Spotlight: Paisley Halloween Festival

Putting Community at the Heart of the Spectacle

The Paisley Halloween Festival is returning for 2025, promising its biggest, brightest, and most fantastical iteration yet. Taking place over two nights, Friday 24 and Saturday 25 October, the event transforms the town centre into a realm of thrilling outdoor spectacle. We asked Suzi Maciver, Commissioning and Creative Events Lead at Renfrewshire Council, to tell us about the growth of the festival and what audiences can expect from this year’s event.

The inaugural Paisley Halloween festival took place in 2014, with a few thousand people attending to enjoy a short parade, fire installations in Abbey Close and a live stage. It has grown since then to attract more than 40,000 to the town over 2 nights, with hundreds of local people participating in the parade. The event has evolved in recent years, taking a break during the pandemic, moving towards an installation and trail format coming out of the pandemic, and then last year with a welcome return to the parade.

We aim to put the local community at the heart of our programming – we listen to what they want and what they’ve enjoyed the most and try to build on that year on year.

For the 2025 spectacle, the programming team have been working with lead creative partner Cirque Bijou to bring an array of talent from Scotland, the UK, and beyond, to Paisley. This year’s event will see the return of crowd favourites Spark! LED Drummers, All or Nothing Aerial Dance Theatre and Circus Alba, alongside new faces such as hula hoop cabaret artist Maple Staplegun and Tanzanian acrobats Black Eagles.

Our town centre animation extends across the whole of the town centre – in the form of stage and street performances, giant building based inflatables, architectural lighting, and the parade – which forms the centre piece of the event, taking place on both nights of the festival.

The two-night parade is curated in co-production with local community groups and sees hundreds of young people participate. This year’s procession will bring literary and cinematic magic to life:

This year, the parade is taking inspiration from beloved characters from children’s books and films – expect to see everything from the giant creatures from Where the Wild Things Are, Fantastic Mr Fox and his ensemble of mini foxes, and a troupe of Mary Poppin’s LED Umbrella dancers, to Wednesday Addams, Minions and the pop sensation K Pop Demon Hunters!

Paisley Halloween Festival has community participation at its heart, and collaborating with local community groups is part of what makes the free-to-attend festival so unique.

We work with many of the region’s underserved communities, such as young carers, care experienced young people, lower income families, groups with additional support needs and New Scots to deliver the parade, and also in our volunteering programme – bringing together these diverse communities helps to generate a sense of belonging, wellbeing and pride of place for those involved as participants, volunteers or audiences.

I hope the festival will continue to grow in its creativity, community spirit and the pride it brings to local people, in putting Paisley on the map. And that it can continue to highlight good practice for the wider events industry in terms of our approach to accessibility, sustainability, supporting artists, suppliers and volunteers, while bringing thrilling outdoor spectacle and performance that’s authentic to our place.