Hoverboard Aladdin and Edward Snowdenhands: 2015 Halloween costumes that have already gone viral

With an ever-expanding number of people going online to find and share cool stuff, "winning" the internet around Halloween takes a lot more creativity than it used to. 

It also takes some serious hard work, technical skills and knowledge of how the game works.

One of the keys to going viral with your Halloween costume (for the right reasons, at least) is getting it uploaded early for all to see.

Few people seem to care about what anyone outside of their Facebook feed dressed up as after the big night has passed, and even fewer are searching for costume inspiration.

With two days left to go until Halloween, we've hit prime time for creeping costumes online.

Below are some of 2015's most widely shared get-ups to date — and if the past few years have taught us anything, they may very well be the best you'll see all season (unless, of course, you score an invite to Heidi Klum's party.)

Hoverboard Aladdin

Questions about why those "hoverboard" things rappers have been obsessed with for the past year exist can now officially cease. 

This is why those hoverboards (or are they segways?) exist.

Vine user Mo Khan can show you the world, shinier,  more shimmery and splendid than ever before as Hoverboard Aladdin — the most original costume we've seen this year by far — and also one of the most popular, with more than 20 million loops of Vine alone.

IHOP 

Paralympic ski racer and author Josh Sundquist, who lost his left leg to cancer as a child, has been crushing the Halloween costume game now for half a decade with his clever one-legged costume ideas.

"My Halloween costumes are just metaphors for this idea that some of the negative circumstances that are happening to you, that have happened to you, may occasionally lead to unexpectedly positive outcomes," he said in 2013 after revealing his viral flamingo costume.

He's also dressed up in the past as the Gingerbread man from Shrek, the leg lamp from A Christmas Story and a foosball player.

Sunquist explained on his blog this week that 2015's IHOP costume, a tongue-in-cheek nod to the U.S. breakfast-food restaurant chain, is "a classic amputee joke."

"IHOP neither paid me nor were they aware I was making this costume," he wrote. "I don't even eat there (no gluten free pancakes)."

Machine-animal hybrid from a dystopian future

If you're more into scary than hilarious, Michael Tapson of Chicago and his 9-year-old daughter, Mia, have the costume of your dreams (and everyone else's nightmares).

"My daughter and I spent a weekend creating our vision of a machine-animal hybrid and the little girl it protects," wrote Tapson in the caption of a video he uploaded to YouTube on Sunday. "We are excited to terrorize our neighborhood this Halloween!"

Whether or not the neighbourhood will be terrorized remains to be seen, but the video and images Tapson posted online have done a great job of spooking out the internet.

Edward Snowdenhands

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Edward Snowdenhands, created and modeled above by Brian Matthews, is another costume that strikes the perfect balance between nostalgia and the zeitgeist. 

The costume is an apparent homage to a prank pulled on U.S. television channel HLN by writer and comedian Jon Hendren late last month. 

Hendren, a popular Twitter satirist, infamously spent an entire TV segment talking about Edward Scissorhands after being invited onto a program to speak about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's new Twitter account.

For those unfamiliar, Edward Scissorhands is a 1990 film about a young man with scissors for hands starring Johnny Depp.

Avocado

As Redditor THE_UPDATE_UPDATER proves, you don't need tons of money, time or technical know-how to make a costume that's a hit online.

In his case, all it took was some cardboard, creativity and clever cut-out placement.