How to Decorate for Halloween

July 20th, 2009 · No Comments

Just because you love decorating that doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be able to come up with tons of ideas for how to decorate for Halloween. If you don’t usually celebrate the holiday (or it’s been a while) or you’re planning unusually elaborate decorations, it can be hard to know where to begin. To help get you started, here are a few things to think about when deciding how you’re going to decorate this Halloween.

Kids or Grown-ups?

The first thing to take into account when you plan how to decorate for Halloween is your audience. Are you decorating for you little munchkins and their friends, some of whom think the Teletubbies are scary? Then Jack-o-lanterns with pleasant smiles and cute black kitties with orange bows are probably enough.

Of course, if you’ve taken a look at the kids’ books on the market today, it’s pretty obvious a lot of kids love scary stuff. You’ll probably want to keep the gore to a minimum, but you can goal all out with the Gothic and ghosts.

Deciding how to decorate for Halloween where adults are concerned is another matter. In most cases, your only challenge will be making your decorations and prop scary enough. Keep in mind that some adults don’t tolerate gore very well. The problem is often that while ghosts and vampires are easy to pass off as fake, murder, severe physical deformities, and the criminally insane are all too real.

Others may have had personal experiences—ranging from a Ouija board scare to witnessing a murder—that put them off certain types of decorations and props. When you choose your Halloween party decorations, be sensitive to your guests’ tastes and everyone will have a lot more fun.

Spark the Imagination

Few decorations are scary all by themselves. Sure, a full-sized skeleton lounging on the couch might be creepy, but it won’t scare most people. The scary part is largely up to the imagination.

Sudden, unexpected motion and noise, such as a prop that sits up and screams or just a book falling off a shelf, triggers a fear response because we imagine that something might attack us. The flickering light in the attic makes us wonder who—or what—is up there and what they might do if they decide to come down. We see a “Room for Rent” sign smeared with bloody hand prints and wonder what got the last renter.

So when you’re deciding how to decorate for Halloween, opt for decorations that get your imagination going instead of those that try to look scary in and of themselves.

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