Halloween party tips for haunting chills and thrills

A Halloween party is easy to throw when you know how. Give your guests ghostly chills and thrills!

It’s chilly and dark by the time you head home for the day. Some of you may be having quiet thoughts about seasonal affective disorder. Many of you are already thinking about swapping your fingerless gloves for proper mittens. Winter is coming… but never fear! Halloween is here! When you plan your Halloween party, what are the essentials?

1. Ghostly Guests

You could just text or Facebook your friends, but where’s the fun in that? An excess of Facebook event invites means they often get ignored or lost in a stream of spam. Invite your friends with personalised Halloween party invitations instead. They can display them proudly on their fridge or mantelpiece. They’ll remember the date. They’ll also remember that it was you who brightened their day when that exciting envelope came through the door. There are so many fun and eerie ideas out there and so much imagery you can use on the invites. Classics include using a gravestone, skeletons and haunted houses. Typical Halloween colours are orange, purple, black and green. Alternatively, use silver/gold/bronze metallic pens on cheap black cardboard for an eerie but artistic feel.

2. Daunting Decor

Once you know who’s coming, you’ll have to decorate your pad to scare your guests and make it a party to remember. There are tons of party decorations you can buy or make and some small ideas may make all the difference. Use coloured light bulbs (green, red or black) to enhance your home with a creepy feel – light can completely change your room to make it feel like a place your guests have never been before. In fact, this may be the perfect opportunity for a black light party.

Use glow in the dark insects and skeletons in dark rooms to give your guests a fright. Spiders are great, too… ensure your guests don’t have any phobias that will result in your props scaring them a little more than intended. Drape fake cobwebs over tables, room corners and doorways for your guests to walk into. Plastic bats from the ceiling is obligatory. It’s not Halloween without a bat or two. Hope one drops into a guest’s face! Sure, they’re your friends. For one night only, they’re also your victims. If you’re very lucky, the bats may acquire minds of their own and fly about the room (although they won’t get entangled in guests’ hair because that is, fortunately, a myth).

You should certainly pull out your best pumpkin carving ideas and decorate the house with pumpkins filled with tea lights. You could, for instance, decorate your pumpkins with sequins or jewels for a sparkly spooky theme. Skulls and witches’ hats are also appropriate. If you want everyone to feel like ghosts who have outstayed their welcome in an old manor house by centuries, enshrine furniture in white sheets.

3. Halloween Costume Themes

Dress to kill. If you choose to take that literally, Mookychick has already covered what to wear for a murder.

Ideally, you and your guests will be dressed to match your chosen haunted theme. Massacre at the Oscars would work well: guests are required to dress as dead, injured or horribly zombified movie stars. Or you could subvert the rom-com with One Wedding and a Funeral, where guests dress in wedding gear but covered in blood and wounds. You could also explore the possibilities of a Zombie Olympics or go back in time, Twilight Zone style, to haunted hippies of the sixties or a seventies dead disco. With Zombie Day just passed, you may well finding yourself needing to brush up on your makeup skills with this Halloween Zombie makeup tutorial.

It’s always an excellent idea to get gothic over Halloween. If you’re a Goth for life, not just for Halloween, you may benefit from Mookychick’s Goth Halloween survival guide. Otherwise, how about saving money by making your own potentially gothic Halloween costume?

Hairdresser Anya Goy has tips on gothic-inspired Halloween hairstyles, and you can look artistic and attractive (and spooksome) on the cheap with this DIY Halloween bin bag dress tutorial. Mookychick also has a few notions on other Gothic Halloween costumes.

Lastly, you could always dedicate your look, your party and perhaps your very soul to beloved Horror Queen Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.

4. Spooktastic Frolics

You’re going to need fun party games to play whilst you’re all dressed up. You could be the gamesmaster (complete with stockings and top hat) for a Halloween knowledge quiz, in which case you’ll probably want to know about the history of Halloween. You could try a game of ‘Pin in the Witch’ where a secret mark is put on a picture of a witch and everyone has to stick a pin in and see who gets closest to the mark. Witches tortured at witch trials often had pins stuck in their arms for witch-testing purposes. Surely one more little prick won’t make any difference.

You can liven up the Box Feel Game by putting Halloween themed objects in it for your guests to root around in. Try spaghetti or noodles to signify intestines and peeled grapes as eye balls to creep out your guests as they feel into a box without seeing what’s really inside. They may initially think it’s a daft game for little kids… but wait until they actually have to do it. Sensation, expectation, dread… they’ll feel it all.

If you and your guests like the idea, you could also make your own ouija board.

No party is complete without a drinking game and this can easily be given a Halloween theme. At the start of the night, concoct six forbidden (either commonly used or Halloween-related) words that no-one is allowed to say. If a word is said? A shot is downed. For non-drinkers or an alcohol-free party, make a blood punch with raspberries, red cordial, soda and red food colouring. If you can serve it in a cauldron, all the better. You can also have spooky ice cubes in your drinks by freezing some plastic buys into your ice cube trays. Or you can freeze blueberries into ice cubes… their dark colour is very Halloween, and a few of them floating around in a glass looks uncomfortably like frogspawn.

If you can brave the cold, set up a tent in a garden and have a sleepover while you tell each other urban legends with only a torch and the sounds outside for company.

5. Tricks and Treats

You need food at your party. Decorate cupcakes with purple or orange icing. Create a frankly disturbing jelly with a Creepy Halloween Jelly Gelatin mold set – Brain and Heart.

You can either buy a chocolate fountain (around £18.00) or hire one from a chocolate fountain company. You can experiment with food dyes in the chocolate. As well as the standard delicious marshmallows and strawberries for dipping, try unusual items like mini chilis and sliced onion and crispy bacon.

Make your guests do something a little daring this Halloween. Make them try something new… and they’ll thank you for giving them a Halloween party to remember.