15 Halloween contest ideas to spook, chill, and thrill your customers
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Halloween, possibly the coolest and most fun holiday on the calendar, is fast approaching, and with its pageantry, edginess, and let’s just say it, mystique, there are opportunities for all businesses to make hay while the blood moon’s shining. (Not just pumpkin farmers and costume shops, this holiday’s big and scary 🥶 enough for everyone.)
Celebrated around the world every year on October 31, young and old alike partake in the annual traditions of scaring and being scared, whether that’s horror movie night, redecorating your house to resemble your worst nightmare, or dressing up as a ghoul to go partying or trick-or-treating around your neighbourhood 🫣 (responsibly).
Halloween is the playful holiday, so gamification is logically the go-to medium for any business looking to carve out the biggest possible slice of this metaphorical pumpkin pie. Read on to see our original Halloween contest ideas to reinvigorate your end of October marketing campaigns.
1. A Halloween quiz (Quiz)
Test your audience’s knowledge on all sorts of spooky subject matter with a Quiz! The history of Halloween, perhaps? Was it always about tricking and treating? Dressing up as ghosts? Or maybe explore their knowledge of horror movies, or even myths, legends, and classic ghost stories related to the holiday.
Ghost stories across all mediums are so compelling and so widespread, these sorts of quizzes can be universally appealing to broad audiences.
2. The scariest costume contest (Video Contest)
Ask your audience to submit videos that feature their Halloween costumes. Invite them to bring their nightmares to life, and why not follow that up by inviting your community to vote for the most spooktacular from an approved shortlist in a gallery of the damned?
Reward the winners of the Video Contest with themed giveaways and be sure to share the best costumes on your social networks to showcase the creativity of your players.
3. The Halloween jackpot (Slot Machine)
Give your audience an opportunity to win! It’s simple and fast to create excitement among participants with a spin of a virtual Halloween jackpot. The objective is universally understood: match 3 identical images to instantly win one of the prizes in play. Customise the graphics and copy of your Slot Machine to suit a Halloween theme while matching your branding.
4. The haunted house maze (Pacman)
Disguised as a pumpkin in the hope of blending in with the ghosts 👻 was a good idea, but no luck! Silly Pacman! Tricks are for kids! He will still have to avoid them if he wants to devour all the candies 🍬 in the haunted house maze. This is where your audience steps in. Help Pacman devour the candy to turn the tide and devour his pursuers!
5. Find a scary costume that matches your personality (Personality Test)
Or identify your role in a horror movie! Get into the Halloween spirit with a horror-themed personality quiz!
It’s a great way to entertain your audience by inviting them to find out what role they would play in a horror movie, or what iconic Halloween creature or character they should dress up as.
Through a series of questions on their preferences in terms of sweets, spooky decorations, Halloween traditions, and other revealing questions, a personality test will highlight whether they’re the first victim, the overconfident dummy who says, “Let’s split up,” the falsely accused, or the killer all along. Alternatively, the quiz could reveal that they’re the charismatic 🧛 vampire, the mischievous 🧙 witch, or the fearless 🐺 werewolf.
6. Escape the haunted mansion (Dynamic Path™)
Create an interactive experience with the Dynamic Path™ format. Players will have to navigate through a virtual course filled with spooky surprises, where they can play mini-games, solve puzzles, and make crucial decisions to escape 🏃♂️. Tell your own story using any of the various game mechanics available in the Drimify catalogue.
This multi-level, interactive journey immerses participants in a uniquely terrifying adventure of your design, and the player who completes the course successfully, and with the highest cumulative score on the leaderboard, wins a special Halloween prize.
7. Best Pumpkin Carver Contest (Photo Contest)
When we think of Halloween, pumpkins 🎃 immediately come to mind. Sprouts, potatoes, carrots, oranges, cranberries and the whole cadre of other fruits and vegetables might be locked in an endless battle for Christmas supremacy, but the humble pumpkin has All Hallow’s Eve locked into a deal that will last longer than humanity.
