The images on this site are stock photography, chosen to capture the mood of Halloween in Melbourne: costumes, pumpkins, decorated spaces and the kind of low, warm lighting that shows up at most Halloween events. They are not archival photographs from Spooktober or any other specific festival, and nothing here should be read as a record of a particular event.
Why we use stock images
We did not attend the original Spooktober festival as organisers or staff, and we do not hold a photo archive from its run in St Kilda. Rather than present unrelated images as if they documented a specific event, we use clearly illustrative stock photography and say so directly. The original site ran its own gallery page back in 2016, and the festival's homepage later added a mosaic-style photo layout of its own; we are building something new here rather than reusing or passing off anyone else's material.
What the gallery is for
This page exists to set the atmosphere for the rest of the site: the kind of costumes people wear, the look of a decorated haunted house entrance, the general feel of a Halloween night out in Melbourne. If you are looking for specific detail on a particular format, such as a haunted mansion theme or a costume competition, the gallery is a starting point rather than the destination; the linked guides go into the actual detail.
We group images loosely by theme rather than by date or venue, since none of them are tied to one. Expect pumpkins and carved jack-o'-lanterns, decorated doorways, candlelit or fog-lit interiors, and people in costume ranging from gentle and playful through to properly unsettling, covering the range most Halloween events in Melbourne actually span.
Where to go from here
Our companion page, inside a Halloween festival, walks through the parts of a typical festival programme in picture form, again using stock photography rather than archival images. If costumes catch your eye here, our guide to costume competitions covers how contests tend to be judged and how to put together an original look. And if you want the fuller guide this gallery sits inside, the homepage is the place to start.
A note on accuracy
Because none of the photography here is drawn from a real event, we keep captions general and descriptive rather than claiming to show a specific moment, venue or year. If an image looks like it could be mistaken for documentation of an actual past event, that is not our intention, and we would rather a caption read as slightly plain than imply something we cannot back up.
If you are after real photos of a specific haunted house or event, the venue's own social media pages or event listing are a far better source than any general guide, including this one. Most Melbourne venues post their own photos within days of an event, which is the quickest way to see what an attraction actually looked like this year rather than what a stock photo suggests it might look like.
