Halloween is not just a day for you and your partner to show up to a party dressed as Eric and Tami Taylor from Friday Night Lights only to discover two other couples in the same exact costumes (and they did them better than you). It’s also what the New York Times recently called an “economic juggernaut,” a monthslong spooky season when #brands seek to capitalize on consumers’ increasing hysteria.

To that end, we’re pleased to present our annual Halloween edition. If you’re tired of posts on DIY Raygun costumes saturating your feeds, we’ve got you covered with new stories about Halloween retail, travel, movies, haunted houses, and more.—AE

Halloween is retailers’ new growth spot

Retailers are so bullish on Halloween that even Jack Skellington might think it’s time to pump the breaks. The spooky holiday, once the domain of kids and homemade costumes, has taken over store aisles earlier than ever as stores cash in on the popularity.

The National Retail Federation (NRF) expects Americans to spend $11.6 billion on Halloween this year after a record $12.2 billion last year. And it’s not just Spirit Halloween—the highly memeable pop-up chain that opened a record 1,525 stores this season—that’s taking advantage:

• Home Depot already had a reputation as a go-to stop for Halloween shopping thanks to Skelly, the 12-foot-tall lawn ornament that went viral in 2020. Home Depot’s rival, Lowe’s, tried something of its own: It debuted a “Haunted Harbor” collection this year that featured an inflatable octopus and zombie fisherman.
• Costco also released its own response to Home Depot’s Skelly this year—the “Giant Ground Breaking Skeleton,” which has glowing eyes and a motion sensor that plays spooky noises. (It hasn’t gone viral, though.)

Another play by retailers: Put the pumpkins out with the Fourth of July streamers. Stores around the US began to display Halloween items early in a strategic play called “Summerween.” Michaels began selling Halloween decor on June 27, two weeks earlier than usual, and Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Costco broke out their spooky bona fides in July. The phenomenon is mostly attributed to high demand and excitement as the holiday becomes more popular. An NRF survey from last year found a record 47% of customers were planning to do their Halloween shopping before October.—CC

The economics of running a haunted house

If you want a t-shirt that says “I p*ssed my pants at BloodManor,” you have a few more nights to get to lower Manhattan, where a 10,000-square-foot haunted house is getting by on just a few weeks of scares each year.

How? “The folks of New York have been providing us with a good client base for 21 years,” BloodManor’s owner and creator, Jim Lorenzo, told Morning Brew.

• He said the operation has drawn a bigger crowd almost every year since opening (except where pandemic restrictions interfered) and now scares 500 to 2,000 people per night.
• With tickets starting at $40, BloodManor could do more than $1 million in sales this year over 21 nights of business between late September and early November.

Reaping the scares of its labors: After two prior iterations, Lorenzo moved the haunt in 2017 to its current spot—which he rents year-round—and did a $1 million renovation that covered:

• New staircases, bathrooms, ventilation, and about 25,000 sheets of Sheetrock.
• About 1,500 canisters of spackle and paint, “every drop” of which was sprayed with a fire retardant costing ~$75 per bottle, he said.

Other costs include: Permits, props, LED lights, sound equipment, and a collection of 35 animatronic monsters worth up to $20,000 each. Plus, there’s a year-round staff of six to eight people who help Lorenzo plan the haunt, a few dozen seasonal actors, and a makeup crew specializing in zombie cosmetics (take a peek).

Expanding: BloodManor set up a second haunted house this year at the Stamford Town Center in Connecticut, which Lorenzo hopes will benefit mall business.—ML

This Halloween, be the one who visits the ghosts

When you think about scary holiday travel, the most frightening things that come to mind are probably the vampiric airlines that drain your money with hidden charges or the monsters that take their shoes off and go barefoot next to you for an entire flight.

But for a certain group of people, the startle that comes with discovering how much a bottle of water costs at the airport isn’t what they’re after—they’re more interested in “scream tourism,” the name given to the travel trend for people hunting spooky destinations during the Halloween season.

Here are three historic and fun locations for travelers looking to step it up from their local haunted hayride:

Salem, Massachusetts

A city where 19 “witches” were executed in the 17th century has become an incredibly popular tourist destination more than 300 years later. Over 1.2 million people visited Salem in the five weeks leading to Halloween last year.

