There is a particular sound a room full of people makes when they can no longer see each other. It isn't screaming. That would at least be on theme. It's a sort of polite, collective coughing, punctuated by someone near the kitchen asking whether a window opens.
That was the first time I used my smoke machine.
I should explain. I love Halloween. Not in a casual, buy-a-pumpkin-at-Coles way. I love it the way Claire Dunphy from Modern Family loves it: earnestly, competitively and with a strong preference for things that are genuinely frightening rather than cute. I know Halloween cops a bit of a bad rap here in Australia, usually as an American import for people with too much time and a Kmart habit. I'd argue it's the only night of the year when adults are given full permission to commit to a theme, and I take that permission very seriously. In the weeks leading up to it, you'll find me with This Is Halloween from The Nightmare Before Christmas on repeat, watching clips of Hocus Pocus, and singing badly on my way to work. The other drivers have not asked for this. They are getting it anyway.
So, the apartment. My first Halloween party was in a two bedroom place in North Melbourne with white walls, which are lovely for daily life and absolutely useless for horror. White walls say rental inspection. They do not say something terrible happened here. I draped everything I could in dark fabric until the place stopped looking like an apartment and started looking like somewhere you'd be reluctant to leave your drink. There was a crime scene outline of a body on the floor. There was, in the corner, what appeared to be a body in a garbage bag, which did a remarkable job of making people check where they were standing. On the grazing table sat a plastic skull I had papier-mâchéd so it looked like it still had some decomposing flesh attached (photo above). Next to it, prosciutto, draped around another skull, so that helping yourself to the charcuterie felt uncomfortably like tearing at something that used to be alive.
People loved it. They also, briefly, lost their appetites. I considered both a win.
And then there was the smoke machine.
In my head, the effect was cinematic. A low, creeping mist rolling along the floor, swirling around ankles, the kind of thing you'd see right before a character in a horror film makes a terrible decision. In reality, the smoke went up. All of it. Within minutes the room had the visibility of a Melbourne morning in July and the air quality of a bushfire warning. Anyone with even a passing relationship with asthma was having a much worse night than I'd planned for them.
We spent the rest of the party running it in very occasional bursts, which gave the room a faint, atmospheric haze. Fine. Not what I wanted, but fine.
Here is where a sensible person might stop. I am not that person.
At the next party I came prepared. I had a length of plastic pipe with little holes drilled along it, laid along the floor, so the smoke would seep out at ground level like something out of a swamp. I was quietly proud of this. I may have explained it to a guest who hadn't asked.
The smoke went up. All of it. Again.
I genuinely could not work out why. The pipe was on the floor. The holes were on the floor. The smoke had simply decided, with the confidence of something that knows more about physics than you, that it was going to the ceiling.
It took some actual research to learn what anyone who works in stage effects already knows: warm smoke rises. If you want that low, rolling mist, you have to cool it first. People who know what they're doing run the smoke through a chamber or pipe packed with frozen bottles of water, so it comes out cold and heavy and stays low. Two parties. One pipe. Zero understanding of how air works.
I haven't tried the frozen bottle method yet. I'm not hosting this year, so it's waiting for the next party, which means for now it remains a theory. A promising one. I've had promising theories before. The difference is that I now live in a bigger house out in the burbs, which means a much bigger canvas for my creative vision, and a lot more floor for the smoke to ignore.
Every year after Halloween, my Instagram fills up with clips of people who have gone completely, gloriously overboard. Front gardens with synchronised sound and light shows. Animatronics that turn their heads as you walk past. Fog that does exactly what it's told. I watch these and feel two things at once: admiration, and the very clear knowledge that I am not those people.
I'm an enthusiastic amateur when it comes to theming. I can drape a wall and make a convincing body out of a garbage bag. I am not an AV technician, a lighting designer or a special effects person, and my smoke machine has the receipts to prove it.
And honestly, that's the point I wish more people understood about event management.
A good event manager is not necessarily your theming expert. They're not necessarily your AV guru either. The core skill of a good event manager is the most boring one in the room: the detail, the admin, the timeline, the making sure everything happens when it's meant to and nobody has to ask whether a window opens. That work is invisible when it's done well, which is exactly why it gets undervalued.
What the best event managers bring alongside that is a network. People they can ring at the last minute and say, I've had an idea, could we do something like this? And the person on the other end says yes, knows how to make it work, and knows how to make it work on budget and by Friday. If I genuinely wanted the full sound and light show next Halloween, I wouldn't spend another three parties drilling holes in pipe. I'd call someone who already knows how to cool smoke.
So if you're planning an event, whether it's a work end of year function, a fundraiser or your own house party, here's the honest version. Be clear about what you're good at. Get the boring bits right first. Then, for the thing that will make people stop in the doorway and stare, find the person who has already made every mistake you're about to make.
As for me, I've been watching reels of charcuterie boards with cheese carved into skulls and some sort of red berry situation oozing out like blood. I have not attempted it yet. Thankfully I am a better cook than I am a special effects guru.
Happy Halloween.