Three Spooktastic Ideas to Spark Your Love For The Arts This Halloween

Halloween is coming! And even if you don’t get personally involved by popping on a witches’ hat to watch some horror films, it’s a great opportunity to engage young people in arts activity. To help prepare, we’ve got some suggestions on how to creatively scare things up.

A Hair-Raising Tale

From Mary Shelley to Stephen King, throughout history authors have been using their story telling skills to frighten us, so why not encourage young people to create their own?

Writing scary stories is not only a great way of showing imagination, but also helps developing language use and spark young people’s inquisitive nature. For example, getting them to consider what’s scarier, a house or a castle, providing a great chance to link to English lessons.

Remember: stories don’t always have to be written down! They could be told verbally, or performed as part of a Drama activity. If the young person enjoys dressing up, encourage them to get into character and let them demonstrate how their character would walk or talk.

Creepy Art Forms

Arts Award has always valued the importance of young people responding to other artists’ work, and if Halloween has (Bram) stoke(r)d their interest there are a host of spooky ways in.

We’ve mentioned writing, but there’s also plenty of frightening reading to do at Halloween. Classics by the likes of Bram Stoker, H.P Lovecraft and Mark Twain are all freely available as public domain works in the UK.

Meanwhile, Into Film’s website offers some great resources, and a list of films that can all be filtered by genre and age range. There are loads of Halloween-friendly films out there – for instance Corpse Bride for younger viewers, Ring for older groups – with supporting resources if you want to prompt some responses.

Decorations are another chance to be creative, if you are going to spruce up a room for Halloween make sure to get them involved! Even if young people don’t make their own, ask them to think about what you could do toget­her to make the room suitably bone-chilling.

Plenty of venues and organisations are hosting special events for Halloween, many with children and young people in mind. English Heritage have a helpful map to help visitors find Halloween activities near them, while sites like Day Out with the Kids and The Family Adventure Project make it easy to search for events across the UK.

Some highlights include English Heritage’s Eight Ghosts Meet the Author events, where the authors behind their Eight Ghosts book read from their ghost stories in the site which inspired them! Or maybe take a Ghost tour of Edinburgh and learn about the historic city and explore some of its’ artefacts?