Dracula Party

To plan a memorable Dracula party for Halloween, incorporate vampire-inspired decorations, costumes, and menu ideas. Here are some Dracula party ideas to get you started:

• Decorations: Hang black rubber bats from the ceiling at the Dracula party with fish wire. Make coffins out of cardboard or wooden planks. Cover the coffins with cobwebs made of cotton. Place a stuffed Dracula inside or convince a member of your family to scare guests throughout the party by opening the coffin door and sitting up throughout the party. Decorate the castle to resemble Dracula’s castle at Transylvania. Put dry ice inside of the castle to create an eerie fog. Place candelabra centerpieces in the middle of each table. Use fish wire to hang a “full moon” made out of paper above each table for an added prop.

• Costumes: Encourage guests to dress up for the party as Dracula characters. Dress up as one of the main characters in Dracula. Choose to dress as a bride of Dracula, Abraham Van Helsing (professor), Jonathan Harker (estate agent), Mina Harker (fiancé of Jonathan Harker), Dr. John Seward (administrator in insane asylum) or Renfield (patient at insane asylum). Encourage guests to come to the party in costume, and award a prize for each best dressed character.

• Menu: Get creative with your Dracula party menu. Vampires like blood, right? Make sure all of your menu items have the blood theme. You can serve a vampire martini complete with fake blood down the side of the glass. For food items, add red food coloring to normal foods to give them that bloody look. You can also incorporate coffins into the menu. For example, use coffin cookie cutters to make finger sandwiches. Make sure to use rye bread so they look like black coffins.

• Cake:  Make a delicious red velvet cake for the Dracula party. Bake a two layer cake and fill the center with strawberry filling. Frost the cake with white frosting and add drops of red food coloring that drips down the sides for “blood.” Continue this effect and make pools of blood with red food coloring on the top of the cake. Finally, place plastic Dracula teeth in the center of the pools for an added cake decoration.

• Activity: If the party is for adults, play the movie throughout the party, in the background. Whenever someone gets bitten or dies, plan an activity for your guests. For example, whenever someone gets bitten, tell everyone to do a shot. Run through the movie beforehand to get an idea of how frequently certain events occur. This way, you can plan out which activity to do for each of these occurrences.

Be sure to send your guests home before dawn – the beginning of the vampire life!