13 Halloween Party Ideas For Adults

It’s October, which means we can all start getting ready for the spookiest night of the year. For many of us, Halloween is the best night in the calendar, and the perfect time for a huge party. If you want to wow, scare, or delight your guests you’ve come to the right place. 

The season of frights isn’t just for kids trick or treating, it’s a huge occasion for adults to go all-out. We’ve compiled the best adult halloween party ideas around so you don’t have to. Keep reading to find your favorite below, but first, let’s start planning!

How To Plan A Halloween Party For Adults

Making sure you’ve got your planning down to a T is crucial for your spooky soiree. Everything from invitations to décor should be on theme, making the whole night come alive. For a detailed guide to party planning, featuring everything from tablescaping to food options, click here.

It doesn’t have to be stressful if you want to be an amazing host. For a simple way to plan a party, check out our five easy tips:

The Spooky Set-Up
Pick your theme (and stick to it!). Whether it’s a Zombie Apocalypse for Walking Dead fans, roaring 20s for Gatsby lovers, or Out Of This World for space nerds, the theme is crucial, so dress your home with the right accessories (and don’t forget about the fragrance). Go all out, make sure your food and drink is on-theme as well. Keep reading for some spooky ideas below!

The Monstrous Music
Shake your BOO-ty all night long with our Spooktacular Spotify Playlist, specifically curated by PartyLite just for your party!

Plan Your Games
Party games make for the best ice-breakers or can really add to the atmosphere among friends. We’ve listed loads of ideas for these below, from simple games to the bigger group activities which require a little more planning. 

Save The Date!
Start sending your invitations out as soon as possible, with all the details of your frightful night. Tell them the date, time and venue, as well as any themed costumes that might be required. You can also let them know if there’ll be any costume competitions (or keep that as a surprise on arrival).

Set Your Budget
Once you know your numbers, plan on how much to spend per head on each guest. This is especially useful if you’re planning activities. If you want to save money, you could always ask your party goers to bring their own beverages if possible.

The Eerie Extras
From party favors as guests come into your venue, to the ideal Halloween playlist. The little things that go a long way will make your party memorable for the right reasons!

Now you’ve got everything planned to perfection, it’s time to make sure your party is a graveyard smash. 

The ideal ice-breaker for guests arriving, and a fun game that’ll last the whole night. Choose a particularly common word that could be said through the night as your ‘curse word’. Pick an on-theme term like “halloween”, “haunted”, or “monster”. Make sure you tell your guests which word they can’t use on arrival, and put up a sign at the door just to reiterate!

If any guests utter the dreaded phrase, then they need to drink an ‘anti-curse’ immediately. In this case, the anti-curse is an adult beverage of your choosing! You could even set up a cursed table filled with drinks to be used for this game throughout your evening.

For an extra twist, hand out inexpensive bracelets to every guest when they get to your party. If anyone hears them using the cursed word, that guest gets to take the beads from them. Whoever has the most bracelets on their arm at the end of the night gets a prize!

Turn your chocolate fountain into a horrifying (but edible) spectacle! All you need is:

• 350 grams of chocolate chips (white or milk are ideal)
• 250ml double cream
• 50 grams of butter
• Red food coloring

Combine the cream and butter in a pan over medium heat, once they’re warm together add the chocolate chips slowly. When the mix is a “bloody” consistency, add your red food coloring until it turns blood red. Pour the chocolate into your fondue set to create a blood fountain effect.

For your dips, serve Tiny Hearts (strawberries), Human Eyes (grapes, peeled or unpeeled), and Fingers (pineapple fingers, guests can use their imagination!). You can choose to add whatever you like to make your blood fondue delicious and devilish at once.

To make a non-alcoholic blood punch you’ll need:

• 1 litre of pomegranate juice
• 800ml of pink lemonade
• 4 limes, juiced
• 2 tins of lychees in syrup

Mix your pomegranate, pink lemonade, lime juice and 200ml of lychee syrup from the tin in a large punch bowl. Drain the rest of the lychees and add them to your punch - these delicious little fruits will look like eyeballs floating in the bowl! Of course, you can add any alcoholic spirit of your choosing to this punch. Gin, coconut rum or vodka work particularly well with the sweet flavour combination.

Gross out your guests with mystery boxes filled with cold, slimy or furry items. Ask them to guess what’s in each box. Let your imagination run wild with each selection - think cooked cold spaghetti, bowls of soggy cereal, or blanched and peeled tomatoes.

A fun game to play as guests are mingling. Designate one person as the “murderer”, and if they wink at someone that guest has to “die” dramatically and is out of the game. However, if the person gets caught winking by another guest, they can shout “witness” and accuse a fellow attendee of being the murderer and win!

