NEW YORK – Heidi Klum’s Halloween costume in 2025 is meant to be petrifying.

On Oct 31, Klum, the German-American model and host of Project Runway (2004 to present), transformed into Medusa, the powerful monster from Greek mythology said to instantly turn onlookers into stone. Her husband, German musician Tom Kaulitz, dressed as a warrior turned into stone.

Every year, Klum spends months trying to outshine the array of other costumes she has worn to her annual Halloween bash, which has become something of a mainstay in New York City over the last quarter-century.

In years past, she has dressed as a worm, a peacock, a werewolf, an ogress and E.T., the endearing alien from Steven Spielberg’s 1982 film. She has also dressed as a “clone” of herself and as an older version of herself.

As Klum posed before photographers, more than a dozen animatronic snakes seemed to slither from her head, and her eyes glowed with reptilian contact lenses. Her body was encased in a snake suit with a nearly 2.4m tail, which housed a battery pack for the writhing snakes and a set of wheels so she could wriggle around.

Her costume made it difficult to sit down and was so large that she took up most of the blue carpet outside the Hard Rock Hotel in midtown Manhattan.

Mike Marino, a Hollywood prosthetics designer and Klum’s long-time Halloween collaborator, said her costume was inspired by the snake-like, stop-motion Medusa from the 1981 movie Clash Of The Titans, designed by Ray Harryhausen, the celebrated animator and special-effects creator.

“Please have a look at these teeth,” Klum said the day before her party, highlighting razor-sharp acrylic teeth. “If I bite someone in the neck, I could actually go for blood.”

“She’ll kill someone with them,” added Marino, who recently won an Emmy Award for the prosthetic make-up on the HBO Max series The Penguin (2024).