The holiday season is in full swing, which means we’re all whipping out our decorations and decking our homes out for the festivities ahead. First up: Halloween. That means it’s time to get your spook on. Between monstrous masks that evoke the horror icons who haunt our nightmares (thanks, Chucky), and our favorite home decor (like dangling skeletons and that cobweb gunk you can never seem to fully scrape off), you’ve got plenty of ways to make your house the scariest on the block.
But it’s 2017, and you don’t need to pull out all your decorations just to get in the Halloween spirit. We’re living in the future, and all you need is a smart speaker like Google Home or Amazon Echo and a few connected devices to transform any pad into a creepy crypt fit for the damned.
Take your haunted house to the next level with some eerie tunes. Google Home and Alexa work with Spotify, so you can tell it “play my Halloween playlist” and it’ll start blasting your favorite frightful tunes. If you don’t have time to make your own playlist, Spotify has plenty to choose from. You can even hook up your Echo Dot to a few Sonos speakers to fill the whole house with a nice ominous vibe.
Ditch your old school bulbs, and install a couple of Philips' color-changing LED lights to give your house a creepy vibe for your poppin’ Halloween party. Using Philips Hue bulbs, you can paint any room in whatever spooky color your choose and tell your voice assistant of choice to change the lighting whenever you feel like scaring the neighbors. Plus, using apps like Sync My Lights and Hue Disco, your lights can sync to whatever scary movie or tune you're enjoying. If you use Hue bulbs outdoors, you can give your home an ominous lighting scheme at the touch of a button.
Once you’ve got your decoration situation all sorted out, take a seat, kick back, and have Alexa play your favorite horror audiobook from Audible. Might we suggest a bone-chilling collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories read by none other than Vincent Price?
Tired of having to grab the remote just to pick your favorite horror movie? If you have a Plex server set up, you can tell Alexa to play whatever movie you want, as long as it's in your collection. Fire TV users can also use Alexa to play any movies from Prime Video. For the real thrill-seekers, we suggest last year’s unsettling The Witch. Spoiler alert: Alexa won't pause the movie automatically if you suddenly cry out in terror.
Wanna impress your guests? Set up an automated fog machine to give your house a more ghostly vibe. Just cop a Wemo Insight Switch or two, plug ‘em in, and set up a voice trigger so your smart speaker can let some fog loose when those trick-or-treaters show up.
Don’t be another sucker waiting in a long line just to fill your candy bowl with goodies for all the costume-clad kids. While you’re catching up on all your favorite horror movies, just tell Alexa to order a nice candy bag and kick back. Just make sure it gets there on time, or you’ll be the sucker.
