Halloween Party Decorations

Home décor for Halloween isn’t necessarily the same as decorations. Decorations are meant to dramatically change the mood of your home for a holiday or party and while they do a good job of that, they tend to stick out and get in the way. Halloween home décor, on the other hand, lets you enjoy the season without worrying about knocking something over.

Autumnal theme

If you like breaking out the Halloween decorations the first day of October, consider a fall theme. The main benefit is that seasonal décor wears better, so you’re less likely to be bored with it by the time October 31st rolls around. It’s also less limiting. You’re no longer restricted to orange and black, but also have red, brown and yellow, and deep green to work with.

The main theme here is the harvest. Place a bunch of dry corn stocks and gourds near your door and a wreath of colored leaves on the door itself. As Halloween approaches, start adding more holiday-specific décor. Replace the pumpkins with Jack-o-lanterns and hang a ghost in the nearest tree.

Cute and Kid-friendly

If you have kids around, provided they haven’t yet been desensitized to gruesome decorations, you may want to keep the décor in the “cute and charming” department. Friendly looking ghosts and scarecrows, smiling Jack-o-lanterns, and black cats wearing orange bows all add a touch of spookiness without giving the kids nightmares. Reasonably well-mannered witches and vampires also tend to go over well with kids. Any one of these figures can be found as useful items like soap dishes, throw pillows, rugs and lamps.

Spooky Gothic and Victorian Décor

You don’t need to live in a dilapidated mansion to get the creepy look of an abandoned haunted house. String fake cobwebs on the trees and shrubs around your home. Mount a gargoyle over the door (extra points for glowing eyes) or frame the doorway in a Gothic . Then add a few rats or ravens to the mix.

Inside the house, more spider webs and gargoyles will look great. Hang a “changing portrait” in among your family portraits. Replace your ordinary home décor and items with a Gothic style clock, candelabras and wall lighting, chalices or goblets, crosses and elaborately framed mirrors. If you get tired of the Gothic or Victorian, bring in a few unusual pieces of Egyptian home décor for the mysterious feel of ancient Egypt.

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.

As Halloween decorations, props like life-size zombies, ghouls, and machete-wielding horror movie characters are hard to beat. Halloween and haunted house props add a lot to your party decor, but it takes a little know-how to choose the best ones and use them for the scariest effect.

Choosing Your Halloween Props

The only down side of a lot of Halloween props is the price. Some of the better haunted house props go for $200 or more. It’s not unusual to find professional quality animated props priced at over a thousand dollars. In the upper price range, they typically have very realistic detail and look good close up.

Some of the cheaper Halloween decorations, props, and supplies look fine from a distance, but when you get within a few feet in decent lighting, you can tell it’s “a fake.” That means if you’re looking for outdoor decorations, you really don’t need to spend a lot. For indoor or haunted house props, though, the more realistic the better. Still, you can get some excellent props for less than $50. Even $25 can get you something fairly nice.

The quality you need also depends on how often you’re planning to use the props. Although you can use Halloween props year after year, they may only be worth the investment if you’re having a fairly large Halloween party, setting up a yard display for a steady stream of trick-or-treaters or designing a whole haunted house.

Animated Halloween Props

The best animated Halloween decorations, props and models provide an element of surprise. They move or talk when your guests–or even you–least expect it. Most work with a motion sensor, but others turn on at random or are switch activated.

Remember that scary props don’t necessarily have to look like Halloween decorations. When there’s a zombie standing by the door, you kind of expect it to do something. It’s a lot scarier when a seemingly normal object starts acting like it’s possessed. The elegant chandelier starts shaking, the radio switches itself on and starts dialing through stations, something jumps out of the trash can, an antique on the mantel piece starts starts talking or a face in old portrait morphs into a skull.

The Creep Factor

One of the cheapest and easiest ways to get scary Halloween decorations is to use “normal,” yet creep-looking objects. An antique doll or mannequin, a pine box coffin used as a table, a Ouija board just laying around, and realistic looking plastic spiders or other bugs scattered somewhere can all be rather disturbing.

