How to Decorate a Small Apartment for Halloween

Curtains Up

• A window is a stage set for horror when you stretch cobwebs over the valance and drapes, stud them with soaring bats and giant tarantulas, paste screaming silhouettes to the outside of the glass, and place a Gothic-style or plain wood chair in front of the panes with a fake candelabra and flickering candles on the chair seat. If the drapes are red, or red-flecked fabric, pool some red paint on a piece of plastic wrap and peel off the "blood-splatter" when it's dry. Set a line of black spiders crawling up each drape with the pool of blood just beneath it. Remove any other lights around the window and limit the visibility to eerie candlelight.

Ghosts Above, Fear Below

• Use your ceiling, and your imagination, to leave your guests nowhere to look but into the face of terror. Crack long-lasting -- eight- to 10-hour -- neon-green light sticks and put them in white balloons. Fill the balloons with helium and then draw "Scream" faces on them with black marker, remembering that you have to look up to see them. Make sure the screams are visible from below. Let all the balloons loose to bob at ceiling height; splurge, and cover the entire ceiling with horrified, glowing green faces.

Petrifying Powder Room

• The powder room will give partiers the creeps when you plant a mummified pumpkin in there and fill the room with spiders. Cover a medium-size pumpkin with strips of surgical gauze, wrapped randomly and stuck to the pumpkin with spray starch. Glue two huge googly eyes in a break in the bandages. Put the pumpkin in the bathroom on the floor, where a seated guest can't miss it. Stick crawling black spiders all over the inside of the bathroom door with low-adhesive tape or a dot of washable school glue. Replace the bulbs in the light fixture with low-wattage orange bulbs. Quick exits are guaranteed.

Creepy Corners

• Max out the corners of the main room for ghoulish creepiness, preserving the center of the floor for mingling, dancing and munching from the buffet. Park a scarecrow in one corner, doctored to become a looming Frankenstein monster -- a leering pumpkin head, shabby dated jacket or coat, skeleton-bone legs and claw-like tree-branch hands should do it. Illuminate the fiend from below with a dim, flickering spotlight. Spray a large, forked tree branch black; wind strings of orange fairy lights around the branches, and perch a couple of sinister feathered black crows in the branches. Give it pride of place in another corner. Hang a crepe paper ghost in a third corner, with a body of streamers that hang to the ground. Suspend spine-chilling rubber masks on clear monofilament inside the white streamers. Train a low spotlight on the ghost, and set a small fan near the base, with just enough breeze to gently flutter the streamers and reveal the masks.