Photo by Lakshyana KC

New York, USA — On the afternoon of Friday, Oct. 31, blue-collar workers lined up around the block to enter Ricky’s Halloween Superstore on 40th and Broadway. The faithful collected their bottles of fake blood, scars and warts prosthetics, vampire teeth and face paint in preparation for the night’s festivities.

A holiday of Christian roots, Halloween is traditionally a day to honor the dead through both fear and humor — trick or treat. Even as the holiday becomes more secular, with the attendance of provocative cheerleaders and firefighters in sleeveless uniforms, the costumes in this year’s New York parade remained faithful to Halloween’s roots.

By nightfall, a colorful spectrum of the undead were pulsing in and out of New York’s Halloween parade on 6th Avenue. Grand marshal Whoopi Goldberg presided over the parade on a float representing this year’s theme, The Garden of Earthly Delights, but was not seen by all, as congestion and the parade’s movement kept crowds milling on the streets of the West Village. Captured in this slideshow are the disfigured villains, the deranged clowns, Godzillas on the loose and an innocent lamb that bobs above the crowd on his father’s shoulders.