Liverpool Halloween Carnival returns for 2025

Liverpool’s Halloween Carnival returns for 2025, celebrating 10 years of the city’s very own Samba Band, Katumba.

Every autumn, the nights grow longer, the air turns colder, and the line between worlds begins to blur. Halloween has always been about more than just costumes and sweets – it’s a time to honour our ancestors, to gather in ceremony, to transform fear into celebration.

This year, Katumba Halloween Carnival reclaims those deeper roots. Their theme for 2025 – “Ancestral Spirits, Ritual Fire” – weaves together the diasporic origins of carnival with the ancient pagan traditions of Samhain. Born from rituals of remembrance, resistance, and renewal, carnival is a living space where communities gather to drum, dance, and light the darkness with rhythm and spirit. By fusing Afro-diasporic beats with the fire and folklore of Halloween, the procession becomes both a homage and a reinvention. A living ritual that connects past to present, ancestry to community, darkness to light.

Every October, Liverpool drumming and movement troupe, Katumba Transforms the Liverpool City Centre into a playground of imagination, with performances inspiring, and engaging audiences by creating big, bold, visual shows through unexpected spectacle of drums, fire, lights, dance, theatre and more.

What began in 2012 as an impromptu, small gathering of drummers springing up in Liverpool City Centre for a dressed up parade on Halloween, has grown into one of Liverpool’s most anticipated annual celebrations — a fusion of carnival, culture, and community spirit.

This year’s Halloween Carnival marks the grand finale of Katumba’s Black History Month celebrations, as participants from their Routes & Roots beginner sessions join the parade.

Starting at Bold Street, making it’s way through Church Street and Lord Street before culminating in an unmissable finale at Liverpool ONE, the carnival will also celebrate 10 years of Katumba – Liverpool’s leading large-scale drumming and movement organisation, renowned for creating inclusive public spectacles and community programmes that blend Afro-Brazilian, contemporary and urban influences. Join them in celebrating an incredible decade of drumming, movement, and community.

Every costume, every rhythm, every flicker of flame in the Katumba Halloween Carnival is created and carried by people from the local area. This year, Katumba are inviting YOU to take part in a host of workshops with a Halloween twist.