Halloween Ideas....for adults.

Halloween is my favorite holiday. I’ve always wanted to throw a big costume party and this year is the year.

It’s going to be an adults only party, so I’d like adult ideas for decorating, food (finger food, it’ll start past dinnertime), drink and general spookiness. It’s easy to find schlocky crap, I want COOL shit!

FWIW, it’s going to be indoor/outdoor, so I’m thinking of buying/renting a fog machine for the backyard…though I don’t know how practical that is, I can just imagine people falling into the jacuzzi.

Help!
Boo!

One of your guests should come as a box of Porn Flakes.

Uh. By “adult” I mean no kids. Though that might be fun.:slight_smile:

Assuming it gets here in time, I’m wearing my **UtiliKilt **(though I don’t know what else to wear with it.)

In past years and for Mardi Gras, I’ve [ul][]gone as baby New Year and Baby Mardi Gras (take a piece of flannel cloth, fold it and pin it like a diaper, make a sash out of some 2" ribbon and throw on some beads)[]worn a night shirt…just a night shirt[*]thrown on my ski gear and carried around a snowboard[/ul] Don’t know that any of that will help you, but remember, less is more. :smiley:

If you’re a guy, don’t shave a couple days, dress super casual, and bring a box of Cheerios with a large knife stuck in it.

Cereal killer.

I don’t want ideas for costumes! I’m THROWING a party and want ideas for decorating and food.

errr…you could SERVE a box of Porn Flakes??

Ow! Ow! Why are you hitting me?

For decorating, do a whole “goth altar candles” thing. As if your house is the set of “Goth Talk.”

The last one we hosted, and it’s been lots of years, was a HallowRally - kinda like a scavenger hunt in costume with video cameras. All guests had to go to a variety of places within a specific area, bounded by 3 main roads and a river. Stunts included:

  • sitting on the riding mowers in Sears singing the Green Acres theme
  • finding a kid who would sing a Halloween song for the camera
  • going to a school baseball dugout and doing “baseball things”
  • making a “documentary” about a local landmark

and on and on… we allowed a couple of hours for the running around and taping, then we all gathered to watch the videos and eat. One of our guests worked in a video dept - he combined all the tapes on one and made copies for everyone - it was a hoot!

hmmmmm - I think I may do it again this year…

Now THERE’S an idea!

I think my backyard is going to have to be “Goth Talk”, I fear drunks and candles don’t mix.

[sub]Goth Talk? Is that like Coffee Talk? Do Goth’s even talk, I thought they’re the brooding, silent type?[/sub]

I’m really fond of living wall effects. I don’t know the layout of your place, but if you can put a sheet of the latex somewhere that people would expect to be blocked off, you can startle people all night with it. There’s a lot of other good props and gimmicks on that site, too–they get far too much of my money. Other than those, the Goth look is a good plan–if you do set up an altar prop, you might set a sheet of the living wall into it, and have someone hide in it part of the time to mess with people.

You might try a murder mystery deal, particularly if you can get a few friends to play along as actors–it’s a bit late to come up with a script, but I can dig around a bit if you like. You should unplug and/or hide the phone to help play the “we can’t contact the police” part of the scenario.

I know people hate her, but Martha “Antichrist” Stewart does have some neat Halloween ideas in the holiday section on the http://www.marthastewart.com website.

Other things I have done:

Fill kids’ trick-or-treat plastic pumpkins with candy (ideally the candy of your childhood, not this new-fangled candy) and use as centerpieces or anchoring the buffet table.

Elaborate, but effective: Make tombstones out of cardboard and put goofy directions on them, so arriving guests follow them out to the back of your house, or wherever you want them.

Fill rubber gloves with ice and freeze, then peel off gloves and float the ice hands in your punchbowl.

If your guests like activities, have a pumpkin painting contest by stocking up on smallish sized pumpkins and poster paint. I’m too paranoid to have people with carving knives around alcohol.