With that in mind, why not organise a Photo Contest to celebrate the variable art of pumpkin carving? This is a great opportunity to showcase the creative and artistic talents of members of your community. And if you have any pumpkin-themed wares to promote, this is the game to adapt. Pumpkin-spiced lattes, pumpkin-flavoured beer – slay while the full moon shines!
8. The Halloween instant winner (Instant Win)
Organising a marketing game in the form of an Instant Win game is a safe bet. It’s a simple and effective contest format where participants “instantly” find out if they have won.
Why not transform your shop or your premises for the occasion, and offer a digital kiosk, or a QR code to scan with an instant win game to play. Use them to distribute tempting Halloween promo codes and spot prizes 🎁 to boost conversions and collect user data.
9. Pumpkin field and memory game (Memory)
To promote your products over the Halloween period, offer a memory game evoking the colours, atmosphere, and mystique of this unique holiday. The goal of the game will be to find the pairs of cards presenting your flagship products in the pumpkin patch. When players match cards, you can include a pop-up to educate them on that product.
10. The Horror Audio Quiz (Audio Quiz)
Create a blood-curdling blind horror test by inserting audio extracts 📢 into your Halloween quizzes!
Invite your participants to listen carefully to the audio excerpts from horror movie music to scary noises, and answer the questions associated with them from a list of multiple choice options. Add as many questions as you want to your quiz and prepare them for an auditory experience full of thrills and surprises!
11. A Halloween-themed game of shoot the bubbles (Bubble Shooter)
Come up with a Halloween-themed Bubble Shooter game where the coloured bubbles are now ghosts, pumpkins, and bats. Participants must shoot the bubbles by forming groups of 3 or more of the same colour, to score as many points as possible and reach the top of the leaderboard. Unleash competitive spirits by offering the highest scorers terrifying rewards to celebrate Halloween!
▼ Try the demo ▼
12. What’s the greatest horror movie of all time? (Voting Gallery)
Ask your community about their favourite horror films by organising a special Halloween voting contest 🗳️ to crown the best horror film of all time. Showcase a diverse selection of horror movie classics, from legendary icons, to contemporary masterpieces and unsung gems, to offer attendees the chance to champion their favourite film and convince others to pick it up. Generate engagement and encourage attendees to give feedback online and on social media! It’s time to choose the masterpiece that best haunts Halloween nights… (Spoiler alert, it’s the original Wicker Man.)
13. Spin the Halloween wheel of fate! (Wheel of Fortune)
Your audience spins a wheel where each segment represents a Halloween monster or creature associated with a specific prize to be won. Invite your audience to spin the Wheel of Fortune, and let Halloween decide their fate!
14. Hammer Horror (Whack a Mole)
Take the Whack a Mole format, make it digital and accessible across all modern devices, and swap the moles for monsters, ghosts, ghouls, and zombies.
Who this works for: This would be ideal for a cinema or streaming platform doing a season of classic horror movies on the big screen, with none being more on point than a Hammer Horror run. Invite your audience to whack Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, Mr Hyde, and the Mummy, while sparing innocents.
Natively within your app, you can set conditions for a draw after the contest is over to randomly select a player from the top 10 to reward with cinema tickets or other prizes.
15. Candy Curse Saga: The Monster Match (Match 3)
You take Drimify’s Match 3 game engine, and create your own spooky version of Candy Crush, something like “Monster Match Saga,” or “Candy Curse.”
You invite your audience to match 3 or more spooky items to clear the board and earn points.
What brand does this work for? Candy brands gearing up for Halloween, coffee shops reintroducing their pumpkin spiced lattes, and pretty much any brand with a visually distinctive product, and an interest in the Halloween season.
Expert advice
Halloween is an excellent opportunity for your brand to promote its products or services, as the excitement Halloween carries appeals across nearly all demographics.
It’s a hugely imaginative and playful holiday – perhaps the most imaginative and most playful holiday of all – and well planned elements of gamification can be just the ticket to make your campaigns jump out at your audience.
