Decorating your home for Halloween can be as simple or complex as you like. In recent years, companies have created strings of lights that you can hang outside your home like Christmas lights, but in the orange of Halloween. Inflatable yard decorations depicting Jack-o-Lanterns, black cats, and spooky ghosts are another quick and easy way to dress up your yard for the holiday. Carving pumpkins is both a fun Halloween activity and a traditional means of decorating. The flickering glow of Jack-o-Lanterns in the night is always a spooky sight.

If you would like to put more effort into really scaring trick-or-treaters and party guests, design your decorations around a theme. Scary graveyard and haunted house are two of the most popular themes. For a graveyard, buy premade fake tombstones at your local party store or make your own by cutting out and spray painting Styrofoam. Add skeletal remains, open coffins, ghosts and dark spirits hanging from the trees. If you really want to splurge, a fog machine will create fantastic atmosphere, and glowing colored lights placed on the ground will seem eerie in the mist.

The trick to creating a good haunted house is to make it look long abandoned. Spider webs, fake bugs and bats, and tattered curtains fluttering in the wind work very well. You can add to this with flickering black candles in the windows, torn wallpaper, old paintings or photographs of people who are obviously long dead—the possibilities are endless. There are dozens of premade items for sale that make decorating on this theme quick and easy, but you can also do it yourself by creating spider webs from torn cheesecloth and using baking flour to create fake dust.

Of course, there are many other decorating themes if you use your imagination. A vampire’s lair, witch’s castle, or mad scientist’s laboratory are some other traditional Halloween themes, but why not go for something more unique? Given the current popularity of the Zombie Apocalypse scenario, you could go wild creating a post-apocalyptic look that would thrill trick-or-treaters. No matter what theme you choose, the important thing is to be creative!