Remember when you were a kid, how Halloween was such a big deal? If you were lucky, your school had a party during the day, and then you went to another one that night, with trick-or-treating in between for the chocolate-bar mother lode. Sadly, though, as you get older, the options get fewer, not to mention repetitive — how many years can you dress up like a crayon and go to a party where half the people didn’t dress up at all?

Halloween doesn’t have to be tired. Boston offers many outlets to help adults capture the hallmarks of the holiday, but in more sophisticated or inventive fashion. This is one of those years when the ghoulish day itself falls in the middle of the week (the 31st being a Thursday), so many establishments are starting the fun early, holding events on the preceding Saturday. That means you have plenty of days to seek out (and find, with our help) all the grown-up variations on the essential thrills of Halloween.

Unlike the blood-sucking vampire bats of folklore, every bat I’ve ever seen was tiny, easily spooked, and completely uninterested in my neck. But there’s one bat in town that not only relishes a good pint of plasma from time to time, but is pretty damn tough. That’s Bat Boy, the protagonist of the eponymous musical being produced by SpeakEasy Stage. As played by Miguel Cervantes, this is a bat with a bite and a heart of gold (not to mention a body to die — or kill — for), and the good Christian folk who take him in can hardly resist. Winner of the Outer Critics Circle Award for its New York production, with music by Laurence O’Keefe and book by Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming, Bat Boy is a comedy ripped from tabloid headlines and rendered in a pastiche of American musical styles. Well-sung, especially by local fave Kerry Dowling, and staged with witty invention, this may be the Halloween treat to beat, so catch the last show in Saturday.

Bat Boy: The Musical, at the SpeakEasy Stage at the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont Street, in Boston, on October 26. Call (617) 426-2787.

No just universe would reserve the pleasures of candy for children, but if your taste buds have grown up, you may no longer want to scarf waxen candy corn. The civilized adult can get sugar and chocolate fixes at L.A. Burdick Chocolates in Harvard Square. Having studied his craft in France and Switzerland, Larry Burdick makes distinct, rich chocolates with a variety of flavorings — lavender, espresso, pistachio, and more — that leave Milk Duds in the dust. Top off your small bites with a chocolate milk that’s thick enough to stand a spoon in, and you’re really living. Or play to your childlike side with miniature ganache mice so singular and so yummy that customers from around the US now order them through Dean & DeLuca in New York.

L.A. Burdick, 52D Brattle Street, in Cambridge. Call (617) 491-4340 or visit www.burdickchocolate.com.

In the movies, gravestones always have skeletons or angels on them, and the plots are always freshly disturbed by the risen dead. You’ll find more variety and fewer zombies when you visit Forest Hills, in Jamaica Plain. This cemetery combines actual gravesites with other representative memorials to the dead. Here, you can pay tribute to the spirit (or, if your prefer, spirits) of literary greats Anne Sexton, e.e. cummings, and Eugene O’Neill, among others. Or see the handiwork of contemporary artists in a self-guided walk along the Sculpture Path, which meanders through the park and leads you to artworks nestled among natural environs. This year, Forest Hills is also planning Day of the Dead festivities, on Friday, November 1 at 5:30 p.m.

Forest Hills Cemetery, 95 Forest Hills Avenue, in Jamaica Plain, is open daily until dusk. Call (617) 524-0128.

No day celebrates fakery like Halloween — from the basic premise of costumes, to low-rent special effects like ketchup-covered spaghetti "veins" and peeled-grape eyeballs. For a more convincing use of theatrical blood, get thee to the Mother of All Horror Stories, Medea. With acclaimed actress Fiona Shaw in the title role of a woman who murders her own offspring to punish her husband, the production puts a modern flair on the Greek tragedy, and has elicited cheers in Ireland, London, and New York. Photos of the production fairly drip with stage blood, and the story is sure to haunt you.

Medea, an Abbey Theatre production, at the Wilbur Theatre, 246 Tremont Street, in Boston, through October 27. Call (617) 931-2787.

Sure, a loser who throws on an old sheet and calls it a ghost costume is scary (it could be worse if he yelled "Toga!"), but wouldn’t you rather be creeped out by the real thing? Test your belief in the afterlife with a good-natured stroll through Boston’s reputedly most-haunted locales. The Boston Spirits Walking Tour will lead you to Boston Common, where the ghosts of a few hanged Puritans may still linger, and take you to the Central Burial Ground, whose patrons have the distinction of being the first to die in the New World. You may find that the Boston Athenaeum is haunted by a disturbed reverend, or that the founder of the Parker House is guarding his property even now.

Even if you don’t see a ghost yourself, the power of suggestion is sure to keep you looking over your shoulder.

Boston Spirits Walking Tour departs from the Boston Common Visitor Information Center on select evenings, at 7:30 p.m. Call (781) 235-7149 for reservations and information.