Totally messy and designed for kids, but my (drunk) friends liked it too: Toilet paper mummy game – have teams wrap one member with toilet paper to be a mummy, first/best mummy wins.

If you are artistic: Cover your upstairs windows with white paper, and then add a black cardboard cut-out of life size monsters – Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman, etc. After it gets dark, turn on the lights in the rooms, and from the backyard you will just see the silouettes of the monsters who have taken up residence in your home. Instead of monsters, you could also do little bats, ghosts, or spiderwebs. It helps if you put a lamp directly behind the window, as the overhead lighting might not be bright enough to make a sharp sillouette. You can also play around with using colored paper or colored light bulbs.

One of the best things I ever saw at a Halloween party was a guy who found about ten fake black birds, and set them up in a row on a small section of his fence, and on the peak of his roof, a la The Birds. Everyone did a double take when they first noticed them.

D’oh! Okay, try this: start collecting as much and as many of those packing foamies as you can lay your hands on. Buy a bunch of (cheap) white sheets, a ton of hi-liters and some black-lights. Cover the walls with the sheets and cover the floor as deep as you can with the foamies, throw the black-light in the corners and hand the markers to the guest to write on the walls (it glows.)

It’s a freezer! We had one of these in our house in college and it was the best damn party room we ever saw ('course, we had almost two feet of foamies on the floor, enough to almost hide under!)

Try these…

Another idea for punch ice is to fill a couple of half gallon milk/juice containers with water, add a couple of Barbie heads and freeze. Peel off the card board and toss in the bowl.

If you’re getting a keg, fill the bucket with dry ice, instead of regular ice. Add water. Eeeeeeeeeekkkkk! Spooky Beer!

Alright…maybe it’s not so scary, but it is festive!

How about hiring a local agency actress to play a Fortune Teller type?

She could wander around, read plams, sit at a table with a “crystal ball”, etc. She’d give all funny or silly “fortunes”, of course.

Good interactive theater for a spooky party, and a cute icebreaker for guests who may not know each other.

I had a woman do that for a party I threw once, and she was great!

Get a package of refrigerated sugar cookie dough. Roll pieces into lumpy, twiglike things - draw knuckles with a toothpick, and add a 1/2 almond to one end for a fingernail. If you have time, use food coloring to tint the almonds either red or green (or whatever). When you bake them, they look like bony witch fingers.

[sub]That is what you meant by finger foods, right?[sub]

Balance nice site, thanks for the link!

delphica I had already checked out her site (I remembered a catalog I received last year). Did you see that “pumpkin cake”? What a great idea, just using two bundts layered, one upsidedown). I hate that bitch, but she’s got some great ideas. Thanks for the other ideas too.

rundogrun BARBIE HEADS? You sick puppy!

ts I’ll do it! As long as YOU come and clean it up. It sounds like great fun, and sorta kinky, but there’s no way I would do it.

This is not the Sue I know and love.

Ever consider going with the Pirate theme?

You could take plain old boxes, and paint them brown,taping the lid on as if it were hinged. Then, you put false bottoms in them, so that they don’t have to be so damn deep, and you fill the suckers up with candy. Stuff like the chocolate coins, hershey’s kisses, and candy necklaces. Hell, ring pops would even work.

You could even put a “plank” by the hot tub, for those who have been “bad” to walk. The cold coins near the hot tub would, of course, not have to be of the chocolate variety, ifyouknowhatimean.

Clean up involves a shop-vac and a bunch of trash bags. That’s it. It can turn kinky, but the same could be said about any party, at least, any one I’ve ever been to :slight_smile:

“Goth Talk” - Saturday Night Live skit, public access show a la Wayne’s World. “If I were alive in the sixteenth century, then I wouldn’t have to turtlewax the van.”

Curtain all your doorways with black, red, and purple velvet. Decorate with faux stone gargoyles and wrought-iron lamps and lanterns. That sort of thing.

A friend of mine set up a movie camera showing a really creepy cartoon sequence endlessly looped, along with very primal sounding music. This was projected on a screen hung between two rooms.