Party Ideas > Halloween CarnEvil Party

Halloween CarnEvil Party

Every year, on the eve of Halloween, we get together to celebrate the dead with an over-the-top Halloween CarnEvil. Over the years, it had gotten bigger and bigger, with over 200 people celebrating with us in 2019. It would be an understatement for me to say that our children look forward to it all year long.

While the outside of our house gets transformed into the Anderson Drive Cemetery for the entire month of October, on this special day, we convert our driveway into a CarnEvil and our walk out basement into a haunted house complete with projections of dancing ghosts and singing pumpkins. We hand out raffle style tickets to some thrilling party games and feed our guests some of the season's most fun (and often disgusting) treats.

Want to host your own CarnEvil? Using our Halloween CarnEvil Printables, you can host a CarnEvil party too.

Halloween CarnEvil Party Invites

Invite your guests with our CarnEvil Ticket invite template. These reusable invite templates can be used over and over again, each and every year you throw your CarnEvil. Open your template, edit it, print as many invites as you dare, cut the tickets out and you are ready to hand them out.

Halloween CarnEvil Food

We've got your CarnEvil buffet table covered too. Our Editable CarnEvil Food Labels allow you to theme up your food your way. Customize them to fit your party and print out as many as you need.

These are some gruesomely good Halloween party food choices:

1. Used Bandages - Graham crackers with a square of white cookie frosting mixed with red cookie frosting in the center
2. Haunted Cheese Sticks - individually wrapped cheese sticks with a ghost's face drawn with a Sharpie on each one
3. Candy Cigarettes - pretzels dipped in melted white chocolate, then melted red chocolate, pressed into black sugar
4. Bloody Good Pizza
5. Possessed Pumpkin Patch - pudding poured into plastic cups topped with Oreo cookies crumbled into "dirt" and Brach's Candy Pumpkins
6. Monster Q-Tips - more than a little gross but oh so yummy - grab some sucker sticks, push small marshmallows on the ends and dip the marshmallows in melted caramel
7. Jack-o-Lantern Cuties - individually packaged oranges with a pumpkin face drawn on top
8. Zombie Boogers - green caramel popcorn
9. Pumpkin Fingers - carrot sticks

Halloween CarnEvil Games

No CarnEvil would be complete without gruesome carnival games. We give out about 20 raffle style tickets purchased at a dollar store to each kid as they arrive so they can play the midway games. For the last few years, our midway games have been manned by some terrific NC State college students, but the kids usually end up taking over the fun midway through the night. After playing, kids get different colored "prize" ticket(s) depending on how well they did, which they use to cash in for Halloween themed prizes we purchase at the dollar store. Some of the midway games we've got are:

1. Sharpshooter - To make this game, I purchased a 2x4 sheet of plywood from The Home Depot. I drew out my skull, and cut out the eye holes, nose holes, and mouth with a jig saw. I attached a string to the back of some large plastic googly eyes I purchased from Dollar Tree using gorilla tape and secured the other end of the string to the top of the eye sockets with more gorilla tape. I cut 1"x2" pieces of wood and painted teeth on them, then taped a straw to the back and threaded the straw through a wooden dowel, which was then taped to the back of mouth so that the teeth can spin on the dowel when hit. I taped a contactor black plastic bag to the back of the board to prevent the nerf bullets from going into the yard beyond the game. Kids attempt to show off their sharpshooting skills by targeting the skull's eyes, nose or mouth with a nerf gun.
2. Hoop Nightmares - I made this game out of a 2x4 sheet plywood and a basketball hoop (but your kid's real basketball hoop would do the game nicely) and this Plastic Severed Head. An easy game that makes a BIG impact. Kids attempt to toss the severed head into the basketball hoop.
3. Frankenstein Needs a Brain - Yet another game made out of 2x4 plywood and this Human Brain Stress Ball - I painted Frankenstein and cut out a hole in his head. Kids stand behind a line and attempt to toss the brain into the hole in Frankenstein's head.

4. Dead Ringer - I made this game out of a 2x4 sheet of plywood, dowels and these Plastic Severed Limbs. I drilled holes into the plywood to hold the dowels, cut the dowels into about 5" pieces and stuck them into the holes. I then drilled holes into the bottom of the severed limbs and stuck them over the dowels. I purchased dollar store glow in the dark necklaces to use as the rings. Kids stand behind a line and attempt to ring the severed limbs!
5. Splat the Rat - I made this game out of a 2x4 sheet of plywood, PVC pipe, some Velcro. I purchased stuffed rats and a Foam Baseball Bat. On the count of three, one child drops a rat down the pipe, while another tries to whack the rat before it makes its way to the bucket below. It's not as easy as it looks!
6. Temporary Tattoo Parlor

7. An Arts and Crafts table for coloring and other Halloween themed crafts
8. Witch's Brew - Kids fill small plastic cauldrens with disgustingly labeled things that must include baking soda (pulverized bone), green food coloring (toad's blood) and vinigar (poison) and watch as their witch's brew bubbles over. We use whatever we have in our pantry - raisons make great dried bugs ;). Brave kids will eat the witch's brew ingredients to impress their friends.
9. Prizes (of course) - I buy a slew of halloween themed prizes like rings, vampire teeth, erasers, pencils, stickers and of course, themed candy, from our Dollar Tree.

Cemetary Decorations

I crafted a bunch of tombstones out of a few 2" thick pieces of 4'x8' pink foam board from The Home Depot. I first drew out the shapes I wanted and then cut out each tombstone using a Styrofoam Cutting Pen. I wrote the epitaphs with pencil, then used a Dremel to etch the engravings. I painted each tombstone with Grey tinted latex primer, then painted black paint over where the epitaph was engraved and wiped off the excess with a wet rag rag, smearing the black paint everywhere to give the grey stones an aged, dirty look. We are big Disney Haunted Mansion fans, so most epitaphs can't be written here ;).

I also made an "Anderson Drive Cemetery" sign out of an old 4x8 sheet of plywood I had, 1/2" foam board, random paint, gorilla glue and some chains I had cut at The Home Depot. Sign is based off of a cemetery sign a fellow Haunter made and posted to Pinterest.

My young girls and I made the casket out of cedar fencing from The Home Depot and I scored this amazingly creepy vintage stroller from Good Will.

This post contains Amazon Affiliate links to products that I know you'll love because I purchased them for our Halloween Party.

Happy Haunting!

Kasey