Halloween

Halloween runs on light that behaves badly on purpose: flickering, colour-shifting, strung along a porch railing until the whole street knows what's coming. Here's what's out there for doing that without starting a fire.

The Philips Hue Festavia outdoor string is the one for people who want to commit: fourteen metres, twenty unbreakable globe bulbs, and the option to switch between white and full colour depending on how committed you are to orange and purple on the thirty-first. Compare more string lights.

For the actual trick-or-treating, there's the LYNEXA 4-in-1 camping lamp, which is a torch, a lantern, a powerbank and a light string depending on which end you're holding, charged by sun or USB so it doesn't die halfway down the block. The best tent lamps.

Indoors, the Calex Smart LED Strip covers thirty metres and syncs to music, which is one way to make a living room feel haunted without buying a single prop. Compare more LED strips.

The Calex Vista Lichtsnoer sticks to fifty warm white bulbs and a remote, which reads less like a haunted house and more like the neighbour who still does Halloween properly and Christmas right after. The best string lights.

Run entirely on sun, the Best Active solar garden string gives five lit metres off two metres of cable, IP65-rated for whatever the weather does on the night. Compare more string lights.

And for covering more ground on the same principle, the Happy Goods solar string doubles up: a hundred LEDs split across two fifty-bulb runs, ten metres of light fed by four metres of lead, no outlet required. The best string lights.