A Halloween party wouldn't be complete without some body parts! Take your celebration to the next level and recreate my amazingly scary Dead Man's Diner!
This gory Halloween party theme was so much fun to create.
We decked out our kitchen to look like a truly gruesome, classic diner complete with severed body parts dripping with blood.
Although some of my guests squirmed a bit when they were served hand-shaped hamburgers, open-face sandwiches with a mashed potato face on top of turkey and gravy, and stuffed pizza skulls, they ate them all up.
Gross Halloween food ideas
The Bone Calzones, Stubbed Toe Subs, Feet Loaf, Cannibals Chowder, and Toe Jam Sundaes really took my guests by surprise, but even the young kids enjoyed eating this creepy cuisine. Everyone particularly loved the panna cotta brain.
You can find the recipes for all of these dishes in my Hungry Halloween cookbook where you'll also see a few photos of our party decor.
If you are interested in hosting a Dead Man's Diner Halloween party, I will show you how we transformed our kitchen into a ghoulish diner.
Add bloody body part decorations.
We have a large island in our kitchen with an area for eating. The island has very pretty maple-colored cabinets and trim, but I really wanted an old-fashioned diner counter for our party, so I had to transform it somehow. I found packages of 8 ½" x 11" silver opalescent paper (from Deals) which I taped to the entire front area of the island.
As you can see in the picture the paper is very reflective and from a distance, you couldn't see the individual pieces of paper, it just looked silver and shiny. It worked perfectly.
I then found cardboard body part cutouts (at Party City) which I taped to the silver paper. A roll of clear plastic printed with dripping blood (from Dollar Tree) was attached to the top edge of the counter to finish the effect.
Add menu boards and bloody body part props.
Many diners have their menus hanging up behind their counter, but our kitchen is open to our morning room (actually my chocolate kitchen), so we created a wall out of PVC pipe on which we hung a large piece of black plastic.
I created three menu signs using a graphics program (Printmaster) which I printed on 8 ½" x 11" paper. I brought my small signs to a print shop and had them printed out in a larger 2' x 3 ½' format.
I hung my signs on the black plastic and added more bloody body part cutouts and some creepy cloth. On the shelf below the sign were realistic-looking severed body parts and a body form of a man's chest. A few bloody knives and hatchets added to the gory effect.
Add gory props to your kitchen.
One of my favorite little touches was quite a surprise to my guests. I placed a few fake severed fingers in my food processor.
Once a few guests noticed the fingers, they began showing them to everyone else. I saw the squeamish, turn a little green.
Of course, that was the whole point of this party theme. I did manage to gross people out with all the food and decor, but everyone realized it was in good fun and enjoyed the party.
Dress up in bloody diner costumes.
What diner would be complete without waitresses and cooks?
I ordered the classic diner uniforms from an actual uniform company (sorry, can't remember where now) and we made blood-stained aprons to go over the uniforms.
The cooks wore blood-stained butcher's jackets or chef's coats and aprons.
Serve gory diner food for Halloween
We actually served the diner food to order, which was a lot of fun for our 80 guests, but it kept the diner staff incredibly busy throughout the entire party.
If you plan to do this, be sure you have a staff of fun caterers or a group of crazy, hard-working friends like I do to help in the kitchen.
Eyeball Appetizers
I was so grateful that we had prepared a lot of appetizers that could just be put out on a table before the party. Our guests who were waiting for their diner food to be prepared could snack on all of these eyeball-shaped appetizers.
Dessert Table
Once all of the appetizers were eaten, we cleared the table and then filled it back up with the creepy Halloween desserts including a skeleton-shaped panna cotta, a Creme Brulee Pie, peanut butter fudge body parts, buckeye eyeballs, and more.
Drink table
We used a dripping blood plastic tablecloth to cover a 6-foot table. We had lots of soda, water, and apple cider for our guests to drink.
I loved the blow-up coffin-shaped ice chest with a blow-up skeleton. We filled it with ice and drinks. We also had a skull-shaped ice bucket filled with ice.
More decorations
To keep the theme going throughout the house, we turned our living room into a funeral parlor and had lots of creepy decorations, hanging heads, and severed body parts throughout the entire house.
If you host a Dead Man's Diner-themed Halloween party, I'd love to see pictures from your event.
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Laurie Spinazze says
What was on the plate? The one where you said you can keep scrolling if you think it is to gross. It was a white square plate with blotches of red and and what looks like a folded up piece of "skin". Is it something edible? Or just a decoration?
Beth says
That plate of bloody-looking skin was edible. To make it, I boiled spring roll wrappers (the thin see-through wrappers) until they were soft and pliable to make the "skin." Then, I strained spaghetti sauce to remove all the chunks of tomatoes and herbs, and added a touch of red food coloring to make it really red. I heated the sauce and poured it over the spring roll wrapper to make it look like bloody skin. It actually tasted pretty good but it looked really gross.
Anonymous says
wooooooahh