Halloween hasn’t been just child’s play for a long time. Children dressing up and going trick-or-treating is still a huge part of the day. But many grown-ups use the entire month of October to get in on the festivities. There’s no denying it: Halloween season is fun as hell. 

The ultimate All Hallows’ Eve fête for grown-ups is a Halloween bar pop-up. These spooky watering holes have popped up across the country, festooned with decor that ranges from the playful to the macabre, paired alongside appropriately chilling cocktails.

At the forefront is Black Lagoon, a Los Angeles-based traveling roadshow of Halloween horrors. Its eerie, cross-continental pop-ups are scheduled to infiltrate more than 35 bars in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico this year. 

It’s the subversive yang to the innocently sweet yin of Miracle, a pop-up bar trend centered around Christmas that has exploded globally in the last few years. 

“We created Black Lagoon to be the type of place where we wanted to go to,” says Black Lagoon co-founder Kelsey Ramage. “What we’re doing deliberately leans into people’s interests with weird, spooky stuff. It’s the same kind of fascination that may have led them to sneak into scary movies or explore witchcraft when they were younger. It’s kind of rebellious.”

Mobile and macabre

Inside Black Lagoon’s cauldron bubbles a macabre potion sprinkled with accents of goth culture, horror movies, heavy metal music, and a touch of evil. It’s not designed to give patrons a case of the willies. However, to quaff drinks with names like Nosferatu’s Rise and Nightmare Fuel next to a severed hand and amidst a sonic blast of Black Sabbath doesn’t evoke childhood memories of superhero costumes or piles of candy, either. 

“We want to create an adult playground for Halloween,” says Erin Hayes the other co-founder of Black Lagoon. “But we wanted it to be spooky and scary, definitely not the Jack-o’-lantern type of vibe.”

It requires meticulous planning and collaboration for Ramage and Hayes to replicate their desired vibe in so many places. They have several music playlists for bars to use, which range from emo to metalcore. They have a “lookbook” of design ideas to foster inspiration. Yet, they’re careful not to fully consume the bar’s original bones. 

“We encourage bars to let their freak flag fly,” says Hayes. “But we also want them to use decor that ties into who they normally are. We always want the personality of the different bars to shine through.”

Halloween at home

In Fayetteville, Arkansas, Bo Counts transforms his bar Pinpoint each year into Nightmare on Block Street, a monthlong extension of the Halloween parties he used to throw as an event promoter. 

This internal pop-up is a serious endeavor. Counts closes the bar for five days during late September to install elaborate, fabricated set pieces and bone-chilling ephemera plucked from his 3,000 square-foot warehouse of props. It’s a labor of love that the community embraces, which inspires him to push creative boundaries every year.   

“When you own your own place, the only limit you have is your own imagination,” says Counts. “Once you start doing it every year, you create this snowball effect where it keeps getting bigger, because you’re always thinking, ‘How can we impress our guests even more next year?’”

While a bar decked out for Halloween can be fun, it can also be practical. Such logic helps drive the Denver bar Poka Lola Social Club to annually morph into the Poka Muah Ha Ha pop-up. 

“October can sometimes be a bit of a lull between summer and the holidays,” says Poka Loka Social Club bartender Harvest Pelletier. “Having a Halloween pop-up is a great idea to bring in business for a slower season.” 

The drink’s still the thing

Several considerations go into creating cocktails for a Halloween pop-up. There can’t be a disconnect between the drinks and the theme. The concept typically attracts many guests who may not frequent bars, so the drinks should be approachable. Cocktails that require lengthy prep times aren’t great options.

“We’re likely going to be at capacity most nights,” says Counts. “To prepare for this, we need to build a fun, approachable cocktail menu that balances between craft and high-volume.”

Hayes and Ramage take a holistic approach to Black Lagoon’s Halloween cocktails that bleeds into a bigger season. “We focus on colors that speak to the holiday — orange, red, green, purple,” says Hayes. “But we also lean into seasonal fall flavors that we know will complement the spirits that we work with.”

While the drinks must be good, they aren’t the prime mover for a Halloween pop-up bar’s success. The secret sauce is the same element that drives a bar’s general appeal.

“Nine-and-a-half times out of 10, people go to a bar for the environment, not the drinks,” says Hayes. “The cocktails speak to the holidays, but the decor and playlist create a more experiential vibe. That’s really our goal. That, and there’s just something cool about a bar dressing up for the season.”