Create a spooky homemade haunted house for Halloween using simple ideas. Consider audience, decorate windows, use a scary soundtrack, and prioritize safety.
Homemade haunted houses are a staple of spooky Halloween fun that’s especially popular across America. While anyone can make a bowl full of eyeballs out of peeled grapes, or get Uncle Joe to leap at visitors from behind a door, why not try taking it a step further to provide your guests with unexpected amusement and fright? By using simple haunted house ideas, you can extend the Halloween fun for days, and just might find it a wonderful way to bond with friends and family.
Before placing a single web or cauldron, try creating a backstory for your haunted house. Perhaps you discovered that your house was built on the graveyard of a mischievous sorcerer, or perhaps a family of tourist ghosts got lost and decided that your house was their vacation hotel. Spend a storytelling evening with your co-conspirators and invent the story behind your haunted house. Write your own spooky story and distribute it to visitors, so they too can follow the unique story you create.
Be sure to consider your audience when coming up with haunted house ideas. Many kids are a little hesitant about Halloween to begin with, and often respond to sudden frights with frantic rather than frightened screams. Remember, not all haunted house ideas have to be scary! Consider basing your haunted house on popular children’s Halloween movies, like It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! o The Nightmare Before Christmas. Seeing familiar characters can help put younger guests at ease.
Even if you’re not using the entire house for display, be sure to decorate every visible window. Take dark cardstock and make large cutouts of witches, ghosts, and ghouls for the windows, placing a lamp behind them for maximum visibility. Consider decorating with Halloween-style Christmas lights in orange, yellow, or purple.
To set the mood in your home, buy or record a scary soundtrack. Consider using soundtracks from suspense movies or horror films, or look for collections of scary sounds like wind, eerie laughter, and werewolf howls. If your home is more fun than scary, look for classic Halloween songs like “Monster Mash,” “Werewolves in London,” or “Bad Moon on the Rise.”
While your home can be crafted however you like, building a haunted house doesn’t have to cost a bundle. Many haunted house ideas are simple enough to pull off and use basic household items. Cover doors with strips cut from black trash bags or old dark linens. Roll out the cotton stuffing to create realistic spider webs. You can even cut large cardboard boxes to create additional walls, allowing you to transform a room into an eerie maze.
Haunted house ideas can get pretty fancy, but don’t forget the basics of Halloween safety. To prevent the danger of fire, use Christmas lights or electric candles to light lanterns instead of real flames. Scatter extra-special candy for guests brave enough to open a vampire’s coffin or look inside a mummy’s tomb. Most important of all haunted house ideas is making sure guests are entertained in a safe and healthy way. Make sure you have adequate adult supervision and multiple emergency exits, should anyone get a little too overwhelmed by your spectacular haunted house.
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