I love Halloween. Most people decorate their houses for Christmas, but Halloween was always my favorite holiday. Around my neighborhood, people spend a lot of time decorating their front porches and lawns but nothing on their garage doors.
If you want to add some devilish charm to this Halloween, decorating your garage door would set your house apart in your neighborhood.
This article will cover Halloween garage door decorations in more detail. Watch out for some excellent decoration ideas you can implement in minutes.
Before you get started…
Before you start decorating your garage door for Halloween, you need to prepare the area. That includes both your garage door itself and the area around it.
This is a perfect opportunity for cleaning out the garage and ensuring nothing will detract from the masterpiece you’re creating.
Once the area is clean, it is time to decide on a theme.
The best Halloween decorations all have some cohesive theme that ties them together. I’m sure you’ve seen houses with great-looking decorations that felt disjointed because there was no unifying theme.
We’ve listed a couple of potential themes below. Feel free to use one of those for inspiration.
Once you’ve decided on a theme, it’s time to get the materials you’ll need to bring them to life.
Most decorations can be found at your local party store or home improvement store. I try to shop around mid-October for the following year, so I can still get some fantastic Halloween decorations at a discount.
Garage Door Covers
One of the coolest ideas I’ve seen over the past few years is having full-color banners for your garage door.
My Door Decor makes covers of weather-proof vinyl that attach to your garage door using steel clamps at the tops and bottom. Nothing to screw into your door, and none of the modifications are permanent.
I’ve recommended a couple of their designs below, so I wanted to include a short video showing how easy they are to install.
It’s worth noting that some of these designs may not show up well on dark garage door colors.
Halloween Garage Door Decorations (and what you need to create them)
If you’d like some inspiration for decorating your garage door for Halloween, here are some options you can consider. I’ve chunked these into various themes and provided some ideas for how you can accomplish them.
Kid-Friendly Halloween Decorations
If your neighborhood is mostly small children, you want to have some kid-friendly Halloween decorations.
You’ll want to focus on cartoonish monsters, witches, and vampires. Lean heavily on pumpkins with colorful designs and inflatable skeletons or ghosts.
For the garage door itself, two really fun Halloween covers will make your door stand out.
Since I was a kid, I have loved Frankenstein, so the Frank & Friends garage door cover is one of my favorites.
Frankie takes center stage, but you’ve also got appearances from two “Slimer” ghosts, a couple of mummies, and a witch mixing punch in her cauldron in the back.
This garage door cover would look great on lighter homes or on darker homes where you’d like a brighter contrast to your home.
You can find it at both Home Depot and Amazon.
Another fun option is the Witch Escape garage door cover. It has a fun, ‘Hocus Pocus’ vibe, with three cartoon witches getting ready for a Halloween party.
Like the Frank & Friend garage door cover, it’s available at Home Depot and Amazon.
Halloween Spider Decorations
Fun fact about me: my first pet was a tarantula when I was 5 years old. I’ve loved spiders ever since.
There are a couple of ways that you can integrate spiders into your Halloween garage door decorations.
If you’re using a general spider theme throughout your house, this can be the finishing touch that will make your home stand out.
One of the coolest ideas I’ve seen has been a giant spider statue making a cocoon of a person with only a pair of old shoes left showing.
That statue sells for over $500, so it’s out of the price range for most of us. But you can get a similar look for far less money.
You can find smaller, less detailed spiders for a fraction of that cost, pair them with desiccated corpses in cocoons, and hang them from your roof.
You can also make a spider’s lair to complete the look by stretching some cheap outdoor webbing and then hanging scary plastic spiders from the web.
My Door Decor has you covered if you want to continue the spider theme with a garage door cover.
Available in sizes for a one-car and two-car garage, this design is all white with the black outlines of several spiders crawling on a web.
Crime Scene Decorations
A roll of police or caution tape across the garage door is a cheap but effective way to decorate it during Halloween. If you pair it with a fake dead body, you could have a realistic crime scene decoration that might get a lot of attention.
Recently, a homeowner in Tennessee tried this and had several people call the police because it was so realistic.
All you need for this is a “Do Not Enter” sign, caution tape, and some fake blood. Put the sign on the garage door, and then pour some blood in front of the door.
You can even leave the garage door slightly open to make it look like the blood is flowing out from the garage.
Add a Projector
Small outdoor projectors have been incredibly popular over the last few years in my neighborhood.
If you have a small projector that can take a USB or SD card as input, there’s a company called AtmosFX that makes a ton of great holiday animations.
Most projectors aren’t water-resistant, so I don’t recommend leaving them outside unless you can keep them sheltered. Also, most projectors cost upwards of $100, so I don’t know how I’d feel about leaving them outside overnight.
This will work best if your garage door is painted white or gray. Of course, the slideshow will only be seen properly at night, even for a 1080p projector like the Total HomeFX 1500.
You can also play a horror movie, but remember to keep it family-friendly!
Additional Tips for Decorating a Garage Door for Halloween
- Affordable ideas can still be amazing: You don’t need to break the bank to decorate your garage door for Halloween. Consider going with ideas that you can mix and reuse in the future. Next year, mix your rubber bats and talking heads with other new ideas for a scarier effect.
- Avoid decorations that require costly cleaning: If you go all out with your Halloween decorations, be sure that cleaning them up won’t break the bank again. For example, getting some red paint on a white garage is an added expense that could have been avoided.
- Be careful not to damage your garage door. Watch out for garage door decorations that require permanent modifications. Nailing decoration or props to the door could permanently damage some of the door’s panels. That may be a costly repair bill at the end of the season. Use clips, ropes, or tape to hold up your decorations instead.
Wrapping It Up
If you love Halloween as much as I do, you’ll want to make sure that your garage door compliments the rest of your house.
Once you have some basic Halloween garage door decorations in place, add some finishing touches like spider webbing or pumpkins can go a long way to completing the look. Add a garage door cover if you want to make your house stand out. They’re incredibly durable and can be used year after year.
To see all of the great Halloween garage door decorations from My Door Decor at Home Depot, click on this link!
