The best Halloween theater in 2025

Laurence O'Keefe, Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming's 2001 cult musical Bat Boy, a horror comedy in the sliced vein of Little Shop of Horrors, gets another chance to fly. Director Alex Timbers (Moulin Rouge!) has assembled a tremendous cast for the show's two-week gala run at New York City Center: Taylor Trensch as the title character, a misunderstood monster torn from the headlines of the lurid supermarket tabloid Weekly World News; Christopher Sieber and original cast member Kerry Butler as the West Virginia couple that takes him in; Andrew Durand, Marissa Jaret Winokur, Rema Webb and Mary Faber as local townsfolk; and Alex Newell as the satyrical Greek god Pan.  

In recent years, the Skirball Center has become New York's top landing zone for Europe's most outré avant garde theater and dance. This production, the U.S. debut of the Oslo company Susie Wang, continues that tradition with Trine Falch's creepy and surreal horror-comedy thriller, set in American hotel lobby and rendered in a style that might be described as extreme Southern Gothic. Among the attractions are blood, dismemberment, cannibalism and a briefcase stuffed with a mother's remains. Susie Wang is only here for a week, so you have just five chances to see this—if you dare.

Frigid New York gives you the chills in its fourth annual festival inspired by Mexico's dead-lifting Día de los Muertos. The lineup features spooky variety shows, short horror plays, Edgar Allan Poe works, a traditional ofrenda, psychic mediums, a tiny interactive matchbox theatre, a murder ballad musical, necromancer burlesque and other tales of the macabre. Among them are Stephen Smith's One Man Poe, Andrew Agress's The Witching Hour and Maeve Aurora Chapman and Liam Corley's Death Owns an Ice Cream Parlor. Visit the festival's website for a schedule and a full list of offerings for shows.

There’s a big twist at the end of the first act; the plot of the second includes a giant hole. Those are just two of the injuries that two old frenemies inflict on each other in this new Broadway musical, a savagely funny dark comedy about the quest for eternal youth. Adapted by Marco Pennette, Julia Mattison and Noel Carey from the 1992 film, and directed by Christopher Gattelli, the show is a catty, campy delight. The terrific Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard make the kind of musical-comedy magic that never gets old.

In this spooky-seasonal variation on the long-running Drunk Shakespeare, five actors gather to perform a vampire-in-New-York story loosely adapted by Lori Wolter Hudson from Bram Stoker's batty gothic thriller. The twist? One of them gets plastered before the performance and it's up to the four remaining cast members to keep the show from going down for the Count. (Audience members can buy alcoholic drinks of their own to get into the spirit.)

Thy favorite scary movie, oh, what is't? Brooklyn’s Random Access Theatre’s boozy-geeky Drunk Texts series muddles classical texts—or modern ones reimagined as classical—into a cocktail of drinking games, improv and audience interaction, in which the audiences chooses which thespians take shots. Now the gang returns for Halloween with Thou Wilt Scream, Robert Price's mock-Shakespearean gloss on horror flicks. 

The world of Harry Potter has arrived on Broadway, Hogwarts and all, and it is a triumph of theatrical magic. Set two decades after the final chapters of J.K. Rowling’s world-shaking kid-lit heptalogy, Jack Thorne's epic—richly elaborated by director John Tiffany—combines grand storytelling with stagecraft on a giant scale. It leaves its audience awestruck, spellbound and satisfied.

Thomas Doherty and Madeline Brewer currently star in the latest revival of this dark, tuneful and utterly winsome 1982 horror-camp musical about a flesh-eating plant who makes dreams come true for a lowly flower-shop worker. Composer Alan Menken and librettist Howard Ashman wrap a sordid tale of capitalist temptation and moral decay in layers of sweetness, humor, wit and camp. Michael Mayer directs the feeding frenzy in this deeply enjoyable revival.

The Phantom of the Opera ended its 35-year Broadway run in 2023, but the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is somehow here again in a surprising new form: an immersive experience, à la Sleep No More, in which audiences are led en masque through multiple locations in a complex designed to evoke the 19th-century Paris opera house where soprano Christine Daaé is tutored and stalked by the killer who lives in the basement. The complexity of the enterprise is staggering, and if you have any affection for Phantom at all, it’s a blast. Get dressed up, hide your face and give yourself over to the phantasy. The October 31 performance is followed by a Halloween soirée, Le Bal Macabre, for which tickets can also be purchased separately.

The ghost of an axe-murdered girl haunts a New Orleans mansion—and must confront her own terrors before it's too late—in David P. Johnson's original musical, which mixes gothic horror with dark comedy. Johnson and Arden Teresa Lewis co-direct a cast of six led by Helen Floersh as the cute little spook who is trying to bury the hatchet.