Halloween is not just spooky fun – this holiday has become big business, with 3.4 billion dollars spent on decorations alone in 2021. Just drive around your neighbourhood, and you will find several houses and yards decorated with ghosts and goblins. You’ll probably even have at least one homeowner who went all out and created quite the spooktacular display with their Halloween house decorations.
The last two years have been irregular for this spooky holiday. Recent Halloween celebrations have been limited due to COVID, with many people preferring to stay at home to avoid catching the virus. Across Canada, Halloween festivities were either cancelled or allowed limited participation.
2022 will be the first year to celebrate Halloween in full form after COVID, so why not go ‘all in’ and make your front yard stand out? Here are 15 wickedly fun ideas for getting into the Halloween spirit.
1. Get Creative with Your Carved Pumpkins
One of the easiest ways to show your Halloween spirit is with a carved pumpkin by the front door. Make it unique by going beyond the traditional jack-o-lantern. Carve a scary or funny face, your favourite pet or some shapes into the pumpkin and stick a fake candle inside. If you’re not too artistic, carve a word like Boo or your last name. Using a drill instead of a knife, you can cut small holes in various designs, allowing light to pass through for a more fall-like image that extends beyond Halloween.
2. Get Spooky with Your Lighting
Add spooky lighting to your Halloween haunted house decorations. Use black or orange lights to create a mysterious atmosphere in your front yard. You can hang the lights around the roof with a covered deck or the front door. Wrap them around columns or a stair rail to add a unique touch.
3. Set Up a Fog Machine
One of the best ways to enhance your Halloween haunted house decorations is by adding a fog machine to your holiday décor. The fog will create an air of mystery regardless of what else you use. If you combine the fog machine with spooky lighting, you’ll have all the neighbours watching over their shoulders as they walk past your home.
4. Bury Your Dead
Have fun when you make a statement for Halloween. Decorate the house with a graveyard in front. You can find gravestones or create your own with a plain stone on which you spray paint a name and header. You’ll want to have a couple of half-buried skeletons and maybe a disembodied hand coming out of the dirt. Paint a bloody hand on the fence or garage for a scarier effect.
5. Just Hanging Out
If you have a large tree in your front yard, you can use it in your Halloween display. Find a limb with an overhang and string up a ghost or witch to float off the ground. You can hang multiple ghouls in various branches to create an even spookier effect. If you don’t have a suitable tree on your property, consider using a plant hanger in the ceiling of your covered deck or entry.
6. Make a Statement with Your Arched Entry
An arched entry is a perfect place to use your Halloween house decorations. Hang lights over the arch, and stretch cobwebs over the top with a plastic spider or two attached. Stand an old broom up by the entryway. Next to it, you could set up a witches’ pot. On Halloween night or at a Halloween party, use dry ice to create the illusion of a brew cooking to entice your neighbours to see what’s for dinner.
7. Switch Out Porch Lighting
Here’s another simple idea to make your home festive even if you don’t have time to do much decorating. You can replace the regular porch lights with a purple or green light bulb. The change in colours will add a spooky touch without much work.
8. Make Your Scary Decorations Larger than Life
Set up a projection lighting kit to project a scary scene against your house or garage door. You’ll find these kits with a witch riding on a broom, ghosts floating in the air, or a skeleton dancing. You can control the speed and colour of the images, and the display can be active for several hours each evening. Because these displays can be quite large, your house will be the talk of the neighbourhood.
9. Cause Arachnophobia
If you like those little plastic spider rings you see in some trick-or-treat bags at Halloween, you may want to set up a place where they feel at home. Cover all your outdoor space with spiderwebs. Put it on your patio dining set, the grill, the deck rail, and even in the trees. This project is quick and easy, takes only a few minutes and has a significant impact. You can find spiderwebs as large as one side of your house with an even larger spider to frighten the neighbours, delivery drivers, and anyone else who visits.
10. Go Big with Inflatables
Visit any home improvement store to find the latest in-yard inflatables. Like inflatable Santas and reindeer at Christmas, Halloween has become a popular time to display dragons, skeletons, ghosts, and more. With just a little air, you’ll find just about any scary character can become larger than life. One of the excellent features of these inflatables is that it only takes a few minutes to air them up and deflate them when the evening is over until the next day.
11. Scare Visitors With Motion Lighting
Give your friends and family a scare with motion lighting. Just imagine they walk to your front door in the dark when mysterious lights come on, causing them to jump. Some of these lighting kits include a scary voice that starts speaking simultaneously to double the scare and fun. Some lights may be strobes, while others may have a lightning effect or flicker for a haunted good time.
12. Get Your Music On
What’s a spooky holiday without a little scary music? Set up a radio or a playlist on your phone and broadcast via Bluetooth speakers in your yard. You can find the soundtracks to some famous Halloween movies and play the theme from the Addams Family, Hocus Pocus, or the Nightmare Before Christmas. Adding music to other Halloween haunted house decorations will enhance the effect.
13. Take the Garbage Out
Is it time to rake the lawn from all the fallen leaves? Use that time to decorate your yard using white or orange garbage bags. Fill the bags with leaves to make soft and spooky ghosts and pumpkins. You can even use a sharpie to draw a face for an even more fun effect. Get bags in different sizes to create an entire family of ghosts, pumpkins, and other frightfully fabulous characters.
14. Create Some Fun Characters
Maybe you never learned how to make balloon animals, but you can create fun characters anyway. Blow up black, white, orange, or even purple balloons. Draw scary faces on them and hang them on a deck rail, in a tree, or on the frame of your porch swing. They can be as simple as two round black circles for the eyes and one for the nose. You can also go more elaborate with a toothless smile or a frown. You can even get the kids to help as a fun family project.
15. Get into Character
Become part of the Halloween décor by dressing up as an appropriate character. Whether you’re hosting a Halloween party or handing out candy to neighbourhood kids, it’s more fun for everyone when you’re in costume. You can go as elaborate as you want or keep it simple with a black hat, robe, and broomstick.
You can make your home stand out with some wickedly fun Halloween house decorations. None of these 15 ideas require much work or money, but they still create impressive results. Take your home’s exterior from plain to fabulous this holiday season with some spooktacular design ideas.