Blood, bones, and entrails — ah, the incomparable joys of Halloween. (Christmas, with its carols and eggnog, is weak.) For those who like their holidays to come with a body count, the Brattle Theatre offers a film fest of murder and mayhem. For a full week, you can catch the return engagement of the Japanese flick Happiness of the Katakuris. Easily the weirdest movie I’ve seen in years, it’s an all-singing, all-killing affair in which an inn-keeping family in rural Japan bursts into song every time a new body turns up, each victim having been offed in distinctive fashion (including a death-by-sumo). For slightly more accessible (if no less incredible) splatterama, the Brattle tucks in a special screening of Evil Dead 2 (complete with vengeful severed hand) on Halloween night.

The Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle Street, in Cambridge, shows Happiness of the Katakuris from October 25 to 31, and Evil Dead 2 on October 31. Call (617) 876-6837.

Nothing says a monster has to induce terror — Sigmund the Sea Monster was kind of sweet, for instance — but all the really good ones have a mean streak to keep you chilled as well as thrilled. Audrey, the carnivorous plant at the center of the musical Little Shop of Horrors, is adorable until she gets big enough to eat humans whole. But the scariest character is the monster many fear most: the sadistic dentist. Emerson Stage brings both creatures to life in this comedy musical on Halloween night, in an intimate theater where every seat is a good one. Just don’t sit too close to Audrey — you never know when she’ll be hungry.

Little Shop of Horrors, at Emerson Stage, 69 Brimmer Street, in Boston, on October 31. Call (617) 824-8780.

"And all they found was a bloody hook!" Sound familiar? That’s because everyone tells the same goddamn scary stories over and over again. Not so at Eerie Events, a decidedly civilized event at Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, where each year brings five newly crafted ghost stories (some original, some based on literary classics, but all changing year to year). The tales are told in various rooms of historic buildings and delivered by actors in period garb. They vary from the creepy and unsettling to the simply odd, but you can’t beat the atmospherics of hearing these supernatural tales whispered in darkened rooms. Admission to hear the tales gives you access to the museum grounds, where strolling entertainers, a bonfire, and a free short film round out the entertainment.

Eerie Events, at the Peabody Essex Museum, East India Square, in Salem, October 25 and 26, from 6 to 10:30 p.m. Admission is $10. Call (800) 745-4054 ext. 3214.

Nothing adds to one’s ability to be frightened like fatigue. Why not link the two? You can wear yourself out screaming (with laughter as well as fear) at the Coolidge Corner Theatre’s 12 Hour Halloween Horror Movie Marathon. Beginning at midnight on Saturday, October 26 and shrieking on till noon the following Sunday, this schlockfest will be equal parts fright, laughs, and endurance. The line-up is eclectic: Poltergeist, American Werewolf in London, Day of the Beast, The Car, Blood on Satan’s Claw, Blacula, and Guy Maddin’s brand new Dracula: Pages from a Virgin Diary. So stay up all night and enjoy a marathon of creepy, campy fun.

Coolidge Corner Cinema, 290 Harvard Street, Brookline, (617) 734-2501.

If you think of art as stiffly formal or coldly cerebral, you haven’t seen the work of Chinese-born Parisian artist Chen Zhen, especially his massive soundscape titled "Jue Chang." Currently at the Institute for Contemporary Art, "Jue Chang" ("50 Strokes to Each") is an installation of 100 chairs and beds lashed together and covered with animal skins to make drum surfaces. Police clubs, branches, fragments of weapons, and wooden sticks are provided for viewers to use as mallets, in order to make music or simply let out their frustrations — and museum-goers do indeed take advantage of the offer. But if frenzied clubbing isn’t your speed, a metal and alabaster model for Chen’s Zen Garden offers more quiet, if disturbing, objects of contemplation: oversize alabaster bodily organs punctured — ouch! — by big metal surgical instruments.

Chen Zhen exhibit, ongoing at the Institute for Contemporary Art, 955 Boylston Street, in Boston. Admission is $6. Call (617) 255-5152.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the chicken coop, Alice Cooper reappears, proving that old shock-rockers never die, they just hide in the shadows and pop up to say boo every few years or so. Cooper may be older, but don’t look for saccharine sentimentality here. He’s still churning out lyrics like "Collecting pieces of my family ... this one has a skull but it don’t have a face" — just what you would expect him to say. And at the Orpheum, you’ll be close enough to the stage to see the toll that the years have taken on him — now that could be scary!

Alice Cooper, at the Orpheum Theatre, Hamilton Place, in Boston, on October 31, at 7:30 p.m. Call (617) 679-0810.

David Valdes Greenwood can be reached at valdesgreenwood@worldnet.att.net

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