Skip to content
Watch
Shop
Subscribe
Atlas 04 / 08

Imagining a Retro-Future Halloween

We made the Halloween brochure the Space Age forgot: a robot at the door, a witch on a jet broom and a pumpkin that carves itself.

By Moss & Fog3 min read
Mid-century style painting of a witch in a pointed hat and flowing cape riding a chrome jet broom with twin turbines past a huge yellow full moon, a black cat in a bubble basket behind her, over a Space Age city with a needle tower and a monorail
Plate 4 of Hallowe’en 2062, our invented 1962 forecast.

In the early 1960s, the future came in brochures. Carmakers and appliance companies printed them full of flying cars and kitchens that cooked dinner on their own. Not one of them covered Halloween. So we made one: a seven-page brochure called Hallowe’en 2062, from a company that never existed. It’s out today on our sister site, Atomic Daydream.

Cover of a worn 1962-style brochure titled Hallowe'en 2062 from the invented General Futures Corporation, with a round painting of saucer homes on tall pylons, the middle one topped by a glowing jack-o'-lantern dome
The cover of Hallowe’en 2062. The full brochure is on Atomic Daydream.

The real forecasts

The real forecasts are worth seeing. In 1956, General Motors made Design for Dreaming, a musical short for its Motorama show, where a woman bakes a cake in Frigidaire’s Kitchen of the Future. A year later, Monsanto opened its plastic House of the Future at Disneyland. More than 20 million people walked through it. When it closed in 1967, wrecking balls and jackhammers barely made a dent, so the crew crushed it with chains.

Newspapers ran the future every Sunday, too. Arthur Radebaugh drew Closer Than We Think! from 1958 to 1963, and Charles Schridde painted Motorola TVs into living rooms nobody had built yet.

Design for Dreaming, the 1956 General Motors Motorama film. Our brochure borrows its cheerful, nothing-can-go-wrong voice.

What we put in ours

Ours keeps the same straight face. A robot answers the door and weighs every piece of candy. Mom flies the trick-or-treaters to thirty houses in thirty minutes. Kids walk into a machine in their pajamas and walk out as Martians. The witch rides a jet broom now, with a bubble seat in back for her cat.

Every page is set in period type, on paper we aged until it looked like it had sat in a junk drawer since the Kennedy administration.

The Moss & Fog ShopThe Design EditDesign gifts for people who notice fontsTrays, tools, books and desk things with the kind of design we love writing about.Shop design giftsPinwheel Tray$48Geometric Tray$48Artist Sketchbook$20
Mid-century style painting of a tall white household robot with a glass dome head handing out candy from a lit chest compartment to a girl dressed as a ghost and a boy dressed as a skeleton, both in bubble space helmets, on the porch of a Space Age house at night
A robot answers the door and weighs every treat.
Aged brochure page headlined Thirty houses in thirty minutes. An orange flying convertible with tail fins hovers beside the balcony of a saucer house on a tall pylon at night, a mother at the wheel while a witch, a homemade robot and a pumpkin hold out treat bags to a woman handing out candy.
Page 2 of the brochure: thirty houses in thirty minutes, tail fins included.
Mid-century style painting of a family on an orange sofa, seen from behind, watching a wall-sized oval television as a glowing ghost made of scan lines drifts out of the screen into the room, a chrome robot dog looking on beside a starburst lamp
The ghost on TV. That September, ABC’s first show in color was The Jetsons.

October 1962

The real October of 1962 was stranger than any brochure. The Seattle World’s Fair, a whole fair about life in the Space Age, closed on October 21. The next night, President Kennedy told the country there were Soviet missiles in Cuba. Khrushchev agreed to remove them on October 28. Three days later, kids went trick-or-treating anyway.

So the brochure gives it a page: a fallout shelter turned Halloween party, with apples floating over the bobbing tub. It’s the least funny page in the brochure, and our favorite.

Mid-century style cutaway painting of a saucer-shaped house at night above an underground fallout shelter lit warm orange, where children in Halloween costumes reach for apples floating above a tub beside shelves of canned food and a fallout shelter sign
The fallout shelter, turned party room.

All seven pages are on Atomic Daydream. The last one has a pumpkin that carves itself when you press the button. Go try it!

Flip through Hallowe’en 2062 →

For more of the future we were promised, start with our retrofuturism guide and Googie architecture. And for a costume that’s actually scary this year, there’s always the AI data center.

By Moss & Fog Staff

Keep reading in Design

All of Design
DesignThe Scariest Halloween Costume of 2026 Is an AI Data CenterCarsHollywood’s Most Halloween-Ready Cars, Parked at the PetersenFurnitureThe $30,000 Sports Car Sofa That Seats Exactly One and Goes Nowhere

Enjoying the wander?

Our best stories on design, nature and architecture, plus Fog Signals, our weekly letter of favorite finds. Free, and easy to leave anytime.

Keep reading