Your Halloween party decorations will probably include the standard range of items, but there are some simple little extra tricks you can easily add that will add a scary surprise, and give your guests a chilling fright and cause a few screams.
You will no doubt be planning plenty of carved pumpkin jack-o-lanterns lit with candles placed around your party room, their ghoulish faces gleaming in the subdued lighting. Luminous images of ghosts and ghouls of all description can be bought and hung to glow in the low lighting around the walls of the room. Gossamer cloth or commercial imitation spider web quickly creates a haunted house atmosphere.
Suspending decoration items like bats, flying witches on broom sticks, large hairy spiders, balloons with ghostly faces, skeletons and the like from the ceiling, down to to face level, will have your guests dodging around among these horrors in the flickering candle light, and always on the lookout for their next fright. Distributing plastic spiders and other shocking surprises around where people sit, or on tables among the drinks and plates, will help to keep your guests on edge.
If you hang a number of thin threads from the ceiling in different parts of the room they will not be noticed in the subdued lighting, but will be felt unexpectedly as your guests move around. This can be a surprising sensation, and suggests a ghostly presence that will often get a shrieking reaction from your guests.
Frights come when unexpected things suddenly happen. You could set up a few lights on timers to occasionally briefly illuminate scary scenes or pictures in two or three otherwise dark corners of the room. The effect is increased if you are able to coordinate sound effects to draw attention when the light comes on. Depending on the age group of your guests, you could create a frightening three dimensional scene that is briefly revealed, such as a ghostly headless or hanging man.
Fog machines are readily available from party hire specialists. Used with lighting effects, they will immediately create a chilling and eerie atmosphere in the room as the fog floats across the floor of the room around the feet of your guests. If you can, set up an artificial tombstone or two to conceal the exact location of the machine.
With large screen televisions becoming more common, you could play a horror movie in the background, with the sound turned down, to help to set the scene.
Music plays a large part in creating the atmosphere. At least for the early part of the party, Halloween sound effects and music like the classic Monster Mash will heighten the sense of tension in the room. With the party in full swing later on, your guests will expect to hear their favorite dance music tracks. A compilation interspersing Halloween sound effects would help to maintain the atmosphere.
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