It sounds simple, but it works. My grandmother kept one of her childhood dolls in a doll-sized rocking chair in her bed room. Everyone but her felt the thing was creepy even on a bright summer’s day.

The “thing in a jar” in another cheap, yet creepy prop. Just get a big Mason jar, put a life-like doll, ghoul or alien inside, and fill the jar with water tinted with blue or green food coloring.

Setting up Your Props

Set up is “it” when it comes to using Halloween decorations, props and other trappings. After all, no mater how realistic that rubber disembodied head looks, it won’t be very impressive if you just leave it lying on the sofa in broad daylight. Props work best when you create a scene around them. Drop that head in the bath tube and splash some fake blood around the tub and wall. Put a ghoul in a cage with a disembodied hand followed by a trail of fake blood. Place a head with glowing eyes

Lighting is another way to add to the effect. Black light creates an eerie feeling and, of course, makes white objects glow. Lights in “creepy” colors like red, green and purple lights are disorienting. Strobe have an even stronger disorienting effect. Flicker bulbs work for “haunted” lights. Throw in a fog machine for that extra touch of spookiness, too.

So, before you buy a prop, think about how your going to use it.

If you’re looking for creative and low cost ways to decorate for a Halloween party, you’ve come to the right place. At HalloweenPartyDecorations.ORG, you’ll find not only a selection of affordable, unique, (and scary) decorations, but also ideas on decorating for Halloween that will help you get the most out of your decor choices.

Kids’ and Adults’ Party Decorations

It’s hard to know who loves Halloween more—the little kids or the “big kids.” What I do know, though, is how frustrating it is to be searching for cute kids’ party decorations and keep coming up with gory haunted house props. On the other hand, those pleasantly smiling Jack-o-Lanterns and friendly scarecrows don’t do much for the grownups. That’s why I’ve separated the cute kids’ stuff and the truly scary adult Halloween party supplies into their own categories.

Halloween Home Decor

Given the weather in late October in many areas, chances are your party guests will be spending the majority of their time indoors. That means home decor for a Halloween party had better be good. What it doesn’t have to be is expensive.

A good part of creating a creepy, spooky atmosphere in your home is knowing how to set up your decorations. Not to many decorations look good if you just stick them on an end table somewhere. Using soundscapes and lighting effects will also work in your favor. In fact, I’d say you really shouldn’t do without them.

I’ll also give you some ideas for Halloween door and window decorations, some of which can be surprisingly disturbing is used just the right way. Presuming your guests aren’t too nervous to eat, Halloween table decor adds a finishing touch to your party. If you want to go all out in this department, you won’t have any trouble.

Halloween Outdoor Decorations

Nothing sets the mood for your arriving guests like a well designed outdoor display. Besides, they’re just plain fun to create. In warmer climates, holding some part of your party outdoors around a bonfire adds an special element. Halloween yard decorations like…

If you really want to go all out, You might be surprised just how much of this stuff you can get on a tight budget if you know where to look. Even if you’re not really planning on doing much outdoors, a good Halloween tree decoration hidden behind a big elm or up in the branches of an old maple adds an element of spookiness.

Halloween Decoration Ideas

Decorating for a Halloween party sounds like fun until you really get into the details of what kind of decorations to use and how to use them.

A large part of the problem is that many party hosts don’t come up with a theme. Without a theme, you can end up spending way too much on decor and still not getting much of an effect. Your party decor end up looking like a haphazard second thought.

Choosing a Halloween party theme will help you do more with less. Decor themes include like a graveyard, insane asylum, pirate ghost ship, vampires’ or witches’ ball, horror movie (like Friday the 13th or Psycho), zombie invasion, and a Gothic haunted house for classy party (think “The Addam’s family hosts a dinner party.”)

Halloween decorations and props range from mild creepiness to all-out gore, so whatever theme you choose, you’ll have plenty of decor ideas to select from.

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Thank you for stopping by! We should have our store set up in just a few days now. In the meantime, why not browse through some of our articles to collect some more Halloween party decoration ideas or visit one of the stores listed below.

More Halloween Party Ideas

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• Halloween pumpkin decorations