• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • What’s New
  • A.K. Smiley Public Library
  • My Account / Search our Catalog

A.K. Smiley Public Library Blog

Serving the City of Redlands, California since 1894

BE LIKE A TREE:
Connect with your roots. Turn over a new leaf. Bend before you break. Enjoy your unique beauty. Keep growing. ~Joann Raptis
And might we also add:
Give of yourself to a library.

Jill ‘Mummified’ Martinson’s dreadfully good ideas for Halloween

October 9, 2022 By Jill Martinson

Beckoning all Halloween and fright fans! If you’re hosting or attending a party this year, it’s the perfect time to start looking for recipes, crafts, and decorating ideas that will help set the ultimate eerie ambience. The following books will spark your creativity and give you plenty of ideas for a dreadfully good time.

Based on the popular movie, “Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: The Official Cookbook & Entertaining Guide,” with recipes by Kim Laidlaw, crafts by Caroline Hall, and text by Jody Revenson, is ideal for Jack Skellington fans. For recipes, try Sally’s concoction of Worm’s Wort and Frog’s Breath Soup, the Roasted Squash Mummy Tartlets with their leering olive eyes, or the green and gooey Oogie Boogie Lemon Meringue Cupcakes. One of my favorites is the Man-Eating Marshmallow Crispy Wreaths. Beware of their spiked fangs! Decorate your abode with Vampire Protection Parasols and Black-Light Bugs, Spiders, and Scorpions. Be sure to check out The Nightmare Before Christmas movie on DVD, available at the library, too.

The Mitchell family’s “Best of How to Haunt Your House” is well suited for artistic people who enjoy creating their own spooky Halloween displays and decorations. Projects, which range from easy to quite elaborate, can involve painting, using a hot glue gun, soldering, and all sorts of different materials. For the adventurous, make a full-sized mummy or scarecrow. I really like some of the smaller projects like the Forbidden Books. Antiquing plastic vampire bats to use as hinged clasps for the Book of Vampire History is truly clever. The Potion Bottle Collection includes creative containers for Distilled Spider Venom and Goblin’s Teeth. Some of the bottles even glow under black light. This book will really unveil your inner mad scientist.

If you’re wondering which spine-tingling films to watch to set the Halloween mood, check out David J. Skal’s book “Fright Favorites: 31 Movies to Haunt Your Halloween and Beyond.” It covers some of the most iconic classic and modern films, along with color pictures and background stories for each. Dracula, The Shining, Hocus Pocus, there’s something for everyone here.

So, you’ve picked out your film from the “Fright Favorites” book. Now, how are you going to watch it? Head over to Smiley Library’s DVD section for a variety of frightening flicks. Another great option is to use our Kanopy database. Free to those with a Smiley library card, this video streaming service has some outstanding options for scary movies–some familiar and some quite obscure too! Here’s a link where you’ll find Kanopy as well as many other databases: www.akspl.org/elibrary

Festivities wouldn’t be complete without some musical ambience. For your listening pleasure, check out the following CDs: “Fright Night in the House of Horrors,” “Spooky Scary Sounds for Halloween,” or “New Wave Halloween Just Can’t Get Enough.”

Stay tuned, boys and ghouls, for next week’s spooktacular article featuring nightmarish novels by our very own ‘Sanguinary’ Shannon Harris.

Filed Under: What's New

Primary Sidebar

Recent Posts

  • What’s New at Smiley Public Library: Otherworldly reads
  • Exceptional women of history you may not know
  • Award-winning titles for teens that explore hard issues

Categories

  • News + Events
  • What's New

Archives

  • March 2023 (4)
  • February 2023 (5)
  • January 2023 (5)
  • December 2022 (4)
  • November 2022 (5)
  • October 2022 (5)
  • September 2022 (5)
  • August 2022 (5)
  • July 2022 (5)
  • June 2022 (4)
  • May 2022 (6)
  • April 2022 (5)
  • March 2022 (4)
  • February 2022 (6)
  • January 2022 (6)
  • December 2021 (4)
  • November 2021 (5)
  • October 2021 (5)
  • September 2021 (5)
  • August 2021 (5)
  • July 2021 (5)
  • June 2021 (6)
  • May 2021 (5)
  • April 2021 (4)
  • March 2021 (4)
  • February 2021 (5)
  • January 2021 (5)
  • December 2020 (4)
  • November 2020 (3)
  • October 2020 (5)
  • September 2020 (5)
  • August 2020 (7)
  • July 2020 (4)
  • June 2020 (5)
  • May 2020 (5)
  • April 2020 (4)
  • March 2020 (3)
  • February 2020 (4)
  • December 2019 (1)

Copyright © 2023 · A.K. Smiley Public Library, All Rights Reserved · Log in