Halloween is an iconic decorating season, dependent on certain imagery and symbolism to terrify its audience. Enter the skeletons, the pumpkins, the moody lighting, and the black and orange color schemes we’re all familiar with this time of year. But even if you’re full of the Halloween spirit, you still need to be able to use your home without sitting on a skeleton. Preserve your living room as a functional sitting space with small touches that make the room say “spooky” without getting in the way of your holiday entertaining.
Get the Look: An important component of a Halloween display is the atmosphere, so create dark mood lighting in your living room through pseudo gas lamps or a modern candelabra draped with fake cobwebs to give a nod to when we feel these traditions started. Introduce classic animal skeletons and other bones throughout the space as the highlight of the display, and create a dark backdrop for them through black throws and rugs to deepen the space. Supplement this with a large array of candles of either the traditional wax or electric variety (which are very convincing nowadays and can be left unattended) and use mirrors to reflect the flickering light against your dark corners.
Why it Works: When you think of Halloween, your brain immediately paints a picture of the traditional elements you need to create a spooky scene in your home, and they’re a great place to start with when decorating. Skeletons and cobwebs are easy to install and are affordable to come by, making them good staples for a Halloween party area like the living room. You can even DIY your own webs with a hot glue gun and easily scrub the glue off your fixtures when you’re done.
Borrowing the vintage elements of old lighting sources, which make great modern accents to a home, uses the context of the room decoration as a whole to make them mysterious and haunting, not to mention more interesting sources of light than your typical overhead lights. You can even take this a step further and layer your lighting through special tinted bulbs to make everything appear a darker color. Going the extra mile on the big fixtures also lets you scale back on the smaller items that can make your space feel cluttered, so you get a strong spooky vibe without overloading on plastic decorations that you’ll just have to stow away in the off-season.
You don’t need to go overboard with decorating to temporarily convert your living room to a fun Halloween space; only a couple directly spooky elements are needed to bring the rest of the room together.