A game that can be played with or without alcohol! Place a tray of numbered shots in front of two guests, and let their Halloween film knowledge decide their fate...

For the treat you can use anything from orange juice to ouzo (even though some guests may not appreciate that particular “treat”!). And for the trick, you can fill your shot glass with safe-but-horrible liquids like vinegar, hot sauce or pickle juice. Add a drop or two of red food coloring to each shot to make the task more difficult.

Ask your players in turn a question about a spooky film. If they get it right, they get to decide which shot they take. But if they get it wrong, let the roll of numbered dice choose for them.

Everyone loves apple bobbing, but apple boozing is an adult twist on a halloween tradition and will be an instant party hit.

Fill a large tub with water for an apple-bobbing setup, but before you start, cut a hole into your apples and add a shot of spirit for the fruit to absorb. After an hour float your boozy apples in the tub for everyone to enjoy. For extra mayhem, buy a few alcoholic miniatures to throw into the bobbing mix.

Regardless of the ghoulish pun, this is for those guests who like their Halloween parties to be a little more fancy. Buy a variety of local, seasonal or your favorite wine and set various tables up for each bottle.

Stick with the spookiness and create a theme around each bottle - for example, a Witch’s Brew table adorned with a cauldron, a Vampire’s Blood table featuring a coffin, or a Pumpkin King table. The choices are endless!

As your party goers arrive, give them each a ticket with their name on. Once they've sampled the wine at each table, they drop their ticket into the cauldron, coffin or bowl of their favorite. Towards the end of the evening, count the tickets and the wine with the most votes wins. As an added bonus, choose one ticket from each table, that guest gets a bottle of wine to take home with them.

Sometimes the classics are the best, and who doesn’t love to combine fun and competitiveness? Make sure you give your guests plenty of notice so they can prepare their outfit, and don’t forget to cast the net wide in terms of categories. This also serves as the ideal way to make sure everyone gets dressed to the nines for your party!

Anyone can give out prizes for best costume, so why not add a couple more ways to win? Think of prizes for best niche costume, best group costume, even a bogey prize for the person who put the least effort in (there’s always one!).

If you want you can keep the categories as a surprise. So when you send out your invitations just mention that prizes will be given, and let the battle for best costume commence.

The premise is simple - teams of two, one goal. Each team has to race to turn one of their members into a mummy by wrapping them in toilet roll. Winners get to choose the punishment for the rest. Easy, fun, and an excellent ice-breaker for your guests to get to know each other.

A twist on the Halloween Feel Box where your guests get to taste the food to add to the strange sensations.  For this game you’ll need blindfolds and a food list. Simply split your guests into teams of no more than four, then ask each team to send one victim to your table where you’ll have their “horrible” food waiting for them. The first player to guess what the real food item is wins a point for their team, and the team with the most points at the end wins!

Try and have enough food items so everyone in their teams goes at least twice, here’s a list you can serve:

Worms - cold spaghetti
Dracula’s Dinner - ketchup
Zombie Flesh - fuzzy peaches (skin-on)
Ghost - marshmallows
Bat Wings - beef jerky (or vegetarian equivalent!)
Werewolf Sick - chunky guacamole
Cockroaches - dates or figs
Troll Fungus -  cooked mushrooms
Bones - uncooked baby carrots
Frankenstein’s Toes - cocktail sausages (meat or veggie)
Human Heart - tomatoes
Cheesy Toes - cheeze curls

There are two ways to play this classic party game. The first is to play the first three seconds of a song before asking people to guess what it is. The second is to read them the lyrics of classic spooky tunes for them to guess!

Here are some example lyrics you can read:

“I was working in the lab late last night” - Monster Mash, Bobby Pickett
“It’s just a jump to the left, and a step to the right” - Time Warp, Rocky Horror Picture Show
“They’re creepy and they’re kooky, mysterious and spooky” - The Addams Family Theme Song

A silly ice-breaker that’s guaranteed to get people laughing straight away. And it’s simple, all each guest needs to do is show their fellow partiers their best ‘Halloween Film Scream’ (it might be worth warning your neighbours before you play this). Add some competition by handing out awards for the best, loudest and scariest screams.

An indoor twist on Red Light/Green Light: Choose one person to be your “Grave Keeper”, and everyone else has to be “Zombies” lying on the floor in their graves!

If the Grave Keeper is looking at a Zombie, the Zombie can’t move (if they do, they’re out of the game). But while the Grave Keeper isn’t watching, the Zombies have to stand all the way up without being caught. You can choose your own penalties for any Zombies who get caught, alcoholic or otherwise…

Click here to read about how the experts would plan a party. Shop here for Halloween fragrances and décor from PartyLite, and see the highlights of our latest range here.