Halloweentown

Boys and girls of every age
Wouldn't you like to see something strange?
Come with us and you will see
This, our town of Halloween...

I feel alive
When I criticize
These ugly creatures with eight eyes!
Have I died?!

"Halloween Town, huh? Even better!"

— Gordon Ramsay, MAD, "Kitchen Nightmares Before Christmas"

This is a setting with a creepy motif. The buildings are Gothic in design (often clearly modeled on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or other examples of German Expressionism), there's always a heavy fog in the air that obscures your vision, the trees sport twisted faces and reaching, claw-like branches, and the full moon always lights the cloud-draped sky... even at 2:30 in the afternoon. Halloweentown is usually inhabited by the usual assortment of horror trope creatures. The main color schemes are black, gray, orange, red, slimy green, and on a few occasions purple. You'll often see them in combination.

Despite the somber colors and the Horror Trope decor, this setting is not always played solemnly^note It's their job but they're not mean, in the town of Halloween. Imagine the Perky Goth or Nightmare Fetishist character as a setting, and you've got this place. It's less Eastern European and more trick or treat. Halloweentown is usually not that scary, at least not intentionally so. It's intended to be somewhat playful and fun. A good way to tell if a series is set in a place like this is if there are jack-o'-lanterns and it's not actually Halloween, although that's not a prerequisite. Quite naturally, Defanged Horrors will be found here.

A very popular video game setting. If the main characters are visiting this location during Halloween, them being in costume (whether they fit the Halloween theme or are references to other works) is optional.

Contrast with Überwald and Lovecraft Country, much more serious and much less fun^note despite the fun and silliness of the former trope's namer takes on the classic "spooky" setting and Christmas Town, the other holiday place. Not to be confused with Halloweentown, a made-for-TV Halloween Special by Disney, though it is itself an example.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Death City in Soul Eater, where the Shinigami live. Idiosyncratic in that the city's located in a desert clime and that a representative "postcard shot" would probably show warm sunlight and clear blue skies. Still fits the trope.
• Thriller Bark in One Piece, an entire pirate ship with a horror motif. The island's population is mostly zombies created from lost pirates. The ruler, Gekko Moriah, resembles a vampire, and lives in a spooky mansion. There is also Perona, a woman with ghost powers.
• Salta from Katsuhiro Otomo's children' book, Hipira-Kun. For a town of vampires where the Sun never shines, the architecture is very colourful and burtonesque.

Comic Books

• The independent comic series The Underburbs. Countess Winifred Pale, a vampire, begins a world domination plot by turning a small human town into part of an evil dimension, transforms residents into monsters and effectively makes every day into Halloween.
• The Dreaming in The Sandman (1989) resembles this, especially early on when the series is less fantasy and more horror.
• Casper and the Spectrals has Spooky Town, a city segregated into numerous boroughs for different supernatural beings that competes with each other to scare normal humans and ensure the local Sealed Evil in a Can stays sealed.
• Solar City from Halloween Man blends this with Raygun Gothic.
• Seeing as it's based on the movie, this is one of the settings in The Nightmare Before Christmas: Zero's Journey.
• Villa Susto (lit. Scare Village) in the Spanish comic Minimonsters.

Fan Works

• In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Fanon, Hollow Shades (a town mentioned in passing by Apple Bloom and appearing as a dark and gloomy town on the official map of Equestria) has been latched onto as a perpetually dark town populated by Bat Ponies.

Films — Animation

• The Trope Namer is The Nightmare Before Christmas. It is the job of the inhabitants of Halloween Town to make Halloween happen each year. Halloween Town is filled to the brim with every kind of monster and scary creature you can think of. But, as they sing in their song, "That’s our job, but we’re not mean."
• Corpse Bride, the spiritual successor to The Nightmare Before Christmas, takes place in this sort of setting as well. It is more specifically the Land of the Dead where the death-related trappings of this setting obviously exist like sapient black-widowed spiders and maggots, resting coffins, ravens and body replacements for corpses. Since they are not that passionate about fear it doesn't have a particularly dark or gothic aesthetic, however, using a more jazz-like and cheery environment.
• The world Other Mother creates in Coraline invokes one since its magical and otherworldly in an welcoming and entertaining way. Also thoroughly subverted, in that it's a death trap.
• The town Paranorman inverts this, as the reason Blithe Hollow is so famous is that there's a legend of a witch haunting the town which the locals use as their only tourist attraction, despite the fact that they abhor anything out of the ordinary and their norms, including foreigners. While the town does have some supernatural elements which most of the populace ignores, the only real danger turns out be those same citizens that are led by bigotry to cruelty and violence.

