Spooky Fonts

The mysterious Spooky, an alphabet to frighten even the bravest, was created by British designer Timothy Donaldson. The figures line themselves up, irregular and with uneven outer contours, and conjure up thoughts of ghosts, bats, vampires and darkness. Spooky is the ideal font for ghost stories with happy endings, a parody on horror and romance. As an added bonus, Spooky includes illustrations, from black cat to spider to witch - everything needed to earn its name.

GrindelGrove is a spooky display face that suggests deep dark woods, long-lost treasure maps, and cautionary fables. Its bark-like texture and v-shaped letterforms lend an air of eerie mystery, a perfect complement to scary novels, haunted houses, and strange happenings. The font’s dramatic, edgy character is best suited to headlines and short punchy statements. While at first glance, GrindelGrove appears to be only for Halloween and similar scary purposes, the typeface is actually quite adaptable; in fact, the designer originally created the letterforms for a native plant garden brochure.

Bats, Cats, Ghosts and Ghouls, Zombies, Witches and Spiders galore. Cackling to herself alone in her coven, the Scary Godmother, Lilou, threw eyes of newts and wings of bats into her cauldron and sent her unearthly children down the street with mischief in mind. Brought to us by Comicraft, these Halloween Dingbats have every kind of Spooky Monster she could imagine, and a few more besides. With both upper and lowercase characters that are easy to keep track of (“g” for ghost), this font gives designers all the images they need for their fun, scary designs. Keep your porch light on!

Blackminster is a Gothic font, inspired by a handwritten set of letters (created by Harry Lawrence Gage) that the designer found in a 1916 book about lettering. The family comes with many diacritics and an alternate swashy g and y. Blackminster works well on anything that requires a Gothic look, including Gothic fiction books, metal album covers, skateboards, and downhill mountain bikes.

If you’re looking for a frightening font, Comicraft’s Creepy Crawly won’t disappoint. There are worms in the earth, hairy bugs under the bed, and strange bloodshot eyeballs peering at you from out of the closet. The Creepy Crawly font is perfect for scaring away Trick-or-Treaters.

Perfect for stories about vampires, cemeteries and anything else Halloween-inspired, Dusk Till Dawn offers four fonts (Risen, RisenUp, Buried & BuriedDeep) with upper and lowercase characters and Western European international characters.

Carpe Noctem (Latin for ‘Seize The Night’), was created by accident when working on a request to make a lower case for the foundry’s existing Closet Skeleton font. If you’re in need of a slightly scary fairytale font, complete with angled edges, swirly bits, a couple of alternate - even more curly - glyphs and an alternate medieval ampersand, then Hanoded’s Carpe Noctem is your typeface!

Linotype’s Freak Cabinet consists only of symbols – all of them strange, frightening faces.

Laura Worthington has put a devilish twist on her usual flowing scripts. Sepian evokes an air of vampires, death, and old evil (“med-evil”) castles. The font is a wickedly fresh update on the centuries-old textura blackletter form. Use its razor-sharp “gothic” face and darkly cool character to create tattoos, horror-movie posters, or scary video game text.

Crypt, created by Hanoded, is a seemingly lovely font that will look good in just about any design. But if you take a closer look, it is actually quite scary - it has jagged edges and a sinister undertone, making the letters jump from your computer and eat you alive! Use Crypt for book covers, posters, product packaging and magazines - the result will be quite haunting. Needless to say, Crypt comes with an otherworldly amount of diacritics.

Wolfsblood, designed by Jim Ford and published by Monotype, is a display face adapted from hand-lettered logos spawned by punk rock bands. The style can be traced back further to Hollywood and the explosion of low-budget exploitation, horror and sci-fi films, which also had an influence on punk rock. Wolfsblood captures this bizarre dark-spirited lettering. The Wolfsblood font has an expanded character set with ghoulish borders, bats (perfect for Halloween!), goblins, and contextual ligatures programmed to give the typeface a random appearance by default. Wolfsblood is great for logos, posters, headlines and short bits of text, and will add a fun, aggressive energy to your dark and other-worldly creations.

After Nightfall, from Hanoded, is a handmade fairytale font. It was called Bunting Nook first (after a spooky story of a black dog that haunts a town in Britain), but was later renamed to a more illustrative name, After Nightfall. This font comes with some lovely swashes, which should be used sparingly. 

Another small but blood-curdling family, created by Monotype, Creepy’s ALL-CAPS alphabet drips blood from every character. Perfect for your gory designs!

From the Bitstream foundry, Raven can deliver an eerie feel to any bedtime story. Raven was inspired by type found on an antique greeting card. With its Gothic feel, it is the perfect typeface to gain a little bit of an edge. In the companion Raven Extra fonts, there are hidden characters, four ravens, which complement its Poe-like nature. Both Raven and its bolder mate, Raven Evermore, work beautifully in text and display sizes.

Shiver me Timbers and Splice me Mainbrace! There’s strange goings on in Smugglers’ Cove… A gathering of thieves, brigands, piratefolk and back-stabbing blackguards the likes of which have not been seen since the days of Redbeard! Someone’ll be swinging from the yardarm or walking the plank if the treasure doesn’t turn up soon! Comicraft’s Dead Mans font, offered in two styles, is ideal for storytelling of old pirate tales and dark stormy nights.