Halloween Party

Imagine a group of young adults dancing in the dark, the room around them lit only by a bright flashing light, surrounded by fog. Music blasts from a casette player, playing songs like Monster Mash, Macho Man and Time Warp. It sounds like a scene from the ’90’s, right? Except that this happened a week ago, when my friend Erin and I threw a Halloween party. We haven’t had one for awhile, but years ago we used to have Halloween parties every year. And they were always a blast. Late in the summer we were reminiscing about them and decided to bring them back, we dusted off the Halloween decorations that we’ve had stored all these years (like that Freddy Krueger claw above) and started planning!

The Spook Trail
Our party started with a spook trail. Years ago we set up a trail of classic horror films including Nightmare on Elm Street (again, see above claw), Friday the 13th and The Shining. This year we decided to do a different take on it and set up a trail filled with recent horror films, basically, films that were made in the period of time that we’ve been watching horror movies. We chose Scream, The Ring, 30 Days of Night and Zombieland. We had stations and used my brother-in-law, as well as her dad, uncle and cousin as actors. The only scene that we really had to set up was The Ring. Erin created a “television set” out of a box she found and black spray paint. We put the box in a tent. When we took our guests into the tent, we started playing a scene from the film on her computer–one of the scenes in which the little girl crawls out of the TV. And then, Erin’s cousin crawled out of our TV. (Afterward, we found out that one of our guests had considered sitting on the box when we entered the tent. That certainly would have spoiled the surprise!) For the rest of the scenes, we dressed up our actors as zombies, a vampire and Scream and had them scattered in parks right by Erin’s house. We elicited a few good screams during the trail!

The Game
After we were done, we went back inside to warm up and played a game. We wrote the names of scary characters on pieces of paper and put the papers into a pile. Each person chose one and had it taped to their back. We had to guess what character was on our back by asking questions. We opened the game to any character that is scary so we had characters ranging from Norman Bates in Psycho to Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty. We also had a few somewhat obscure characters, like the Killer Klowns from Outer Space (do have any idea how long it took me to guess that… or how many clues I received?).

The Bonfire and Dancing
Of course, no party is complete without a dance party. As described above, we set up a strobe light and a fog machine and our music came from a cassette tape. We had trouble finding speakers to hook up to a computer or an iPod dock, so Erin was getting ready to burn a CD when she discovered a cassette tape filled with party music. Somewhat old-fashioned music to the rescue! We also had a bonfire, a nice way to try and keep warm on a chilly night.

The Movie
We decided to end the evening with a movie. After taking quite some time to narrow our choices down we finally landed on Sweeney Todd, the Johnny Depp version.

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I’m sorry for being MIA this week. I’ve worked every day this week so I haven’t been on the computer much.