What is the best way to decorate for Halloween?

You can do several things to decorate for Halloween, both inside and outside. If you want more people to be able to enjoy your decorations, have a fun setup in your front yard. Some common decorations that can be bought at party stores are fake gravestones, skeletons, cobwebs, and even smoke machines to set up a fake graveyard in front of your house. Caution tape, chalk figures, cobwebs, and wooden boards over windows can make your house look like an abandoned murder site. Several people have made 3D figures out of chicken wire and put them up around their houses to make ghostly figures wandering around. People with bigger yards will often set up a haunted house you can actually walk through and interact with.

And of course, there’s the classic jack-o-lantern on the porch, fake cobwebs, and spiders around the door, and other easy little decorations you can buy to aid the Halloween spirit.

One thing that is getting popular is a Halloween lights outdoor display. You can set up lights to accent your Halloween decorations, or have just the light display by itself. Just the lighting alone can cast a spooky spell on your house.

Spooky ideas for a Halloween light show

Making spooky lights for your home is the most important step in making your house look haunted and scary for Halloween. Cheap props look funny in the daylight, but with the right lighting, it doesn’t take much imagination to be scared by a simple prop.

One way to add a more Halloweenish atmosphere to your house is to use colored light bulbs rather than normal white lights. Orange and purple lights are a little tacky but classic Halloween decor. Green, blue, black, and gray tinted light bulbs can give your room a shadowed graveyard feel. Red bulbs will cast spooky shadows and also make the room look eerier. Black lights are also fun to experiment with and see how it reacts with your props.

Another way to use lighting is to change the angle of your lights. Uplights can be used to light the scene from below, casting strange shadows we’re not used to seeing. This is also sometimes called Halloween lighting. Lighting a room, a scene, or even a person from below casts dark shadows on their faces and the walls behind them. Not only does this make them look more dark and scary, but it is confusing (and therefore scary) to the mind because the shadows are inverted from nature. We usually have lighting from above, and the shadows go downward. When it is reversed, it’s unsettling.

Candles, real or fake, are another way to add to the spooky feel of your room. The low, spread-out lighting adds to the Halloween ambiance of the room. Candles and props like chains and rocks can make it feel like a medieval dungeon. You can also replace your normal light bulbs with flicker bulbs. For chandeliers, it will seem like you have real candles lighting the room, and with modern lights, it will give that unsettling, scary feeling of lights flipping on and off when they shouldn’t be.

How to have the most show-stopping Halloween light display

When it comes to Halloween light shows, the bigger the better. There is a time and a place for simple, minimalistic lights. Halloween is not one of those times. The best displays are going to combine good props with better lighting. Using the right colors will also help you get the right feeling. Cool colors like green, blue, and purple contrasted with warm colors like orange, red, and yellow will help create contrast in your display. You can draw people’s eyes to certain parts of your display you want to highlight with lots of contrast. You can also use a spotlight to create contrast with light rather than color.

Floodlights (colored) are a great way to add lots of lighting that you can position at good angles to cast shadows on your displays. Using white or light-colored props with colored lights is the best way to highlight and reflect the spooking lighting you are creating.

Cobwebs, tulle, or other thin, wispy, see-through materials can help diffuse the light and soften it over your display. A fog machine is a bit more expensive but a great way to diffuse the light over your outdoor display and make it look more supernatural and less like an LED. Fog will also add to the creepy feel of your display. You can also use dry ice, it won’t go as far as fog but it will still add to the eerie graveyard scene while still diffusing some of the light.

You can also connect your lights to music so they sync and flicker to the beat. You can add either fun Halloween tunes or more spooky, unsetting music to make it scarier.

What themes are trending this year?

There are a few themes this year for trending Halloween decorations. Supersized figures of werewolves, vampires, zombies, witches, you name it, are popular this year. Animatronics are also pretty popular, albeit a little bit pricey. Hocus Pocus themes are also pretty popular this year as well.

Of course, we can’t just skip over Hawkins. Stranger Things is more popular than ever, and creating your own Upside Down is not so hard. Using teal blue lights to give the Upside Down lighting with dark vines curling on the ground and the walls with accents of red lights will give the feel of Hawkins’ alternate dimension. You can also order or even make your own Demogorgon to put in the yard.

You can always take inspiration from the Stranger Things display in New Jersey. A family in Brick, New Jersey goes all out each year for both Halloween and Christmas, creating huge light displays. The family sets up lights covering the whole house, and syncs it with music from the series that you can tune into on the radio and watch the show from your car.

Of course, there are classic themes as well. Halloweentown is a popular theme in many yards, as well as haunted houses, murder sites, graveyards, dungeons, and haunted forests

Is it expensive to hang lights that change color or coordinate with music?

Outdoor color-changing lights are not cheap, but good quality ones will also last a while. Some you can put up yourself, and some will require more expert installation. This can be between a hundred and a couple thousand dollars. So getting a quality light display that can be permanent may be worth it if you use light shows often.

Halloween light display music shows are always entertaining. If it is worth it to you to put on a good show, then it may be worth spending some extra money to make a more entertaining show.

How can JellyFish lighting help me?

JellyFish Lighting specializes in long-lasting outdoor LED light displays. Our color-changing light displays are durable and can be left up on the house all year. Having one light display for all your occasions will save you so much money and time.

The LED lights can make over 16 million colors and can be programmed into any number of patterns. They can also be set to nightly and weekly timers to keep the same display going every dusk without you having to monitor it.