A “Beetlejuice” Halloween
Our favorite Halloween movie, hands-down, has to be Beetlejuice. This year, we used it as inspiration for our Halloween decorations, inside and outside. From the iconic black and white stripes to the spooky green color, we drew inspiration in big and small ways to transform our home into a Halloween haven for ghouls and witches.
INDOOR HALLOWEEN DECORATIONS INSPIRED BY BEETLEJUICE
Inside our home, we had a few areas we wanted to decorate for Halloween: our mantle, the shelf above our couch, and our dining table.
Mantle Cardboard Cutout
In Beetlejuice, their town plays a big role, and one of the main characters has a detailed model of the entire town. For our ode to the fictional town of Winter River, Connecticut, Chance truly outdid himself. He created this intricate silhouette of the town entirely from Amazon cardboard boxes.
What You’ll Need:
cardboard box
scrap wood (1x2)
Odds are you have a bunch of Amazon boxes sitting at the back door, waiting to be recycled. Instead, you can easily reuse them in this DIY. After deconstructing a large box, he laid it out flat, which coincidentally was the perfect length for our mantle. Chance first sketched the town’s basic outline on the cardboard with a pencil. He used the actual movie, as well as images online to replicate several of the prominent buildings in the movie, such as the Maitland’s home, the church, the strip club Beetlejuice attends, and other Tim Burton-inspired shapes.
He roughly cut out the town using a pair of scissors and then followed up with a Cricut weeder for the finer details such as windows, tight curves, or trees. This is totally Chance’s strong suit. He thrives in details roles like this. And I am so thankful because that is not my skillset — which is what makes us such a good team.
Once the town was completely cut and weeded, we spray-painted the cardboard on both sides. We used our go-to spray paint, Rustoleum’s 2-in-1 Prime/Paint in Matte Black, and our favorite spray paint tool — this trigger gun that’s less than $10.
We found a scrap piece of 1x2 that was almost the exact length of the town cut-out, and spray painted it with the same black color. Once they were dry, we hot glued the cardboard cut-out onto the scrap piece of wood. This will allow us to keep the two-dimensional town upright on our mantle without adhering it to the fireplace.
To really make it pop, we lined the back of the silhouette with green LED lights and tangled black cheesecloth and faux cobwebs around it, and our TV above, to complete the spooky setup.
Living Room Shelf & Coffee Table
The long driftwood shelf above our sectional is such an easy way to decorate seasonally and switch up the feel of our space without doing a major project. For Halloween, I draped it in black cheese cloth, spiderwebs, big, fake spiders, and some spooky homemade elements. Among the shelfie, you’ll see neon pumpkins that I spray painted neutral colors a few years ago, as well as one of the easiest and coolest Halloween DIY’s ever: the old, haunted photos.
For the coffee table, I wanted to include a key element from the movie: The Handbook For The Recently Deceased. It’s super easy to make your own:
What You’ll Need:
paper
color printer
any book
measuring tape
Pick any hardcover book and measure it. Note: If you want to cover the spine of the book, be sure to account for that. I found this image on Pinterest and imported it into Canva. I created a custom-sized project with the book’s dimensions and adjusted the image to fit the project size. Then I printed it out and taped it to the book.
OUTDOOR HALLOWEEN DECORATIONS INSPIRED BY BEETLEJUICE
Headstones
A few months ago, we did a built-in bookcase project for a client. They wanted arched bookcases, which left us with these large arches cut out of plywood. They were begging to be headstones for our Halloween decor. We trimmed the headstones down and then randomly spray-painted them with black and charcoal paint to look like a stone.
Chance created the “Here Lies Betelgeuse” on out Cricut, using bright orange vinyl.
We just leaned ours against our front porch, but you could easily add a 1x2, similar to the mantle piece to support the 2D tombstone so it stands on its own.
Lighting
If you purchase LED lights for your home, make sure you buy these smart string lights. They can be used all year round. The string of lights looks like ordinary outdoor string lights but can be controlled with an app on your phone to any color, mode, or effect you’re looking for. That means you can leave these up all year. At Christmas, create your own custom light show — since these sync to the music. For Halloween, and to follow the Beetlejuice theme, we turned them green.
Witch’s Caldron
This old planter we had taking up space on our back patio was perfect for a witch’s caldron. Here’s an easy way to make your own:
What You’ll Need:
large pot/planter
large stick
Place your diffuser and LED lights inside the large planter and then top it with black cheesecloth or spiderwebs. Turn on the diffuser and lights to give the effect of a witch’s caldron brewing on your front porch. We added a large stick to the pot that looked like a witch’s broom, stirring the brew.
Overview
This Halloween, we drew inspiration from the movie Beetlejuice by using green lights and black and white stripe accents. We created easy and cheap Halloween decor for inside and outside our home, including a silhouette of the town in Beetlejuice, our own Handbook For The Recently Deceased, and a Beetlejuice tombstone. Get inspired for your Halloween decor without breaking the budget.
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