All Hallows’ Eve is upon us, and scaring up the right spirit is at your fingertips. Three phases of Halloween are hiding in your iPhone or iPod touch: decorating, trick-or-treating and having a party.
Decorating tips
To set the seasonal tone, create the right mood. There are quite a few scary sound-effects apps available. The best value is Free Halloween Sounds.
Among the sounds are a witch’s laugh, a howling wolf and a bloody shriek. Tap a series of tombstones to mash together your own audio kaleidoscope. You can even pick “scary soundtrack,” which continuously plays creepy music while randomly layering the other 15 effects.
Instead of chopping and scooping goo from a pumpkin, swish your finger in the Pumpkins app. Choose from a group of pumpkins and landscapes to create a grotesque sculpture. When you’re done, you can email your glowing artwork or apply it as wallpaper.
To get in the right frame of mind for Halloween, ingest a few classic horror stories from the Bloodcurdlers: 13 Terrifying Tales for Halloween app. The book app gives you 1,313 mini-pages for 99 cents. Titles include “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving, “Dracula’s Guest” by Bram Stoker and “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe.
Tricks and treats
If you’ve got a kid and an iPhone or iPod Touch, you’ve probably been in a situation where your device has come in handy as an entertaining distraction. Let’s begin with a treat that fits this bill.
The next time you want to entertain your little learner, pop open Little Brainiac Halloween, released this month. It’s a picture and word association game designed to bolster your child’s language skills. There’s a mouth button to hear the word, and even if the child is not speaking or reading yet, the relationships between the letters, sounds and pictures will still inform and occupy.
Another treat for kids is MonsterMatch, a free memory game with a cameo appearance by Jack from The Nightmare Before Christmas.
With Crazy Chainsaw, turn your device into a virtual chainsaw that starts and stops when you shake it or revs when you tilt it down. Look out loud-cell-phone-talker guy.
For a gross treat, the Zombie Pizza app makes a game out of slapping pumping hearts and wiggling brains onto pizzas and serving them up to caged zombies. This cute, gory game is worth a taste.
Costume party
The Halloween Costume Generator is the most irreverent, and therefore, best app for finding hip Halloween ideas. You can dress up as a Facebook Page, a Wall Street Hobo or Jon from Jon & Kate. It’s more amusing than functional, but it does have a couple cool features. Each costume is fitted with a recommended theme song and a link to Google Images for inspiration.
Parties need music and the Halloween Music app rocks. Songs include “Monster Mash” by Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers, the Reverend Horton Heat playing “The Halloween Dance” and Southern Culture On The Skids performing a song called “Sinister Purpose.”
