Tips and tricks for a spooky Halloween on the cheap! Part 1

So my boyfriend and I are wayyyy into Halloween. For the past three years, we had a party with a whole new theme each year. While it was a blast to see our themes come together, it was also an exhausting process. If you're hardcore about it, you're making a lot of your decor, and that ends up costing both a lot of time and money. I don't regret how gung-ho we've been in the past with our Halloween parties because they were a blast that succeeded in spooking and delighting our friends, but this year we're taking a break.

Don't get me wrong! Our place will still be decorated to the hilt, but as for coming up with an entirely new set of decor for a new theme...it's not happening this year. It's a good thing that three years worth of purchased and handcrafted decorations is currently sitting in our basement. Lots to choose from. :) The new area we moved to actually has trick-or-treaters too, so I'm still psyched for Halloween!

Anyway, since this is my first Halloween season as a blogger, the internet (other than Facebook) hasn't seen any of my past efforts and, like, I have to brag! J/k, I just want to share because it's amazing what you can do with some simple, cheap tricks.

Below is a photo of my favorite part of our haunt: the dungeon! It's not taken in the creepy lighting we had, but this will give you a better idea of what we used for the setup.

Now this is our back porch. If you have porch with a railing like ours, a great way to enclose it and give it that eerie, cut-off from the outside feeling is to simply buy some heavy black plastic from Home Depot or any other hardware store and use a staple gun to affix it to the porch. I say heavy plastic because the first attempt at this effect was done with a cheaper, more lightweight version and every remotely heavy gust of wind blew the dang thing clean off! You definitely don't want that happening the night of your big bash.

See that grungy looking trash can? Inside there is the best motion activated scare you can get for the price. It's called a Haunted Hedge and I've seen them at pretty much any place that sells Halloween props, from Halloween Spirit stores to Target to Big Lots. They usually run about $10-$15 and really give people a good jump scare. You can accomplish a good fright without the use of expensive props. They're so versatile too since you can put them inside pretty much anything. Here is a video illustrating how the Haunted Hedge works.

Most of the other decor on the porch is a mishmash of flea market and garage sale finds. We were lucky enough to find a garage sale that was selling a rusty bucket packed to the brim with rusty tools (those hedge trimmers hanging from the chicken wire on the left are from that lot). The lady selling them gave us the whole thing for $5! If you're doing a dungeon, I really believe flea markets and garage sales are the best route to take. If you buy fake weapons and tools from a Halloween store, you will end up wayyyy overpaying and ending up with a product that looks, well...fake. Now, when using real tools you do want to make sure that the most dangerous ones are secured very tightly. Those hedge trimmers are quadrupled tied to the chicken wire with twine.

I should also note that I've only had adult Halloween parties. This dungeon, even with all of my precautions, is not something I would recommend doing if children are going to be stopping by.

Another relatively cheap item that becomes scary in the dark under a strobe light is chicken wire.

Our porch had a little recessed area maybe a couple feet wide. Again, using the staple gun, we attached some chicken wire (also found at Home Depot for less than $5) over this area and hung "torture tools" and a severed head behind it! This was done with just some small metal hooks and fishing line. It also served as a barrier between these dangerous objects and our guests. That's right folks, that's a real meat cleaver on the left and that evil pincer looking device on the right is what icemen back in the day used to pick up those 50 lb blocks of ice they delivered to families. And of course, your enclosed torture chamber isn't complete without the skeleton of a victim who died there. Muhahahahaha!!!

Now, let's discuss the single most important aspect of your Halloween atmosphere: lighting! It's amazing how much the mood of your apartment or house can change with the right lighting. For the dungeon we had a single red light bulb in the middle of the ceiling and a strobe light on the ground of the recessed torture chamber shining upward.

Around Halloween, places like Rite-Aid and CVS have a ton of colored bulbs. Purple and red work best for the rooms that you want to have a creepier feel. These should be rooms where people don't need to see as much. For rooms with heavy interaction like the living room and of course the kitchen, where they'll need to see to pour drinks and dish out snacks, I recommend orange light bulbs and a string or two of orange lights. Obviously a party is guaranteed to result in somewhat of a mess, but you want to avoid it as much as possible by keeping these areas a bit brighter than the rest of the house. As for string lights, they range from the simple to the more festive and, as I said, one or two plus orange light bulbs in your lamps will usually do it.

Another great atmospheric tip is web, web, web! You can NEVER have too much spider web! It's one of the cheapest things you can buy and if your house doesn't have a sufficient amount of good corners for draping the web, white duct tape is completely invisible to guests once your Halloween lighting is set up.

Well, this post is getting a bit long, so I'm going to end it for now and craft another one showing you some more ways to amp up your Halloween decor!