Films — Live-Action

• The Halloweentown series of movies. The titular town is unusually bright and cheery... Until it's time for bed...
• A proto-example is Holstenwall from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. It has the creepy mood and architecture (which were a visible inspiration for Nightmare), but only one Mad Scientist and his sleep-walking Serial Killer.

Literature

• Photographer Walter Wick's book series Do You See What I See? has one installment that involves exploration of a Halloween Town, starting from a hill overlooking the town, down into the streets and finally to a spooky house at the other end of the village.
  • In one of his other series "I Spy" has a book focused entirely on the spooky house (Which may or may not be the same house as above, as he is known to reuse images in various books)
• The world of origin of Vampires in the Necroscope series.
• The setting of Chris Riddell's Goth Girl books. Gormless is a macabre English hamlet steeped in bizarre traditions, the heroine Ada Goth (a parody of a young Ada Lovelace) lives in a dark, labyrinthine, and proudly haunted mansion, and vampires, werewolves and other fantastic creatures are abound.

Live-Action TV

• This trope is the entire point of The Addams Family, along with the similarly themed show, The Munsters.

Tabletop Games

• The freeware tabletop RPG Pumpkin Town takes place in a small world inhabited by all sorts of Halloween monsters, who live in an otherwise-ordinary small town setting until Halloween night, when gateways to the mortal realm open up and the denizens can pass through and go trick-or-treating or do whatever other mischief they think they can get away with.

Theme Parks

• The Haunted Mansion's bread and butter. Although it's primarily ghosts who live in the mansion, there are also giant spiders (in certain versions of the ride), animate skeletons, zombies, and even a mummy that call the mansion home. Doubly so in the Haunted Mansion Holiday overlay when the inhabitants of Halloween Town take over for Christmas.

Toys

• LEGO's Monster Fighters theme takes place in the Monster Realm, a spooky land inhabited by all manner of spooky monsters whose machinations the titular Monster Fighters must foil.

Video Games

• Animal Crossing has the Spooky furniture set, which can only be found on—of course—Halloween. It allows you to turn your house into one of these.
  • The Animal Crossing Follow the Leader game, Magician's Quest: Mysterious Times, has both the "Creepy" and outright "Halloween" themes; "Creepy" is more haunted-house oriented while "Halloween" is full-out Jack-o-Lantern style Halloween.
• Mad Monster Mansion in Banjo-Kazooie.
• Croatoa, a zone in City of Heroes, is fog-encrusted, and inhabited by ghosts, witches, Red Caps, and fire-breathing Jack-o-Lantern plant monsters.
• Horrorland in the Goosebumps point and click adventure game Escape from Horrorland.
• Conker's Bad Fur Day has the aptly-titled Spooky level, which seems to be a mishmash of this in design and more worryingly Überwald (there actually are flesh-eating zombies and vampires that you have to kill).
• The Netherworld/Makai in every iteration of Disgaea and its sister series.