Per The Ringer, the monthlong Haunted Happenings festival is responsible for ~35% of Salem’s annual tourist revenue. Visitors contributed $782 million to the region in 2022, creating nearly 8,000 jobs and more than $31 million in state and local taxes.

The festival began this year with a parade on Oct. 3 and will conclude on Halloween night with fireworks and an all-day witches’ market and psychic fair that would not have gone over well in Salem in 1692.

Ireland

The Emerald Isle is inviting the world to visit for something other than having a perfect pint of Guinness. The country is making a push to bring tourists to the place where Halloween got its start.

The spooky holiday’s roots in Ireland go back 2,000 years to Samhain, which marked the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter. Ireland’s tourism body touts archaeological sites and artifacts that can illuminate visitors’ knowledge of the origins of the holiday.

And if learning on vacation isn’t for you, there’s fun to be had as well: The Halloween festival in Derry is the largest in Europe, while the Bram Stoker festival in Dublin is four days of “deadly adventures” and a chance to reference Keanu Reeves’s lines from Bram Stoker’s Dracula until you’re asked to leave the country.

Transylvania

If you’re more of a hardcore Dracula fan, visit the castle in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains that Stoker made famous in his novel. Bran Castle hosts a bash that Thrillist called “the best Halloween party.”

There’s a day tour, a night tour, a castle restaurant that somehow doesn’t have blood pudding on the menu, and the Time Tunnel, an interactive experience that takes you through the fortress’s history, which dates back to 1377.—DL

What’s been scaring you?

Warning: This story contains spoilers for several popular horror films.

If you were a stubborn dad, a final girl, or any other horror lead in the last 20 years, you most likely delivered a pretty high return on investment by fighting a ghost or a demon. Scary movies are one of Hollywood’s cheapest, most dependable genres at the box office. And despite everyone’s love of a Halloween rewatch in October, scary movies perform well in theaters all year round.

We compiled the 50 top grossing horror movies from 1995 to 2024, adjusted for inflation, and looked at who was chasing our silver screen teens and terrorizing towns.

The most common villains

Ghosts or demons. The most common villains were supernatural, with 20 movies focused on ridding homes/islands/TV sets of unwanted spirits. A quarter of the movies in this category were from the Conjuring franchise.

One scary guy. These villains have no help from the supernatural and no friends: Twelve of the top 50 films featured a weirdo with a horrifying tool or leaned on a controversial interpretation of mental illness. The first three Screams made up a third of this category.

Monster. Ten movies starred some type of nonhuman being or horde of nonhuman beings (like zombies) as the villain. This might be the most disputed category, though, because we included World War Z, I Am Legend, and Van Helsing, three films some consider more action than horror.

Alien. Many extraterrestrial movies fall into the sci-fi category, but if they rip off limbs and jump-scare humans, we’re counting them as horror. Seven of the top 50 movies had alien villains, and three of those were from the Quiet Place franchise.

Cult. Only one movie fell into this category, mainly because it didn’t fit anywhere else. The villain in Jordan Peele’s Get Out was a group of scary people, no ghost or monster help, just racists.—MM

(If you want to see the full list of films we considered and how we categorized them, you can find it here. And if you want to fight us on anything, let us know here.)

Crowd work

We asked you to share your office horror stories. Here are some of our favorites:

• “I was eating lunch one day and discovered there were baby spider eggs underneath my desk. I accidentally kicked the eggs and they started crawling all over my legs.”—Hailey from New York
• “We had a shared snack drawer and someone put their toenail clippings in the chip bags.”—Bart from Boston
• “My first job out of college was at a charter bus company that primarily served Amish and conservative Mennonite clients. We also had a regular route that took passengers to a Plain community in Sarasota. One morning my boss called and asked if there was room on a northbound bus from Florida because his Amish neighbor died and he wanted to send her unembalmed body back to Indiana as a favor to her family. He couldn’t understand why this would be a problem and got upset with me after I explained that we lacked the necessary permits and that having a dead body in the extremely hot luggage for twenty hours would upset paying passengers. Mercifully, the woman’s son decided that he wanted to fly on an airplane for the first time and flew her body home instead. I quit shortly after this incident.”—Lauren from Indiana