TikTok's Genius Thrift Hack Will Make Your Halloween Decor Even Spookier

Looking for creative and distinctive spooky season decor on a budget? The solution may be no further than your neighborhood thrift store, which harbors a huge number of items, many antique or vintage,  that can make all your Halloween decor DIY dreams come true. That includes books, which are available in abundance at thrift stores and other second-hand markets like discount bookstores, garage sales, and flea markets. Tiktokker @britt.ostofe recently revealed her hack for creating spooky, yet slightly literary, Halloween decor on a budget by using old books as part of her décor. 

Books are an excellent way to add to your Halloween decorating scheme. Whether stacked or lined up on a mantel, shelf, or table, they are great for adding atmosphere and texture, as well as serving as risers for smaller items like candles, pumpkins, and other objects. They work particularly well if you are going for a dark academia or haunted Victorian feel for your seasonal decorations, or if you want a way to capture the feel of an enchanted creepy library a la the Harry Potter books and films.

While thrifted and secondhand books come in a wealth of varieties, @britt.ostofe advises looking for hardcover and older-looking books with spookier titles like ghost stories, mysteries, and crime thrillers, whose titles will only add to your Halloween theme. Look for colors you like and books with an antique leather bound look, removing any hardcover dustjackets to reveal the bound cover underneath. While you can use them as-is, @britt.ostoffe distresses some of the books, which you can do by rubbing sandpaper along the spine and edges to get a time-worn look on even the newest titles.

Whatever their original appearance, you can also amp up your Halloween decorations by painting and adding decorative elements to your books like spiders, medallions, and other materials to create creepy spell books or a DIY Necronomicon from the "Evil Dead" franchise. If you have a stack of old books that lack the requisite spooky titles, try painting them and using a gold or white marker to make up your own horrific titles on the spines.