Best Halloween Decorations: Lighting & Effects

With Halloween approaching, it's time to set all your party plans into motion and create the perfect spooky-themed house party to scare your family and friends.

With the thoughtful use of Halloween lights and effects amongst some well-placed decoration, you can easily transform your home and garden into a creepy crypt or ghastly graveyard that will amaze and disturb all at once!

Halloween effects generally rely on a darkened room or night sky to give you their best, with ultraviolet or blacklights and laser systems needing both darkness and some form of mist or smoke in the air to be visible.

With effects lighting it varies, from ambient wall lights and ceiling wash lighting being great for general scene-setting in any environment to the more specialist light effects such as strobes and beam effects or gobo lights, that require correct placement and the combination of smoke and darkness to be truly effective.

Halloween Decoration Essentials

Smoke & Fog - What would a Halloween party be without some misty fog rolling around. It's great for creating the general atmosphere, and also for helping to mask the familiar layout of a house or room by hiding the floor. A necessity for those wanting to use effects lighting, there are several different types of machines available for creating the desired smoke or fog effect, with room-filling smoke, or ground-hugging haze.

Strobe Lighting - Though always thought of as a disco or club lighting effect, the strobe has always been used in theatre productions and for both film and photography as a fantastic scene creation tool for stutter and lightning effects.

The switch to LED from discharge lamps has allowed strobes to become much more usable, with electronic dimming and rate adjustments giving you fine control to suit the overall effect you want to achieve.

Themed & Novelty - Specific to Halloween and perfect for both those on a tight budget, or for the finishing touches to a big parties decoration, there are some great value sets of battery operated pumpkin lights and ghost light strings, stretchy spiders webbing, plus larger animated creatures like vampire bats, inflatable ghosts, and even lifesize moaning zombie figures!

UV / Blacklights - Arguably one of the most important lighting effects for any successful Halloween event. Traditional blacklights were always a fluorescent tube, and these are still popular for many, offering a classic low-cost solution.

Similarly to strobes, modern LED technology has allowed ultraviolet lighting systems to be fitted into small Par enclosures and flat panels for easier placement. They look amazing in a smoky atmosphere, giving off that eerie purple glow and making everything white really pop out.

LED Effects Lighting - From dazzling coloured beam effects to simple wall wash lighting, the choice available is huge, and only limited by budget or room size.

For the full-on party system there’s some amazing units with features like built-in lasers and derby style multi-lens lighting, or the more subtle charms of an LED wash light or uplighter for creating an ambient colour theme.

Weatherproof IP rated effects lights allow you to kit out the garden and outdoor areas such as creating a spooky front door area for trick or treaters to enjoy, or your very own back garden graveyard.

Best Halloween Lighting & Special Effects

We've gathered a few of our favourite lights and effects, from bestsellers and packages to old classics, helping to give you an idea of what to look for when planning your Halloween event:

• BeamZ Rage 600 Smoke Machine

  Offering amazing value, the BeamZ Rage 600 Smoke Machine is the latest design in the ‘budget’ smoke and fog machine range, giving a fantastic performance and a fast heat-up time from its 600W heater for consistent use.

  The stacked housing design acts as a built-in stand, allowing the smoke output to fully deploy into the air rather than firing along the ground as it does in a standard machine, allowing the Rage 600 a room fill rate of 65m³ per minute for superb dense smoke.

  With a fluid tank holding 500ml and both wired and wireless remote controls supplied, you can tuck this machine out of sight as part of your decorations and let it do its thing.

  Shop from our full selection of Smoke Machines and Smoke Fluids online at ElectroMarket.

• BeamZ Rage 600 Smoke Machine

• Halloween Party Light Set

  Perfect for the shopper looking for a nice house party set, this ultraviolet blacklight based Halloween Party Light Set package will add that bit of fun for the kids without costing a fortune or being over the top.

  It includes a powerful 45cm long fluorescent UV tube light in an easy to mount plastic enclosure, plus a pair of 25W E27 screw-based blacklight bulbs that simply fit into your home light fittings. The three lamps together create a stunning effect that will make white and lighter surfaces pop in a luminous glow.

  For some further fun decorations, there’s a set of battery-powered amber LED pumpkin head string lights and some stretchy spiders web material for doorways and light fittings. A miniature LED strobe light unit completes the package and will give you that amazing lightning and stutter effect with adjustable flash rate.

• Halloween Party Light Set

• BeamZ ICE1200 Low Fog Machine

  For the larger house party or event, the BeamZ ICE1200 Low Fog Machine enhances the ability of the standard smoke machine by creating a dry ice effect from its inbuilt ice tank and powerful 1200W heater system.

  Using standard ice cubes or slabs placed into its 2300ml ice tank, the rapid cooling effect to the smoke being output makes it hang low to the floor, in a classic music video style effect. This dense ground fog is just perfect for Halloween, helping to create a real atmosphere over a large area from its large 900ml smoke fluid tank.

  The single button wired remote makes the manual firing of the machine simple, and use of standard smoke machine fluid means refills are cheap and easy to buy. It's a larger unit for sure, but the effect it provides is worth finding room for.

  The fantastic universal 5L Eco Light Green Smoke Fluid has been developed to get the best performance from all water fluid-based smoke machines.

• BeamZ ICE1200 Low Fog Machine