• In Kingdom Hearts, the protagonists actually visit the trope-naming town a couple of times. And they even get cool monster costumes to match!
• Haunted House on the Atari is one of the first games to be set here.
• Ooga Booga in King's Quest VII.
• Dark City (Chaos Faction) in the MMO Angels Online.
• Niffleheim in Ragnarok Online.
• Pumpkin Hill, Aquatic Mine, and several other levels in Sonic Adventure 2.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • The entirety of the Luigi's Mansion series, where Luigi goes about in a haunted setting (a haunted mansion in the first game, multiple haunted locations in the second, and a haunted hotel in the third) hunting ghosts with a souped-up vacuum cleaner.
  • The final world of New Super Mario Bros. has a distinctly Halloweeny feel. And walking Pumpkins.
  • Twilight Town in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door exists in a state of perpetual twilight, with a gigantic yellow full moon in the sky, and is inhabited mainly by crows and the gothic Twilighters. The town itself is under a curse where every time the church bell rings, a random denizen of Twilight Town is turned into a pig. Fortunately, No Ontological Inertia is in place.
  • Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins has the Pumpkin Zone.
  • Super Mario World has an unlockable skin that turns the game into this if you can beat the special stages.
  • The Cap Kingdom from Super Mario Odyssey is a foggy, monochrome level inhabited by hat ghosts called Bonneters, with the hills, sky, and Danny Elman-like music giving it a heavy resemblance to the Trope Namer. It's a major Dark Is Not Evil example, as the Bonneters are universally Friendly Ghosts who are the victims of Bowser's recent rampage that left their airships wrecked.
• World of Warcraft's Undercity, home of the Forsaken undead. This is a city built completely underground. All the buildings are gothic in design, skull-shaped decorations abound. Green-yellow goo (in which you can surprisingly fish) flows in the canals. The city is guarded by giant abominations (read Frankenstein's Monsters). One of the quarters of the city is "The Apothecarium": a laboratory destined to the production of said monsters and the development of new Plagues. All the inhabitants are obviously undead. The ruler is a Banshee and the co-ruler (used to be, until his failed takeover attempt) a vampire-demon. This is the actual capital city for a player race, too. Not a vile dungeon filled with enemies. (Don't get us wrong, the Forsaken are mostly assholes, especially the Apothecaries, but still.)
  • As far as actual dungeons are concerned, Naxxramas probably qualifies. A flying Necropolis filled with more undead horrors your mind can comprehend.
  • There is also the Halloween-feel to Duskwood from Darkshire to the Worgan raids. The whole area also often plays host to the Headless Horseman, Pumpkin Fest, and Trick or Treat Mask give-aways every year.
• Ghost Island in Pac-Man World.
• Crescent Moon Village from Wario Land 4 has this feel about the place, as well as being Big Boo's Haunt.
• Underworld from Fallout 3 is the closest the setting can offer. It's a settlement of ghouls (in the Fallout universe, this refers to ageless Technically Living Zombies who're usually sapient and got their condition from being massively irradiated) who took up residence in a museum exhibit about the afterlife, hence the name and the giant stone skull over the gate. Many of the people and places in there have names relating to death and mythological interpretations of the afterlife.
• The "Wacky Worlds" Expansion Pack of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 lets you put Halloween and "horror"-themed decorations in your park, along with the option of bare dirt (or whatever you want) for the ground. Some rides are even Halloween-themed.
• The Transylvania world in Bugs Bunny & Taz: Time Busters.
• The town of Threed in EarthBound (1994) at least before you beat Master Belch, it features zombie dogs, zombies, ghosts, a graveyard, coffins in an underground path leading to Grapefruit falls, and even a totally blatant Halloween enemy called the Trick or Trick kid.
• OutRun 2006 has one of these scenarios as a race track.
• Gabrielle's Ghostly Groove takes place in the town of Monsterville, which naturally doubles as a Monster Mash.
• Planet Zoo: The “Twilight Pack” DLC includes lots of gothic and Transylvanian-themed architecture and decorative options. There is also a career mode map based around this theme set in "Castle Myers", Transylvania.
• Puppeteer (2013) has Hallowee-Ville.
• Sly 2: Band of Thieves: This is what Prague is set up to be. It even comes with its own set of monsters, a guillotine, a gothic castle, and a countess with spider legs to rule over.
• Guild Wars 2: During the annual Halloween activity, Lion's Arch becomes a Halloweentown, with permanent darkness, a leering moon, kitschy tombstones, Jack-o-Lanterns, creepy portals, and assorted other Halloween paraphernalia filling the Trader's Forum.
• Impressive Title: Shrieking Hills is a set of gloomy dark hills filled with giant pumpkins, gnarled dead trees, and gravestones along with bats and crows flying everywhere. On top of this, it also has a pumpkin-shaped lake full of suspiciously-red liquid and a set of blue, crystalline Floating Platforms that overlook the landscape to let the player take in the spooky atmosphere.
• Nobody Saves the World: Damptonia is populated by witches and classic monsters like a vampire and a wolfman, pumpkins are growing everywhere, and black cats roam the streets, but the NPC citizens are perfectly friendly.

