The spooky copywriting tropes we love to hate
A mini-blog – just for fun! Looking for something (marginally) more serious? Try ‘Tone of voice: Your secret weapon’ or ‘Grammar rules you shouldn’t break – and a few you can’.
October is almost over, which means, for the last month, everyone in events copy has been slowly losing their minds over ‘spooktacular’ this and ‘spine-chilling’ that.
Halloween is, arguably, the most fun festival of the year. I maintain that this is largely due to the fact that marketing teams nationwide – from banks to bakeries – suddenly have free reign to be as outrageously camp and theatrical as they like in the name of gentle scares.
And I’m here for it.
So, without further ado, allow me to present some of copy’s top spooky tropes that you won’t be able to un-see after reading this post.
1. Puns
So. Many. Puns.
If you’re not hopping on a ‘frightseeing’ bus then you’re grabbing an ‘ice-scream’ from the freezer aisle in Tesco.
Word play and scares might feel like an odd partnership, but it’s well and truly become the norm. We can only blame the huge commercialisation of Halloween, don a pointy witch’s hat and hunker down until November 1st.
2. A challenge
Halloween brings out the competitive copywriters, apparently. You’re innocently walking to the bus stop, doing your shopping, or Googling a nice restaurant, when out of nowhere comes the taunt: “if you dare…”
‘Enter the forbidden circus… if you dare.’
‘Join our midnight ghost hunt… if you dare.’
‘Cover your jacket potatoes with our new, blood-red, special-edition baked beans… IF YOU DARE!’
By the time the trick-or-treaters come a-knocking, we’re all enjoying hugely inflated egos for having the nerve to do a great many things that wouldn’t usually scare us in the slightest.
3. Hinting
Of the very obvious, wink-wink variety.
Indeed, everybody’s pretending that we don’t know exactly why we came here. It’s a fabulous game.
So, the copy for a vampire-themed haunted house absolutely won’t tell you that vampires live at the house.
But it will inundate you with delicious morsels like, ‘Be warned… the neighbours bite’ and ‘owned by a mysterious gentleman with an aversion to Italian cooking’ and ‘crucifixes heavily encouraged’.
As ever, the cheese is being laid on thick and fast.
4. A long-winded backstory
The best part of Halloween events copy.
You can just feel how much fun someone has had sitting down and writing up a never-ending tale of spookery to explain how the Halloween maze came to be, or how the creepy acrobatics troupe first somersaulted onto our wind-battered island from… Transylvania.
The back story often starts a suitably long time ago (before anyone likely to attend the event was born). There’s usually an “unsolved” mystery. And there is always, of course, an unaccounted-for death on the property.
The more theatrical, the better.
5. Alliteration
We’re back to the word play.
Halloween, more so than any other marketing opportunity, invites the most alliteration as far as I can tell.
Shop shelves are plastered with signs promoting ‘creepy crafts’, ‘spine-tingling sweets’, ‘ghoulish groceries’ and ‘haunted homeware’.
It’s light-hearted, it’s fun and it signifies the copywriter’s final hoorah before the onslaught of Christmas madness begins.
6. Making the reader the protagonist
This is one of my genuine favourite Halloween tropes: plonking your audience straight into the story.
‘You have been chosen to commune with the dead…’ on a ghost walk poster. Or ‘It’s up to you to uncover the truth, buried beneath the earth for 100 years…’ on a Halloween escape-room website.
This is a big hit within haunted house/fairground events copy, and it’s all part of that storytelling element, bringing the theatrics to life.
Unfortunately, now we’ve discussed these tired (but beloved) spooky copy tropes, you won’t be able to stop seeing them everywhere you go.
They’ll follow you around like an unwanted spirit.
You’ve been warned… (*muahahaaaa*)
(I’d be truly honoured to write spooky copy for you and I’m entirely up for shaking off some of these old tropes – or keeping them if you’re a fan! Drop me a line to get in touch. If you dare.)
