11 Haunting Artworks for Halloween Inspiration

The Halloween season is a time to be creative, and the art historical canon is full of sources ready to lend themselves to an original decorative theme or costume. Beyond sheet ghosts, goblins, and jagged-toothed grinning jack-o’-lanterns, there are masterpieces in galleries, private collections, and museums worldwide that lend themselves to the festivities. From Gustav Klimt’s sinister-but-sumptuous Death and Life to the airborne sorcery of Goya’s Witches Flight to Édourd Manet’s eerie black-and-white illustrations of Edgar Allan Poe and the familiar psychological terror of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, these spellbinding works offer an artful but apt alternative to conventional frights.

1. The Scream | Edvard Munch

The image that launched endless emoji use is immediately evocative and needs no introduction. The Norwegian painter first created it in 1893, but continued to produce versions of the iconic work through 1910. With its whirling sky, undulating landscape, and ghostly, hollow-cheeked figure clutching its head in horror, it captures existential terror as two quotidian figures in the background amble along under streaky, not-quite-blood-red skies.

2. Ophelia | Sir John Everett Millais

The drowned maiden from Hamlet caught the attention of Taylor Swift in 2025, when it influenced the cover of her twelfth studio album, The Life of a Showgirl. More spectrally beautiful than outright terrifying, the celebrated Pre-Raphaelite work is housed at the Tate Britain, where it transforms the grisly death of the Shakespearean heroine into an enchanting tableau complete with her elegant silver gown and wildflowers woven into her long auburn hair.

3. Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette | Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh painted this 1886 canvas long before medical science delivered the definitive verdict that cigarettes kill. The painting has attracted appreciation from the likes of writer David Sedaris, who used it as the cover of his 2008 book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames.

4. À la fenêtre (At the Window) | Édouard Manet

In one of those happy but true cultural crossovers, Manet illustrated an edition of Edgar Allen Poe, that early master of American letters and horror, that was itself translated by French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Only 240 of were printed, and they originally retailed for 25 francs, and failed to sell. Today, copies sit in the collections of the Met, the MoMA, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the British Museum, the New York Public Library, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, among others, and a complete copy can fetch as much as $45,000 at auction.

5. Medusa | Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio)

Screaming for eternity, the fearsome Gorgon looks none too pleased with Perseus for depriving her of a body. It is believed that Caravaggio incorporated his own features into her dramatic, bulging-eyed visage. The most popular version sits in the Uffizi in Florence, while a second is currently in a private collection.

6. Death and Life | Gustav Klimt

Combining Klimt’s beloved decorative flourishes with a meditation on mortality, Death and Life, housed at Vienna’s Leopold Museum, offers an unexpectedly opulent take on Halloween’s darker themes. The richly ornamented painting depicts a skull-faced figure representing Death, cloaked in deep blues and purples, looming over a brighter-hued cluster of living humans, all seemingly oblivious to the menace watching over them.

7. The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane | John Quidor

An American Halloween season would feel incomplete without some reference to “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The wide-eyed Crane seen here is no Johnny Depp, just a man fleeing for his life while pursued on horseback by a gruesome, pumpkin-headed figure. Now part of the Smithsonian’s collection in Washington, D.C., the work offers a macabre dose of Halloween nostalgia, Americana-style.

8. Tournée du Chat Noir Poster | Théophile Alexandre Steinlen

Black cats are a central All Hallows decorative motif. This one is moody about something, given its bristling fur, while its spooky yellow eyes contrast with the red graphic in this advertisement for a popular Montmartre cabaret production. The Belle Époque world of Toulouse-Lautrec and cohort, which birthed the poster and its distinctive style, is a delightful subject for a Halloween get-up.

9. The Love Potion | Evelyn de Morgan

The Victorians and Edwardians understood how to make the occult properly ornate. No hag at all, this sorceress in a marigold-colored gown sits at command in a luxurious world, prepared to alter the feelings of another to her liking. Her kitten is an elegantly cloaked, comfortable cousin to Steinlen’s alley creature. The 19th century is replete with images of witches as harridans; take a look at William Holbrook Beard’s The Witches’ Ride or Lightning Struck a Flock of Witches for examples. But why not choose something pretty instead?

10. Witches Flight | Francisco de Goya

The airborne weird sisters in Goya’s circa 1798 painting from the Museo del Prado are decidedly more bizarre than the enchantress above. Three bare-chested figures in pointed hats carry a naked victim through the night sky as two panic-stricken men attempt to protect themselves from the spectacle. The composition reflects Goya’s fascination with the supernatural. For something still more grotesque, check out the artist’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters or Saturn Devouring His Son.

11. Isle of the Dead | Arnold Böcklin

Swiss Symbolist Arnold Böcklin conjured a mysterious vision of the afterlife in Isle of the Dead, which he painted in five versions between 1880 and 1886. A lone boat carrying a coffin and a shrouded figure glides across still waters toward a rocky island, where tall cypress trees and shadowy burial chambers hint at an eternal resting place. Both beautiful and unsettling, the dreamlike scene captures the eerie uncertainty of what lies beyond death, making it particularly Halloween-apropos.