So you want to be a robot for Halloween? If you want to make yourself look truly scary, you have your work cut out for you. To construct an outfit that makes you appear to be fully mechanized, you might need the skills of a machinist, and to pull of the wearing of it, you'll need the grace and dexterity of a mime.

In the following pictorial list of the 10 best robot costumes, we found that rather than using industrial manufacturing techniques, a few of our favorites brought industrious humor and ingenuity to the task. Others, well, they were built by the professionals:

 

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1. Giant Wolfmech
It's over 9-feet tall and even has working fingers manipulated by servos attached to the wearer's hands. Check out inside the wolf's mouth — there's a tiny frog at the controls, moving the levers in sync with the wearer's legs.

 

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2. Ten-foot Robot
This costume is terrifyingly real, but the scariest thing about it? Its price tag, somewhere north of $40,000.

 

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3. Transformer that actually transforms
What good is a Transformer costume that doesn't actually transform? Akihide Fukui of San Gabriel, California figured out a way to collapse his costume into a vehicle and back again with no batteries required. Brilliant.

 

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4. Robot costume, or real robot?
We're still trying to figure out if this is a robot or elaborate costume. Either way, this one's bringing the goods, carried in on a cart, interacting with crowds and scaring small children.

 

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5. Beyonce's Robo-licious Robot
When Beyonce Knowles showed up in this showstopping costume at the BET awards, She had a good reason: after shedding the mechanized armor to reveal something a lot more supple, she belted out an appropriate song, "Get Me Bodied".

 

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6. Cardboard + duct tape + laptop = robot
Running out of time before the Halloween bash? Get a laptop, a cardboard box or two, tape it all together and you're good. Just launch the Windows performance monitor on the laptop and talk a lot in a monotone voice, and you'll be the hit of the nerdfest.

 

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7. Big bunch of boxes but HUGE
Good lord, we're hoping those boxes are light, because this sucker is huge. If they're Styrofoam (or carbon fiber?), this open-air costume is probably surprisingly comfortable. Just hope the guy doesn't want to drive home in a compact car wearing this getup.

 

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8. Cylon Centurion
Shiny, scary, looks too real to be true. It looks real because it is — this is an original Cylon Centurion costume from the first Battlestar Galactica series filmed in 1978. This one makes us want to return to Earth, post haste. Are we there yet?

 

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9. Homemade MeKeVoRkA costume
Get a few strands of electroluminescent wire to light up on your Halloween costume, and you have our undivided attention. Now if someone will just tell us what the heck a MeKeVoRkA is, we'll be set.

 

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10. Red Kelly
Okay, Manga aficionados, here's a power armor costume with a weapon big enough to ruin Halloween for an entire city. If you see this cross between a fire hydrant, garbage cans and a fire extinguisher flying at you, call your local superhero for help, or from the looks of it, maybe a garbage collector or even Joe the Plumber.