Scary Halloween Haunted House Ideas

To create a really scary Halloween haunted house, all you need is a little ingenuity and some creative ideas. People of all ages love haunted houses. However, the scariest haunted house ideas should be reserved for adults.

The most important thing for a scary haunted house is atmosphere. Make sure that your guests arrive at night after the sun has gone down. Create just enough light so that your guests can see where they're going, but make sure that your house and yard are still dark and eerie. String lights, flashlights and LED lights are ideal for creating a spooky haunted house atmosphere. It's also important to set the mood with sound. Get some CDs with scary sound effects like screams, maniacal laughter, objects breaking, wind blowing, owls hooting and wolves howling.

Scary Halloween Haunted House Themes

Using a theme can make your haunted house scarier and help you to come up with ideas for haunted house props and decorations. Create a haunted house on a hospital theme by setting up an operating room, an emergency room, a laboratory and a morgue. You could also create a lunatic asylum themed haunted house by dressing up dummies as mental patients and psychiatrists with crazed expressions. Do a prison-themed haunted house by building prison cells throughout your home. Another idea is to do a circus-themed haunted house. Get some warped mirrors to create a demented fun house and set up circus rings with bizarre and scary freak shows. Whatever theme you choose, dress yourself appropriately. Wear a stethoscope and white lab coat stained with fake blood for a hospital or asylum-themed haunted house. Wear a police guard costume with a prop gun for a prison-themed house. Dress up as an evil clown or zombie ringleader for the circus-themed haunted house.

Scary Halloween Haunted House Props

Ghosts are an important prop for any haunted house. You can make ghosts out of white bed sheets or fabric, project them on the wall with a projector or create ghost shadows by setting a ghost-shaped prop in front of a light. Make witches out of black cloth, witch masks, witch hats and brooms. Make gravestones from cardboard, paint them gray using acrylic craft paint, put a name and date of death on the stones and plant them in throughout your yard. Make severed heads out of Halloween masks and make dead bodies from mannequins or stuffed clothes.

Scary Halloween Haunted House Decorations

You can make your haunted house a lot scarier by covering your walls. Put up black plastic sheeting on the walls or cover them with cardboard that's been decorated to look like rotting walls with peeling paint. Put cobwebs up in all the corners of the rooms. Decorate your door with a spooky skeleton. Carve plenty of jack-o'-lanterns with scary designs and set them around the outside of your house with candles inside. Make a Halloween haunted tree by gathering some dead branches and decorating them with ghosts, black cats and pumpkins. Make bats from paper and hang them from the ceiling. Make spiders from egg cartons and chenille stems and scatter them throughout the house. Make shrunken heads from apples and hang them in strategic places where your haunted house guests will find them.

For more tips and ideas for Halloween haunted house decorations and props, read Halloween Craft: How to Make a Mummy, Halloween Craft: Mini-Spider Project and Halloween Crafts: Poseable Skeleton.