31 Days Of Scares – Day 18 – Vintage Halloween Pin-ups

by Shawn Loeffler

In my adventures while looking for Halloween images to include in our 31 Days of Scares articles, I came across these interesting pictures of Vintage Halloween Pin-ups and decided to put them together in one place for you. As you can tell it was a simpler time for these ladies, as today’s successful Halloween pin-ups have to be one of two things, or both: nearly naked and/or adorned in class-A gore. You could argue that the vintage Halloween pin-ups were nearly naked in their day, and they were because it was a much more conservative time, but I’m not sure implied sex was part of what they were expressing with their pictures.

Pin-ups, as the term suggests, refers to the fact that these pictures are to be pinned up on a wall or inside a locker, or wherever you fancy to have them. According to Merriam Webster, the first use of the term was in 1943, however, the act of pinning up these types of pictures dates back to the late 19th century.

Among the vintage Halloween pin-ups included in our small collection today are: Ann Savage, a B-movie actress famous for her role in the noir film Detour (1945); Paulette Goddard, an actress starring in such films as The Unholy Four and The Cat and the Canary; actress Lucia Carroll (Danger Street, The Nurse’s Secret); actress, singer, dancer, and Number 1 pin-up girl of the WWII era famous for her legs, Betty Grable (I Wake Up Screaming); actress Penny Edwards (Alfred Hitchcock Presents); actress Barbara Bates (Triple Deception); actress Barbara Britton (They Made Me a Killer); actress Ella Neal (Mysterious Doctor Satan); actress Eva Gabor (Pacific Blackout); actress Veronica Lake (This Gun for Hire, The Glass Key, Flesh Feast); actress Virginia Welles (Francis in the Haunted House); actress Angela Greene (Night of the Blood Beast, The Cosmic Man, Futureworld); actress Lona Andre; Janet Leigh (I’m not sure if this is the same Leigh from Psycho); actress Ellen Drew (Isle of the Dead, Science Fiction Theatre); actress and dancer Cyd Charisse (Warlords of the Deep).