How to decorate your house on the cheap this Halloween

Liverpool’s favourite sesh is back: Halloween is on it’s way. Cue shit latex knife wounds on necks and boys with tomato ketchup down their white t-shirts. The Brookie has covered it’s kopperbergs in stringy cotton wool and the centre of town is gearing up for a large scale zombie invasion complete with sexy dead nurses and multiple mass murderers.

We all know the centre of town on All Hallows Eve is a real-life horror story, and that everyone gets turned away from even the grimiest of clubs on the 31st.  So why not change your plans this year? Hold your own house party, crack out Thriller on the speakers and scare yourselves shitless from the comfort of your own home. Yeah, your budget for decorating might be a bit depleted after 5 weeks, but fear not: here’s a selection of on-the-cheap, terrifying Halloween decorations to fill your Smithdown terrace with terror or accessorise your Kensington hovel with horror.

Spider Webs: The Real Edition

Free and if you get one, you get 40 more without a subscription. We’re talking Aragon’s den here. Go vegan and protect these babies with your life. No more spider deaths on Langdale Road: cultivate their existence by leaving out food for flies and not vacuuming for a week. Yeah, your housemate might have a panic attack but tell her sometimes you have to suffer for your art.

Derelict Chic

Take inspiration from American Horror Story and create a murder house on Borrowdale Road: you’re half there anyway with the broken furniture that litters student housing.  Embrace the chipped paintwork, strange stains and rotting window frames. Trash a few more chairs, put the slice of pizza that’s been hanging around under the sofa in a jar as a specimen, and tell all your housemates they can’t leave the house. If you’re feeling daring, you could even murder one. It’s your choice, but Halloween ain’t Halloween until there’s authenticity.

Take-Away Flyer Bats

Fucking hell, finally – another way to use up all the Carlitos menus piling up behind your front door. Grab your scissors and get cutting, pumpkin, because have we got bats for you. Find a template on the internet and make bats galore. Go wild, go mental: stick them on the windows, in the kitchen, on your neighbour’s door. Beg for more menus from Chesters. Make more and more. Stick them on yourself and go as a cloud of bats to the Halloween Abandon Silence. This is your time: be batty.

Ket Statues

Take your most boring housemate, give ’em some of that ketamine that’s been hanging round in the living room for ages and stand them in the corner for the Halloween weekend. They won’t even notice when you drape the sheet over them. Top them up every few hours. Result: you’ve removed the person who might ruin the party while also accessorising your downstairs loo with a living Ket statue. Charge trick or treaters for a peek. Beautiful.

Bathroom Horrors

You could go out of your way to get the tomato ketchup from downstairs, and the innards of a pumpkin to decorate the bathroom with it, or you could just not clean it for a week and get the same result. Either way, someone who’s drunk too much cider will vomit when they see it, making it more disgusting yes, but also more effective.

Balloon Vibez

Buy some cheap balloons from ASDA (odds on 1/10 are faulty) and blow them up big, gurl. Then sharpie some scary faces on and BANG you have some Donald Trump decorations to scare the living daylights out of your pals. For added effect, scalp a mate and stick his lid on the balloon.  If you want to supersize it, build a wall around it.

Emoji Pumpkin

Take the ironic levels up to max with an emoji themed carving sesh – start easy with a smiley face. Flirt with the fit boy you see naked in the house opposite by carving a side eye smile or go al out and attempt a sassy lady to ward off fuck boiz from your pad.

photo credit | Connie Compton Stewart

Halloween Tealights

Naw, look! I’m giving you an actually idea. Eat your weights worth in Nutella this week and use the jars as readymade tealight holders (you can decorate with a sharpie to make them slightly more frightening).  As a bonus, you’ll be so fat by next Monday that you’ll be a halloween horror on your own.

Table Confetti

All that mould growing on your walls is such a waste. For real life-endangering, lung-infesting chic, grab a kitchen knife and scrape that black fungus off onto a plate. When your Hallow’s Eve dinner table is ready to go, sprinkle the mould onto a white table cloth and let the spores go off, man. Here’s hoping you might even get a bit trippy.

Steal from the Guild

Yeah, we said this at Christmas but it’s as relevant now as it was then.

The Guild love spending their budget on decorations and as an automatic member of the NUS you are 100% in your right to start nicking here and there. For real fear factor, take some of the NUS leaflets they give out and stick them on your kitchen wall. For a less terrifying attempt, take a skeleton or two and if you’re stopped pretend you’re just a medic on your way back from a lecture. They’ll be so panicked with you being there, they’ll forget about the nicking. Easy.