- Behind the Scenes
Ideas for Halloween events
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By Ryan Moss
- 24 Oct 2022
- 12 min read
There are a variety of ideas for Halloween events this October. From fun with the family and fancy dress club nights to spine-chilling hide-and-seek events, it’s a versatile holiday that can be tailored to a number of potential audiences.
Halloween is well-loved in Britain, too. According to Finder.com, pumpkin purchases are on the up. In 2022, Brits are expected to spend £28.95 million on pumpkins, while Halloween spending is estimated to hit £687 million.
What does this mean for promoters?
It means strategising ideas for Halloween events should be an important part of your yearly planning.
Halloween offers the chance to deliver a unique event, due to the variety of event types you can organise. It’s also a chance to promote a successful event because, as the stats show, people are willing to part with their money to celebrate the popular holiday.
In this article, we’ve compiled ten ideas for Halloween events this year.
Family-oriented ideas for Halloween events
Pumpkin Carving
This Halloween, consider organising a Pumpkin Carving event. You could structure the event so that people arrive, spend some time carving their pumpkins, refresh themselves with some spooky snacks and take them home at the end of the event.
Alternatively, you could organise some light competition. Have your guests arrive and pick a specific design to carve into their pumpkins. Then, gather everyone together and pick a winner, awarding prizes to first, second and third place.
Encourage guests to come dressed in their most spooktacular costumes and, for extra immersion, transform the venue to get that Halloween feeling.
The finished pumpkins carved by your attendees could make for great social content to promote your brand. Arrange a display and fill the pumpkins with tea lights and candles, decorating the space around them with creepy crawlies, skeletons and other unearthly trinkets.
Halloween Hunt
A family-orientated Halloween Hunt could take place in a venue with a specific history or a piece of outdoor land. A museum, barn, or gallery would work well here. You can create mysterious clues based on the event’s overarching theme, tasking your attendees to find the clues and solve the mystery to win prizes on the night.
Again, you can encourage fancy dress to create extra immersion and decorate the venue you choose to ramp up the Halloween setting.
Holding events in museums and galleries brings an educational aspect to the event. If the venue you choose is steeped in local history, the event can encourage people to learn about the place they live, amplifying the unique parts of the area’s culture. You can use the historical context in your marketing to make your event stand out.
Halloween Arts & Crafts Event
An arts and crafts event where families can come together and create home decorations is fitting for Halloween.
Situated in a community hall or section of a library, you can arrange stations for people to create artwork. Decorating pumpkins with Halloween-themed colours, artwork and text; bats made from black felt; or hanging decorations of ghosts, witches and spiders are just a few crafting ideas.
Consider collaborating with youth and community groups that work with arts and crafts. You can strengthen links between groups in the area, and market your event across different channels and audiences.
When everyone has made their decorations, showcase the designs of your attendees and upload them to social channels for promotional purposes.
Halloween Festivals
Hosting a Halloween festival that caters to all ages can be an effective way to pack numerous ideas for Halloween events into one.
Here, you can combine Halloween mask designing, face painting, story time events, physical and digital trails and fancy dress competitions all under one umbrella. You can award prizes for fancy dress competitions, and with your trail events, award prizes for the attendees that collect all the checkpoints on the trail.
The event can work indoors or outdoors, or if you have a big enough space, you could combine the two. This will give the event some variety, and the outdoor setting means you can bring in food and drinks stalls so your guests are refreshed from beginning to end.
Ideas for Halloween events aimed at adults
Ghost Hunt
Halloween Hunt events aimed at adults can lean into horror, supernatural and paranormal themes.
Much like the family-orientated Halloween Hunt event style, a ghost hunt provides an opportunity to make use of a venue with an interesting historical background.
The Grimsdyke Halloween Ghost Hunt and the Ghost Hunt at Ramsgate Tunnels — two events listed on Skiddle — are both set to be held at venues with a rich history. Sourcing venues like these means that you can play into the mythology of Halloween, setting the context for the event before it has even begun.
Getting the venue choice right will go a long way in delivering a memorable experience to your attendees. A night like this hinges on its participants being in the right mood. For example, the natural environment of a tunnel network will set the atmosphere and get the right emotions whirring.
Murder Mystery
A murder mystery event can be creative in its execution. The setting could be an ominous whodunnit set in the smoky atmosphere of a downtown 1950s jazz club, a masquerade ball where events have turned awry, or a simple approach where your guests arrive in their best Halloween styles.
These are just a few themes. The internet is filled with writing prompts, story ideas and guides to give you extra inspiration when picking a setting.
For the backstory, it’s up to you which route you go down. Some events give detailed backstories so the attendee can really get into the role; other events choose to write a few key details and let the attendee take the reigns when interpreting the character.
Food and drink choices come into play here, too. You could choose to serve general food and drink options or serve up some Halloween-inspired drinks to go along with the spooky happenings at your event.
Halloween Hide & Seek
Traditional games such as hide and seek can be transformed into heart-pounding event experiences. This Halloween, consider repurposing a venue space into a scary hide-and-seek game, where your attendees get a set time to hide from in-costume characters.
Clowns are a good starting point for your seekers. From Pennywise to Poltergeist, scary clowns have been a fixture in horror imagery for decades. The prospect of a few of these trying to track your attendees down is sure to get their heart racing.
If the venue you choose has multiple rooms, you can have your attendees taken to another room, their consequence for being caught. The prospect of being caught, the claustrophobic nature of the setting and the atmosphere of your seekers will create an exhilarating ride for your customers.
Halloween Brunch
Halloween can also be a light-hearted celebration, a chance to celebrate the pomp and pageantry of the holiday.
A brunch event is perfect for this. You can adapt movies like The Rocky Horror Picture Show or Little Shop Of Horrors to brunch events. Here, you can play music from the films, host quizzes, karaoke, offer Halloween-themed drinks and encourage your guests to arrive in their best costumes, with prizes on offer for the best dressed.
A Halloween drag brunch takes the idea further. With this, you can keep the music and quiz aspect but have your queens in Halloween-themed outfits, singing popular Halloween numbers to keep your guests entertained.
The brunch event type offers versatility, too. With brunches often taking place in the afternoon, you could market it as a warm-up for the weekend or a Sunday event to see off Halloween as the month of October ends.
Ideas for Halloween events at a nightclub
Fancy Dress Club Night
You can organise a Halloween-themed club night in various ways.
As the holiday is popular with attendees, it’s worth offering something different than usual to your customers. You could book a popular headliner with a greater reach, a DJ playing an all-night set or expand into two rooms to offer a range of genres on the night.
This makes the event that extra bit special for your attendees, and you can use the Halloween factor to promote the event in the marketing.
But the night doesn’t solely have to focus on the music. You can encourage your guests to arrive in fancy dress or set a dress code; so the outfits align with a specific theme. From there, you can hold competitions. The person with the best costume could win a free drink or free tickets to your next event.
Silent Disco
A silent disco can offer flexibility when choosing a venue. With these event types, you don’t have to worry about noise curfews and the equipment takes up less space.
Your venue could be a warehouse or a space that isn’t typically used for club nights but can work for them. Once the safety measures are in place, you can transform the space into a setting fit for Halloween, immersing your guests in a frightful world.
Consider booking DJs playing specialist genres, curating your own playlists or booking two DJs in a ‘head to head’ set. The two performers will be playing a set of different genres, partaking in friendly competition and giving your attendees a choice of music.
You could hire out a photo booth with Halloween-inspired props, giving your attendees a chance to make memories full of laughs.
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