by Luke McKinney

Halloween is about pretending to be someone else, meeting new people, and seeing things that aren’t really there. Of course it’s about drinking. But for a holiday that’s meant to be horrific, all the drinks are based on some dumbass deciding that pumpkins are apparently terrifying.

The horror!

The only scary thing about pumpkins is global coffee chains saying “The stuff we sell is so foul, even we admit that adding some artificial fruit flavor makes it better.”

Most Halloween cocktail guides are based on “spoooooky” names and bright color schemes, which is weird, because we thought it was illegal to market drinks to children. Especially since most of those cocktail recipes read more like craft project instructions, requiring three trips to the shops and at least one sober adult to help you make it. Sober adults are the exact opposite of a cocktail’s function. That’s why we’re showing you simple, scary cocktails you can make any time, no matter how many of them you’ve already had.

Toxic Waste

• Orange juice
• Some bright blue liquor

Forget the bright colors, what you need is the drink that created Jack Nicholson’s Joker. Which tells you exactly what it looks like, how crazy you’d have to be to drink it, and how happily full of insane plans you’ll be afterwards.

Seriously, this stuff looks like it could kill Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease

This cocktail is the perfect evil toxic green. It’s what Steven Seagal discovers before beating up an entire corporation in a mid-’90s ecological movie, and is  also the easiest drink in the world to make. Any blue liquor plus orange juice equals poisonously dark green. Aftershock Blue works well despite looking like window cleaner, tasting like window cleaner, and now that I think about it I’m not convinced it isn’t a scam for selling cheap window cleaner. But it works: use some and you suddenly see the world a lot more clearly. The result is surprisingly good: it looks terrible but feels good going down, so now you’ve got both a drink and an opening line.

Another option is Sourpuss Blue Raspberry, but be warned, that means you’re making people drink something that contains Sourpuss Blue Raspberry. And if you’ve got enough mortal enemies to get through an entire bottle of that, you really need to reconsider your stance on not killing them, Batman.

Lotto 649

• Bar shooter: bartender chooses a random shelf behind the bar, then mixes from the 6th, 4th and 9th bottles from the left.

A regional cocktail, so feel free to substitute your local lotto, radio station, area code or other three digit number. It’s truly the most terrifying cocktail of them all, because you’re trusting your future to luck and to what the bartender thinks of you. Bartenders see everything, know everything, and have a distressing tendency to be sober (or much, much better at remembering things when drunk). And this cocktail gives them the power to either paralyze you, or inject the alcoholic equivalent of the super-soldier-serum in through your stomach.

A bartender can knock you out faster than a UFC champ

The Four Horsemen

Mix one part each of:

• Jack Daniel’s
• Jim Beam
• Johnnie Walker
• Jameson

Technically we should point out that the Johnnie Walker is Red Label, but if you try to put any other kind into this cauldron of evil the bar staff will stop you.

Man, we find a reason to use this image, like…way too often to be healthy

The Four Horsemen is Lotto 649, but 33% more dangerous and with that pesky, tiny risk of it actually working out removed. It’s less a mixed drink than a declaration of war against your liver, future self, and everything in the entire world which isn’t the condition of partying. It’s the atomic bomb of shots: undeniably effective, equally terrifying, but once the idea is suggested people can’t help but build it at least once no matter how bad they know it will be. Enjoy!

Halloween Skull Acid

• Crystal Head Vodka
• Hi-C

Specifying a certain brand of vodka is like specifying a certain finger to press the “ON” button – pointless and irrelevant, because you’ve clearly decided to just get things going as fast as possible. Except in this cocktail. Crystal Head Vodka is the best named product in the world for an incredibly obvious reason. A reason which is a pointless gimmick 99.73% of the year, but perfect for Halloween.

Combined canteen and decoration

A Crystal Skull is brilliant for a Halloween party, and 750 ml of vodka is perfect for any kind of party. Pour some of the vodka into a less impressive container, replacing it with the Hi-C. Hi-C tastes like fruit trees tried to make batteries, cheaply, without safety regulations, and possibly as revenge for how we eat them all the time. But it’s the perfect bright Halloween orange. Refill with both vodka and Hi-C as the night progresses. Best results obtained by dressing in an appropriate costume and swigging directly from the bottle.

However you feel, there’s a booze for that

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Classy, but not fussy

Luke’s alcohological expertise characterized The Spirits of Spirits, and showed how to matchmake your booze with Four Impressive Cocktails You Can Mix with Ease.