How You Can Use Lighting to Decorate The Month of October

The month of October is here! This is the month of candy corn, scary witches, pumpkins, haunted houses, and the festive night of “trick or treat”! And speaking of October, it's time to accommodate your home with all sorts of fun halloween decorations, whether it´s inside or outside, to set just the right ghostly mood for the entire month. And since lighting is the perfect element to capture a particular feeling or mood, lighting would be ideal to set up a scary scene in your front yard or to entertain guests for a Halloween party or to simply highlight specific objects such as a jack-o-lantern or a skeleton cadaver in a cemetery. Here are some ways to use lighting to decorate the month of October:

1. Halloween String Lights – Halloween string lights in the form of ghosts, skeletons, pumpkins or any Halloween-related objects are great to decorate around your front door or windows, to wrap around going down an interior or exterior banister or to hang them from the edge of the roof of your house, garage or outside shed.
2. Halloween Lights – Believe it or not, black lights or dark blue lights are great to light up in the dark. However, think about what type of scene you want to display for a particular audience. Even though black lights are typical Halloween lights, they are more suitable for children. You can use these as your porch lights or yard lamp posts to make certain decorations glow in the dark such as white plastic or styrofoam skeletons. Black light bulbs also bring a graveyard to life. You can create this scene by painting tombstones in black or using transparent glow-in-the-dark paint to trace the wording on the tombstones and when the black lights are turned on, they will brighten up the tombstones. On the other hand, dark blue lights are more suitable for a classic scary scene. It creates a mysterious, “something is about to pop out” ambience. Use dark blue lights for a dark interior scene or to create an eerie moonlight night.
3. Jack-O-Lantern Lights – Convert ordinary lamp posts into creative Halloween lights by replacing the lamp shades with plastic jack-o-lantern or pumpkin buckets. You can do this by cutting a hole in the bottom of the bucket, just make sure the hole is the same size as the hole in the bottom of the shade, and place it on top of the lamp post. Also, change the lightbulb with a low-wattage light bulb to illuminate a dimmed light effect and since the jack-o-lantern or pumpkin is orange, you can use either a yellow, orange or red light bulb to create the same effect.
4. Halloween Strobe Lights – Halloween strobe lights are primarily useful for ambient lighting and can be used for either outdoors or indoors. They especially fulfill their purpose in combination with fog to enhance a spooky scene such as an outdoor graveyard or scary critters hanging from trees or an entire room for a Halloween party with music and dancing to highlight not only the scene of decorations but also the party guests with their costumes.
5. Fog – As we already mentioned, fog works well with strobe lights but they are also effective with certain colors or with flashing or moving lights. Use bright green lights with fog to make it look toxic and dangerous, and use red lights with fog to produce a gory, bloody look. Flashing or moving lights with fog creates a sense of floating spirits or an unknown creature with glowing eyes.
6. Spotlights – Spotlights provide accent lighting to draw attention to a particular area or object. Once you have your front yard or interior home decorated, look around to see which centerpieces or objects would look best with spotlights. For example, a vampire coming out of his coffin or a zombie in a graveyard or a pop-out skeleton can all use spotlights to immediately turn a visitor´s eyes towards these focal points.
7. Shadow Lights – Casting shadows will definitely scare visitors or can easily sneak up on a passerby. The obvious way to display a shadow is by placing lights low to the ground and facing them slightly upward. If someone walks in front of the light, this will create a large, disfigured shadow. There are also some other ways to create specific shadows such as placing cutouts or certain figures in front of the lights, or cover half or paint the lenses of the lights.
8. Light with Fire – Fire can spark a creepy look and feeling. The multiple colors of orange, blue, red and yellow simultaneously enhance nearby shadows and makes them move about. You can use fire with candles or outdoor tiki torches. Put a lit candle inside a jack-o-lantern and place it on a table on your porch or line a set of jack-o-lanterns going down the stairs of the porch or walkway. You can also line up tiki torches. However, make sure you position candles, tiki torches and any other producing flamed objects in safe and secure places or positions. Orange lights and electronic candles are other non-hazardous alternatives to provide the same effect.

No matter what type of Halloweenish atmosphere you are trying to create, there are different lighting sources and ways to use them to serve various purposes. Whether you're decorating your living room for a kids Halloween party or staging your front yard with Halloween decorations or transforming your home into a haunted house, lighting is an important addition for holiday decor, to establish certain emotions, to highlight a scene or to illuminate an area. Overall, the above lighting ideas to decorate your home for the month of October in preparation for Halloween will help you get started and hopefully, inspire you with some other creative ideas to use lighting to complement your decorations.

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