Life as a LEO Wife

Last Thursday I shared free printables for a Halloween family movie night or a Halloween party themed around the movie Beetlejuice. Each year during different holidays, I do a family movie night for a movie that our kids pick out. This year they chose Beetlejuice. We had themed food, drinks, games, and the movie. Today I thought I would give you some ideas to have your own night!

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Here are a few things you might use during your Halloween family movie night:

• these free Beetlejuice printables: food tent cards (black and white stripe that can be used for any Halloween night for party), invitation to movie night, photobooth props, and Halloween signs
• themed foods and drinks
• things for games ie paper for charades, Doritos for Dorito roulette, microphone (or brush lol) for lip sync contest, etc
• pumpkins and items for carving
• apples for apple bobbing
• Halloween movie- We used Hulu to watch Beetlejuice. You can use a streaming service or a Blu-ray disc.
• popcorn for the movie

Food Ideas

Spaghetti & Eyeballs

For our movie night, we had spaghetti and eyeballs as our main course. I make homemade meatballs using this recipe from Yummy Healthy Easy, and they’re extremely easy to make. They are so much better than frozen, but if you don’t have a lot of time, go for those frozen ones! Walmart has some from their brand that aren’t bad. Boil noodles, add the meatballs, and marinara sauce and heat them together. Place everything in a pretty serving container, then you can make the eyeballs. I’m not an artist, ok y’all? So don’t laugh at my eyeballs, lol. Ok, you can laugh, but I tried. You can probably do so much better than I did. Use cut black olives and a circle of white cheese (mozzarella, parmesan, etc) to make an eyeball on top of the meatballs that are on the top of the serving bowl.

Mummy Bread

Next we had “mummy bread” (garlic bread). I baked a loaf of French bread that I bought from Walmart. To make your own mummy bread, bake your French loaf, whatever kind you prefer, according to the directions on the package or by following the recipe. Remove it from the oven and cut it in 2″ to 3″ strips. Then drape strands of mozzarella or other white cheese back and forth across the bread, in diagonal lines. Place it back in the oven on low broil for about two minutes. Place two cut black olives on each piece to create eyes. In the picture below you can also see our “Beetlejuice” which was pineapple Fanta in lime green cups. You could use green Hawaiian Punch if your kiddos will drink it. My son isn’t really in to anything sweet, and the Fanta is the only sweet drink he’ll even try.

Deetz Sweets

Finally we had “Deetz sweets” which is the last name of the family who moves into the Maitland’s home after they die on the movie Beetlejuice. It allowed us to create a combined platter of sweets that different members of the family would eat. We cut plain strawberry PopTarts using ghost, witch hat, and pumpkin shaped cookie cutters for my son to eat. We bought Halloween shaped sugar cookies and tiny Halloween cupcakes from Walmart that we added to the tray. My step-daughter cut up pieces of cheese, some with tiny leaf cookie cutters and she tried some other shapes. Hey, she had fun.

Other Quick & Easy Food Ideas

I know when you’re trying to spend some good, quality time as a family, you don’t want to spend a ton of time prepping. You could go out and get Halloween themed sweets from Walmart and other grocery stores, then you spend no time in the kitchen for that. Here are a few ideas you can put together pretty quickly to have a fun night without exhausting yourself before!

Last year we made hot dogs that we labeled as “bloody fingers.” Somehow I didn’t get a picture of them! Like, what?! Here’s a photo from Salty Canary.

Witch hair pasta is also a very simple dish to have as a main course on Halloween family movie night. It very simple. Basically use black gel food coloring to dye you noodles and that’s it. However if you want to get a little crazy, here’s a recipe using “squid ink pasta” from Sprinkles and Sprouts.

This veggie tray is so quick and easy, and very clearly Halloween! This is the tutorial from Keeping the Peas.

This idea couldn’t get any easier. My friend Linda from A Labour of Love shows you how to put together a Halloween candy charcutier board in this post.

Games for Halloween Family Movie Night

Having games on family movie night is a must! Our kids look forward to the night mainly for the themed games! There are so many Halloween games that you could play. I’m going to share a few that we’ve played during our movie nights.

Charades

I think that the most popular game by far for our event is Halloween charades. They have a ball. Before the party of movie night I cut up pieces of cardstock. You can use white or colored, and if you don’t have any you can use regular paper. The cardstock just holds up better, you can keep it, and you can’t see through it. Choose Halloween themed words and movies and write them on the strips of paper, then fold them up. Put them in a hat, or even better, something Halloween-y like a plastic jack-o-lantern. Here are a few things I add to the pumpkin (you can leave out the scary movies or names if you have very little children):

Ghost Bowling

Another super easy Halloween game is ghost or jack-o-lantern bowling. All you need is a small pumpkin, one of those tiny ones, and plastic cups. You can use white and draw ghost faces on them green and draw Frankenstein faces on them, or orange and draw jack-o-lantern faces on them. Then stack four on the bottom, stack three cups on top of those, two on those, and one on the very top. Then allow each child to “bowl” the pumpkin down the aisle and keep score based on how many they knock over. You can even play without keeping score. If you don’t have cups on hand, you can use toilet paper.

