Spooky Movies Vs. A Bucket of Blood

Much as I like your typical horror movie I find the really creepy ones are the ghost movies. What you don't see is often more scary than a bucket of blood sprayed all over the screen. Remember, for full "jump-in-your-seat-effect" watch it in the dark and no talking.

• The Others - a refined ghost story
• The Woman in Black - I prefer the old one.
• The Awakening - has really good actors and a proper movie look
• The Innocents - creepy old movie based on the short story "Turn of the Screw" by Henry James
• The Skeptic - this is a b-movie that only has a rating of 5,8 at IMDB but it certainly had me jumping in my seat.
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The following are not necessarily ghost stories - but still quality creepy movies:

• Carrie - the original movie with Sissy Spacek
• The Shining - Stanley Kubrick + Stephen King = scary
• Let the Right One In - the original Swedish movie is better than its American counterpart
• Ringu - the original NOT the American re-make
• The Fog - again I postulate that it MUST be the original

How to Make Halloween Poison Bottles

Having props around the house for Halloween is half the fun during Halloween. I like to place poison bottles in either the bathroom, kitchen or where ever I find it appropriate. Not REAL poison bottles of course but fake ones. You grab an empty jar, can, bottle or other container that you think will be "appropriate". If it is see-through you can put stuff in that look like poison:

• Flour
• Sugar
• Rice with a bit of food coloring. I like green myself
• Vitamin pills
• Whatever harmless materials you can find in your kitchen

Notice that your poison should be non-toxic so that if a child get hold of the content it will not get sick.

Here are some of the labels that I use for my bottles. I have put them on a single sheet of paper to make it cheaper to print.

How to Make Your Own Halloween Party Invitations

It is easy to make your own Halloween invitations if you have access to a photo editing program like Photoshop:

1. Decide on a THEME for your party that will be reflected graphically in your invitation. E.g. Dead Rock Star theme can be illustrated by Dead Elvis image.
2. Find inspiration for your LAYOUT. Search Google Images with search words like: halloween invitation, cool invitation, invitation layout.
3. FONTS are great for spicing up your design. If you don't already have grizzly fonts in your editing program there are plenty of free fonts out there. I found 1001fonts.com for you with loads of awesome free fonts including a bunch of Halloween inspired fonts.
4. The CONTENT. Remember to include the where and the when, what to dress as if you have a specific theme and what to bring.

Here are some of the Halloween invitations that I have made over the past years. A few times I have snail mailed them but mostly I email them as a PDF or jpg attachment.

Sound Effects for your Halloween Playlist

Whenever I plan our Halloween parties I spend a lot of time finding the right music for the evening. My playlist is usually rock music which have titles befitting Halloween. Like Elvis Presley with "Devil in Disguise", Blue Oyster Cult "Don't Fear the Reaper", or "Highway to Hell" featuring ACDC. For that extra Halloween flavour I sprinkle the playlist with a generous amount of creepy sound effects. E.g. a howling wolf, creaking doors, screams, boos and what have you. Here is a great link that I just stumbled across today while looking to update the sound effects on my Halloween playlist.

http://scarstuff.blogspot.com/2006/02/haunted-house-music-company-haunted.html

The Importance of having a Theme - or a baby happened

Well, I was going to write about the importance of having a theme for ones Halloween party. However, today my just turned 2-years-old daughter refused to take her nap due to teething issues. Screams, tears and snot. It reminded me of our 3rd Halloween party. Despite the fact that we were 1st time parents, had a daugter who refused to sleep and thus had kept us awake for the almost 2 months that she had been in our lives, I insisted on throwing a Halloween party. I did scale it down a bit to only 6 adults and had the guests bring a pie each. And some of them even brought a cake. Oh bliss. I decorated our apartment a week before the party, made an easy entree and bought icecream for dessert. Our theme for the evening was The Dark Side of the Fairytales. I dressed up as a down-and-out Cinderella re-using the slit throat from 2 years before. My husband was Prince Charming with a scissor in his forehead. Our story was that we did not live happily ever after and had had a fight in the kitchen which ended up with me sticking a scissor in him while he was slitting my throat. The night went great, except my husband spent most of the night with a baby on one arm. Our daughter would as usually not sleep so she was with us for the entire evening. We were so tired that by midnight we could barely stay awake in our chairs. Our guests pitied us and put us out of our misery by leaving early. We forgot all about taking pictures. As the guests were leaving I suddenly remembered, so I took a couple of fuzzy pictures of them exiting. I got a picture of my very tired husband in costume with our daugter hanging on his arm. Before demasking I took a picture of myself in the bathroom mirror, which was covered in fake cobwebs. That picture was even more fuzzy. The next year we got our mom to babysit for Halloween. Fingers crossed she will do the same this year.

Living in Oblivion

When I was a kid nobody celebrated Halloween. It did not exist. In Denmark - the small country in northern Europe - it was all about Christmas. No monsters in the closets, no tombstones in the front yards, no ghosts trick-or-treating in the night, no jack-o'-lanterns flashing their toothy grins in the dark. And boy how I would have loved it. From an early start I loved monsters, witches and ghost stories. If it was scarry it was good. As I grew up I began hearing tales about a holiday in America that incorporated all of my favorite things. Oh how I hoped it would come to Denmark. But it didn't. Not really. A few years ago the stores began selling plastic spiders, cobwebs and ceramic jack-o'-lanterns in October. That was about it. So, taking matters into my own hands I decided to throw a Halloween party. I got my sister - who lives in California - to send me some Halloween decor and fake blood. Decorated our home, got dressed up as a 1960s housewife with a slit-throat while my husband was a shot-in-the-head gangster from the 1930s. Our friends - who had never been to a Halloween party before - came dressed as pirates, devils, witches and monsters. It was a blast. And so a tradition was born. This year we will be hosting our 5th year anniversary Halloween party.