Before you become Jane Doe, you are just a doe.
Take a moment to ask yourself what animal is most associated with femininity. You may find that a deer is the creature that first comes to mind.
With their soft, doe eyes and delicate features, these fawns of prey move as if en pointe. The beautiful animals they are, it’s no wonder they’ve become one of the most popular Halloween costumes for young women. But they aren’t always in the forest alone.
Image Courtesy: Pinterest
We see new Halloween couples costumes all the time. Their themes tend to revolve around popular film and television that came out that year and iconic pop culture moments.
When scrolling through carousels of Halloween photo dumps on social media, I was disturbed by a recurring couple’s trend. The hunter and prey costume. This trend, which I traced back to 2023, is when the man or masculine presenting person in the relationship is dressed as a hunter and the woman or feminine presenting person in the relationship is dressed as their partner’s prey.
The most popular iteration of this costume is the hunter and the deer. The deer’s look is makeup focused, using different base products and face paint to mimic a fawn’s brown coat and white spots.
Other disturbing aspects make this costume cause it to hold a darker connotation than the harmless blood and gore of your typical Halloween costume. The deer paints a red target on their forehead with blood pouring down their faces and necks, mimicking a headshot wound.
The hunters are cloaked in camouflage and at times even armed with the weapon they used to catch their kill. This duo costume disturbed me from the moment I first saw it, but what was more disturbing is its increasing frequency with each year.
The hunter and prey costume has earned itself several variations: The fisherman and the fish, the poacher and the cheetah. People are finding more iterations of this Halloween pas de deux because the hunter and deer has become so popular, it is now considered the most basic and predictable couple’s costume.
But it’s just a Halloween costume– you were never meant to think about it this much. The countless videos of young men pretending to shoot their girlfriends and swing their prize kill over their shoulders is meant to be cute, romantic, even.
A woman is killed every 10 minutes by a partner or family member. Another will be murdered in the time it takes you to read this blog post. Yet this is not reason enough to think about it. Rates of femicide, which is globally defined as a gender-related killing, is alarmingly high. In 2024, 60% of femicides were perpetrated by intimate partners and family members, according to the United Nations.
Many women are shushed for reading too far into things. In 2026, this costume trend is too devastatingly relevant to ignore the underlying messages it sends to our culture. Young, college aged women have spent their recent fall semester reading inescapable headlines about Cornell’s Jane Doe, the woman who is suing her former university for mishandling her alleged sexual assault by 7 fraternity members.
When we allow men to make light of their power, to blow smoke off their finger guns and laugh as their partners are weak and bloodied, we are encouraging the toxic masculinity that breeds rape culture and violence. Especially during Halloween, when costumes can be interpreted as consent, according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center.
So, no. I don’t think there is such thing as “thinking too much” when this is the world that women are forced to navigate– when we are responsible for watching our drinks, making sure none of our body language is signaling “asking for it,” and looking over our shoulders for dark figures in the night. We are the prey because no one has ever bothered to tell the hunter to stop hunting.
In a perfect world, it is Halloween, and anyone can be anything. Cautionary tales and prophecies are as meaningless as the veil is thin. This October, the deer are lurking on the edge of the woods between bark and darkness. The only light that touches them are the headlights of death.
Strike out,
Josephine Belliveau
Editor: Kaya O’Rourke
Saint Augustine
Josephine Belliveau is a writer for Strike Magazine, St. Augustine. She’s an aspiring journalist, girlblogger, and the author of strange, strange poetry. When she’s not anxiously showing her girlfriend the first draft of everything she’s ever written, she is most likely crocheting or painting nails. You can read more on Instagram and Substack @unripe.angel.
