Tricks and treats for Halloween

With rising expat and NRI population in the city, celebrations from the West are becoming more pronounced. Halloween is just around the corner, and Nisha Ravindranathan has some great ideas for you to decorate your home

Who doesn’t love fright night? The candy, the costumes, the high spirits and howlers…not to mention the inevitable fiascos that ensue, because it’s the one time of year when just about everything is about ghosts. Well, this year, when you send out your party invites, make sure your guests turn up for more than just the boos. Here’s how. If you’ve got it, haunt it:

Invitations

Want a fang club that’s dying to gatecrash your do? Personalise with easy DIY handmade invitations. Create paper jack-o-lantern cards with orange card paper and yellow tissue. Use scissors to carve wonky smiles and glue together so they light up. Alternately, use card paper and paper printables – ghosts, goblins, witches, warlocks, vampires, werewolves – the afterworld is your oyster really. Add a clever note asking everyone to come hang with you, and you’re all set!

Curb appeal

Make sure everybody understands that yours will be a monster party. Translation – begin decorating at your doorstep. Carve pumpkins into jack-o’-lanterns (accessorising doesn’t get cheaper than this). Line them up, either singles or in a mix of sizes, along your curb, yard, or staircase leading up to your door. Use these like you would votive holders. Place LED candles inside, instead of tea-lights or open flames to avoid accidents.

Capitalise on easily available props to set the mood. Use a large broomstick (you can fashion one with twigs and a regular wooden broom handle), spray paint a cauldron-like vessel or two, and stand them up against a wall. Buy a 100-pack of fake spiders and use double-sided tape to create a river of arachnids climbing your door. Paste a silhouette of a witch on a broomstick carefully, on a simple, round, white paper lantern. Hang and screw in a yellow light to watch the witching hour come to life against the light of a supernatural moon.

Fashion a wreath of black streamers, glue plastic eyeballs (available in most novelty stores) onto a cardboard cutout or use vines and twigs, twisting and tying them together to form a ring. Spray paint the latter black before adding paper cutouts of pumpkins, spiders or bats. Create a tombstone to prop up at your entryway, by using chalkboard paint on wood. Scrawl a spooky story.

Theme scheme

Thankfully, fall colours never change, making black, white and orange your go-to shades of choice for indoor embellishing. Here’s a decor tip so easy, it’s frightening! Drape old, even tattered white sheets over your furniture to create a look of ruin and dilapidation.

Not only does this instantly transform your space, it keeps your expensive cushions, throws, rugs, and furnishings safe from makeup that might rub off, food and drink spills, as well as other disasters that go hand-in-hand with party shenanigans. Procure gauze, cheesecloth or light white fabric with tissue-like texture; shred and drape over mirrors, mantels and curtain rods so it looks like there’s a mummy on the loose (in this case, not the terrifying parental kind).

Remember the paper garlands we made as children in school – most usually ones of girls or boys holding hands? Repeat the exercise but with black card paper instead. Create strings of spiders, bats or witches’ hats and drape across your doorway. Alternately, create individual cutouts in various sizes and hang from beams, the ceiling, or other canopies you have at home.

Also, who said balloons are for children only? Upcycle these by painting or pasting on black eyes and a mouth – white balloons for ghosts, green ones for zombies, black balloons with yellow eyes and teeth for creatures of the dark stalking prey.

Stick black tapering candles onto candelabras for across a community supper table.
Use an old white sheet for a tablecloth and spatter it with red paint for extra impact. Line the centre with bowls of black crepe paper flowers, old twigs in oddly-shaped bottles and bowls of fruit in moody hues (think dark berries, red poisoned apples, purple grapes, crimson plums and so on).

For lighting, make luminaries using black spray paint on old tin cans and punching holes in them. Rustle up some miniature mummies by draping mason jars in gauze and gluing or painting on eyes – use as votive holders. Make miniature haunted houses with cardboard roofs over shoeboxes with windows and doors carved into them to let the light out – use LED lights to keep them glowing through the night.

When it comes to window decor, once again, there are options galore. Create dramatic spiderwebs by folding and cutting black garbage bags to drape across your panes. Use food colouring or red paint that can be washed off, dip your hands in the mixture and leave handprints on the glass complete with downward trickling droplets of ‘blood’ and scrape marks that conjure up a murderous struggle.

Should all else fail, fall back once again, on silhouettes — procure printables – knives, axes, hammers and scalpels all scream there’s a psychopath on the loose, like nothing else — trace and cut these out using black construction paper and hang to make perfectly menacing windows.

Don’t forget about the bathroom. Leave a scary message with red lipstick on the mirror – I recommend the classic “You’re next!” Use black foam to cut out eyes and a howling mouth and use sticky double sided tape to convert your toilet lid into a yowling ghoul. Fill your bathtub with water and bubbles, and add red or green food colouring to stir up a seethingly toxic concoction and some trouble.

Halloween is all about fun, frolic and the good natured scares.Go ahead and decorate your homes to throw one wild party for friends and yourself!

(The author is founding editor, www.forbetterorverse.com)