Time to get out the fangs, throw on some black bin liners and invite your friends around. Have yourself a party, dude! Go the whole hog with our great ideas to make sure the evening goes with a swing...

Deck the halls...
Decorations for your Halloween house

Games for parties...
Easy, fun and spooky games!

Deck the halls...
Get into the spirit of things with our simple tips:

1. Garlic strings
Why not replace the fluffy dice hanging from your car mirror with a nice string of garlic bulbs? Very attractive, curiously aromatic, and it’s sure to keep you safe from ghouls and vampires as you drive along at night.

2. Make a Halloween wreath for your front door to welcome guests and trick-or-treaters to your haunted home. Simply buy a wreath from a garden centre or florist’s shop, and tie garlic bulbs and small plastic spooks and skulls (available from toy shops and joke shops) to the wreath. Very classy.

3. Decorate your doorways with fake cobwebs and plastic spiders, or simply forget to clean for a few months, and nature will do this for you - surprisingly effective!

Party games...

1.Halloween Pictionary is a great fun game to play, and it's easily adaptable for adults or the kids.

Before your party, make up some cards with scary words on, such as witch, vampire, bat, mummy, horror, nightmare, spook etc - you'll need quite a lot of these. Put your cards in a bowl where all the players can reach them. One team member chooses a card, and must draw that word on paper or a blackboard for the other members of his team to guess. You aren't allowed to use words or mime, and each team has 1 minute to guess each word.

2. Make a Mummy - Divide your guests into groups of four (or whatever works). Give each group about three rolls of cheap toilet paper and get them to make a mummy.

One team member is nominated to be the mummy, and the other members will do the wrapping (one can wrap the body, others can wrap an arm or a leg each). Make sure everyone knows to leave the nose and mouth clear! Give prizes for the fastest mummy, and the neatest mummy.

3. Dead Man Game - Before the party, put the ingredients listed below into plastic cups and make up a story about your dead man. Give each player a pen and some paper and dim the lights until the room is almost dark. The aim of the game is to pass the cups around to your guests while you relate a spooky story something like this:

"Many years ago, on this very night, a man named Jack was murdered as he travelled home from a party. They say these are his remains:
Here is his brain ( a squashy tomato in a cup);
Here are his eyes (two peeled grapes in a cup);
Here is his heart (a piece of raw liver in a cup);
Here is his hair (wet wool in a cup);
This is his blood (warm watered-down ketchup in a cup); This is his rotting hand (a latex glove filled with jelly);
This is his ear (a dried apricot);
This is his nose (a pickle or cocktail sausage);
Here are the worms that ate poor Jack (cold spaghetti in a cup)"

Pass the cups around one-by-one, as you relate the story, and ask your guests to write down what they think is in each cup. They mustn't look inside the cups - everything must be done by touch alone - oooh, nasty! Whoever has the most correct answers is the winner.

More spooky Halloween fun...