Web Original

• Ravensblight Manor, a site for the various artistic experimentations of Ray O'Bannon, is modeled after a strange town which is capable of teleporting anywhere within the continental United States ^note , and we don't know what happens to anyone who was there when it does so. The site includes a toyshop in which you can acquire free downloadable papercraft of the various manifestations of spookiness that occur around the town. These include a Ghost Train, ghost aircraft, ships, haunted car, trucks, and multiple houses, each with a succession of occupants who either died tragically and miserably, were suspected of working foul magics, went mad, or did something weird and disappeared or had to face the locals' wrath. Cemeteries, monsters, coffins, and games about cemeteries... and the list goes on. And it's always midnight in Ravensblight! Don't take a ride on the abandoned carousel, even if it is still playing fairground music.
• Dreamscape: The vampire empire in the Underworld. Not just because of its populace, but also all of the buildings look like haunted houses and its got a red sky.
• Less is Morgue takes place in a Halloweentown version of Tallahassee, Florida. There are ghosts, ghouls, demons, vampires, and pet stores that sell zombifying rats and mind-controlling goldfish. The main characters even live at the delightfully silly address of 247 Mayhem Way.
• The Haunted Woods in Neopets is halfway between this trope and Überwald. It's always night with a full moon, filled with spooky Neopets and other strange creatures.

Western Animation

• The Neitherworld in the animated adaptation of Beetlejuice. It's full of bizarre buildings, Gothic-looking scenery, twisted backgrounds, and strange creatures of all shapes and sizes. Of course, the creatures are, for the most part pretty friendly if a little strange.
• Casper's Scare School has its school here.
• Ruby Gloom is set in one named Gloomsville. We don't see much of it outside of the mansion the characters live in, but it's permanently night there and the residents are all manner of ghoulish creatures. Of course, most of Gloomsville's residents aren't really evil, just eccentric.
• Transylvania in Laff-A-Lympics is despicted as such.
• Depending on the Writer, the eponymous Monster High is located in a town like this. In one of the movies the protagonists live in an entire monster counterpart of planet Earth.
• Several episodes of The Real Ghostbusters deal with villages or even worlds like this. Episode "No One Comes to Lupusville" has a village of vampires, and episode "Flip Side" works as a Mirror Universe episode with Boo York, the ghostly counterpart of New York with ghost citizens. Also the Containment Unity turns out like this becoming basically Another Dimension inhabited by spirits in a ghostly environment.
• OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes has the house where Enid and her monster family lives in "Parents Day". It had vampire mom Wilhamena, werewolf dad Bernard, headless horse boy who had a pumpkin for a Head Icky, a Frankenstein's monster named Boris, and two ghosts named Spanky and Crudde.
• The first series in Ben 10 had supplementary material state that Ghostfreak and other aliens designed after mummies, werewolves and Frankenstein's monster all come from a solar system of planets called the Anur System. Some of the last episodes also mentioned zombie aliens stated to be from the same system. Omniverse finally explored the place, while also introducing a species of vampire aliens, and it was perpetual night with rural Victorian Bizarrchitecture .
• An episode of The Fairly OddParents!, Timmy (temporary turned into a fairy) tries poofing to Fairy World, but instead ends up in Scary World. He meets a vampire, who scares him with a picture of his grandma's feet.

Real Life

• Certain parts of Salem, Massachusetts try so hard to live this trope year-round. Unfortunately, the bar, or ice cream shop, or convenience store next door conveniently ruins the illusion.
• St. Helens, Oregon is a good example, seeing as it was also the same place used by Disney for the Halloweentown DCOMs.

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