London's Month of the Dead: a spooky October guide

If you have a taste for the macabre, October in London is a good time to lean into it. London's Month of the Dead runs from 1 October to 1 November, and it is an annual festival of death and the arts that spreads more than 60 events across the city. The line-up leans heavily on ghost tours, haunted walks, candlelit cemetery concerts and classic horror film screenings with live piano accompaniment, with tickets ranging from £12.50 to £79.50 depending on what you book.

There is a lot to choose from, and it helps to pick a theme. If you want to spend your evenings in old chapels, the silent horror screenings are a good place to start: The Unknown (1927) plays at Guy's Hospital Chapel on Friday 30 October, and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) follows on Saturday 31 October, both with live music accompaniment. Guy's Hospital Chapel, in the West Wing of the original hospital on St Thomas Street in Southwark, was built between 1774 and 1777 and is the only 18th-century hospital chapel in England, so the setting does half the work for you.

For something more hands-on, the festival leans into the occult and the unusual. There is a ghastly puppet show, 'Till Death Do Us Party', at the Working Men's Club of Bethnal Green on Friday 23 October, and a séance at All Souls in Kensal Green on Sunday 11 October, with tickets at £25, which includes a 20% donation towards restoration projects at Kensal Green Cemetery. If you would rather walk than sit, the guided tour of Brompton Cemetery and its catacombs is a classic choice, and the Barbican ghost tours run from 1 October right through to 13 December at £26.50 a head.

Family-friendly options are well represented too, so it is not all for the brave of heart. Halloween at Kew Gardens runs from 16 October to 1 November, the London Dungeon's Curse of the Mummy covers the same period, and there is a Halloween trail in High Street Kensington from 24 to 31 October. For something free, the Hair-Raising Halloween events in the Royal Parks run from 27 to 29 October, and the Halloween spooky walks in Waterlow Park fall on 31 October. The Warner Bros. Studio Tour London also keeps its Dark Arts experience going from 16 September to 8 November, with floating pumpkins, Death Eater projections and interactive wand combat.

As the month winds down, the programme gets busier. Friday 23 October is particularly packed, with a tour of the plague pits of East London at Bunhill Fields, a look inside St Mary's crypt and churchyard, and a session on the resurrection men who snatched bodies to build modern medicine. Halloween night itself is the busiest of all, with a Japanese horror-inspired ball at Karma Sanctum Soho Hotel, a candlelit concert with Thomas Truax, and a guided tour of Abney Park's Music Hall Muses. The festival then closes out on 1 November with a haunting walk along the Thames at Tower Hill, a tour of the ancient churchyard at St Pancras Old Church and a session of ghost stories by candlelight.

Whether you want a genuine shiver or just a bit of seasonal theatre, the Month of the Dead gives you a month to work with rather than a single night, so there is plenty of room to pick and choose what suits you.