Lip Sync Contest

Since we were watching Beetlejuice, we had to do a lip sync contest. You know the scenes where the Maitland’s control the living’s bodies and have them sing “Day-o” and at the end where Lydia made an A on her math test and they made her sing “Jump in the Line?” We had to do it. For this you don’t have to stick to the songs from the movie. Have the kids choose songs that they know well, then have a competition. You can have a prize for the best lip sync-er, or just play for bragging rights!

Spider Races

The final game we’ve played is racing spiders. All you need is straws and plastic spiders for each child (and mom and dad if you want to play!). Sit you kiddos at the table, or have them kneel on the floor or next to the coffee table, place the plastic spiders in front of them, then have them blow the spiders off the table, or across a specified line. They love this game, and it creates a great competitive atmosphere!

Activities for Halloween Family Movie Night

Carving Pumpkins

We carve pumpkins most years. Some years do get away from us, and we don’t get the chance. When that happens, the kids are devastated. This year, we carved pumpkins on family movie night. I’ll give you a very quick tutorial on how we carve our pumpkins.

Choose a Pumpkin & a Stencil & Prep the Pumpkin

Decide what you’d like to carve into your pumpkins, then choose they pumpkin that will fit that design best. My son chose the Joker, so I’ll use that in my explanation for how to do it. He picked his pumpkin before deciding what he wanted to carve. If we had known, we’d have gone for a pumpkin with a flatter side.

We found a Joker stencil on freestencils.com. We copied the image into Canva and sized the image to 7.5″ tall to fit his pumpkin. Then we printed it out.

Cut a circle in the top of the pumpkin, then remove all of the guts and seeds. Scrape the insides of it to remove any excess.

Add Stencil to the Pumpkin

Tape the stencil to the side of the pumpkin you want to carve. We couldn’t find a pumpkin carving kit anywhere, so we had to use knives. Not fun. Our kids are 10, so we carefully supervised as they used butterknives that have pointy and serrated ends.

Once the stencil is taped on, poke holes in the pumpkin along all of the lines of the stencil. Like if you have triangles for eyes, poke holes along all the sides. You will create an outline of the stencil that you can later connect when you remove the stencil. Make sure you place the holes close enough together that you can see how the lines go. Since some of the lines on this image were so thin, the paper kind of broke off as I finished some sections which you can see in the picture below.

When you have all of the lines outlined, remove the stencil from the pumpkin. Here is my son’s pumpkin with the entire stencil outlined.

Carve the Pumpkin

Go around, connecting the lines with a knife or saw that comes with the pumpkin carving kit. Since our design was so tiny and intricate, I more “chiseled” the pumpkin rather than sawing and cutting all the way through the side. Here’s his finished Heath Ledger’s Joker jack-o-lantern.

Here it is in the dark, with a candle inside.

The Joker also got a little bit too realistic makeup…. don’t do this! This is why those carving kits are so much safer. It’s also why I did most of the “chiseling” on the Joker!

Bobbing for Apples on Halloween Family Movie Night

Another fun activity for families is bobbing for apples. Fill a deep bucket, or a cool cauldron, with water. Next fill it with apples. Personally we like the green apples, but any apple is fine. By the way, green apples in a black cauldron or bucket is perfect for a Beetlejuice themed family movie night. Now line up the kiddos and let them bob until their hearts are content. If you don’t want to be there all night, you can time them or let them bob until they each get one apple.

Dorito Roulette

We found a bag of Doritos at Walmart, and my son immediately wanted to make a game of it. In the bag are hot Doritos and regular ones. My husband and I hate hot food, so this was hard for us! We did it anyway for the kids. My step-daughter loves hot food, so it wasn’t much fun with her lol, but it was watching everyone else’s face! Here’s a few pics, but we were relaxing and not really into staging photos. Please forgive that, ha!

I’ve also seen people do this with Halloween bark. They make chocolate bark and then add chili pepper to one piece. Then you go around the group letting each person choose a piece, then eat them either at once or one at a time. Keep going until someone gets the hot piece!

Photobooth

The final activity I’ll leave you with is a Halloween photobooth. We didn’t get time to do our photobooth this weekend, but I did create props for it. You can print out my Beetlejuice comment bubbles and other signs from the free printable post. Pumpkins, jack-o-lanterns, flowers, and other Halloween decorations also make great props. If you’re doing Beetlejuice like us, Dollar Tree has black and white striped or check tablecloths that are perfect to use as a backdrop. They also have Halloween print tablecloths or black or orange ones you can use. Hang them on the wall, hop in front, and have a blast!

I hope you have a blast during your Halloween family movie night!

I really hope that you’ll adopt our tradition and do this each year with the same or different movies. I’d do Hocus Pocus every year if my son would let me! Let me know in the comments if you’d like me to share the printables that I make for family movie nights every season, and I’ll gladly do that for you. Christmas is coming up, and I do the same during that holiday. Also let me know if there are any fun games, activities, or food that you do, because I’d love some new ideas. You can also use any of these ideas for a Halloween party. Here are a few pictures of our Halloween family movie night. Do you like my Halloween dress? I couldn’t find my crinoline underskirt!

Side note on the above pics… the kids did not want to take pictures. So it’s mainly me… sadly.

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