface is not a person, and that is the design.

The Addams Family

Gomez is written as pure appetite, and it is the most cheerful characterisation in the property.

Hannibal Lecter

Hannibal Lecter works because he is almost never doing anything.

The novel and the film disagree about Jack Torrance so completely that they are effectively different characters.

Two things about Jason Voorhees are routinely misremembered, and both are worth stating.

Saw was made for around a million dollars by two Australians in their twenties.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre predates Halloween by four years and effectively wrote the rulebook the…

The mask that defines the entire slasher genre cost about two dollars.

Morticia Addams

The Addams Family

Morticia is the still centre of the family and the reason the whole premise works.

Norman Bates is the point at which horror stopped being about monsters and started being about people.

Pennywise is a shape the creature wears rather than the creature itself.

Pinhead is not a demon and not a killer in the slasher sense, which is the detail most people miss.

William Peter Blatty based the novel on a 1949 case he had read about as a student.

Samara is the American version of Sadako, from Koji Suzuki's 1991 novel and Hideo Nakata's 1998 film.

The Bride of Frankenstein

Universal Monsters

The Bride is on screen for roughly three minutes and is one of the most recognisable characters ever created.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon

Universal Monsters

The Gill-man is the last of Universal's classic monsters and the only one designed by a woman.

The Invisible Man

Universal Monsters

H. G. Wells published the novel in 1897 and its argument is bleak and modern.

Universal Monsters

The 1932 film exists because of a newspaper story.

Universal Monsters

Almost everything popularly believed about werewolves was invented for this film in 1941.

The Xenomorph is the most influential creature design in science-fiction cinema.

Valak was not in the film as shot.

Wednesday Addams

The Addams Family

Wednesday existed as an unnamed cartoon child for twenty-six years before the 1964 sitcom required names.

More for Halloween

All halloween →

Halloween T-Shirts for Kids That Are Not Scary — Spooky enough to count, gentle enough for a four-year-old.
A T-Shirt Instead of a Halloween Costume — For when you have to acknowledge the day but do not want to dress up.
US size guide — work out the size before you order.

Written and maintained by The CharacterTshirts editorial team · How we work