Though Halloween never fully ends for many who partake, the crowning of fall makes it a little more socially acceptable to serve severed fingers for dessert. More than just costumes and candy, the spooky season has been known to invoke the spirit of competition in enthusiasts, with glamorously gory displays of self-expression engulfing entire homes, office spaces, and pastry shops.

Clawing the decorative itch and offering inspiration for closeted culinary necromancers, Discovery+ and Hulu are home to a gallery of Halloween-friendly contests pulsating with bloody, seasonal allure. From carving and chunkin' pumpkins to constructing gingerdead houses and devilish desserts, the mediums may differ but all demand to be devoured during the most enchanting time of the year.

Jim Henson's Creature Shop Challenge

Youtube TV/Hulu + Live TV

Jim Henson's Creature Shop Challenge's Full Cast

Airing for one season on Syfy back in 2014, Jim Henson's Creature Shop Challenge took the dazzling practical magic of Jim Henson and wove it into a life-changing opportunity. With $100,000 and a contract to work at Jim Henson's Creature Shop waiting at the finish line, 10 artists competed each week to concoct the most compelling, screen-ready characters worthy of the Henson name.

RELATED: 10 Best Jim Henson's Creature Shop Movies (According To IMDb)

Tasked with creating everything from aliens and sea creatures to swamp beings and Skeksis from The Dark Crystal, contestants had to conceptualize, sculpt, and build fully operational suits— animatronics and all—to be brought to life and screen tested in front of Henson legacy/chairman Brian Henson, creature designer Kirk Thatcher, and creature fabricator Beth Hathaway at the end of each round.

Kids Halloween Baking Championship

Discovery+

Kids Halloween Baking Championship girl with sidepony holding an orange cake

For parents looking to bake up something spooky with their children during the Hallo-season, Kids Halloween Baking Championship on Discovery+ offers 42 minutes of inspiration. A seasonal spinoff from the longstanding Kids Baking Championship, the Halloween iteration brings back four familiar faces for a second shot at bragging rights (and $10,000).

Hosted by cake ace Duff Goldman and actress Alison Sweeney, the contestants are tasked with a "Preheat" and "Main Heat" challenge that sends them trick or treating for supplies to be baked into scary/sweet treats and monstrous cakes. A fun and mildly frightful experience for younger bakers, the show provides a gateway into baking akin to what Goosebumps and Beetlejuice do for horror.

Punkin Chunkin

Discovery+

Punkin Chunkin hosts in front of a cannon

While carving tends to get most of the gourd-related glory, the art of launching a pumpkin thousands of feet through the air via homemade machinery and watching it splatter off into the horizon is no small feat.

Taking place at the annual World Punkin Chunkin Championships in Bridgeville, DE, thousands of spectators gather to watch 100+ teams battle across six divisions (centrifugal, human-powered, torsion, air cannon, catapult, and trebuchet), with the top flinger getting their name engraved on the massive 1,500-pound trophy. Akin to a medieval tournament designed by Gallagher, Punkin Chunkin is a pulpy good time that showcases the best backwoods ingenuity America has to offer.

Face Off

Youtube TV/Hulu + Live TV

Face Off's creepy clown

For 13 seasons, SYFY's Face Off has summoned the transformative abilities of the world's best prosthetic makeup artists and used them to turn human canvases into movie-quality monsters. Offering a hefty $100,000 prize, $25,000 in Alcone makeup, and career-altering exposure, the competition is an intense and enlightening look into the artistry behind cinema's most unsightly creatures.

Making household names out VFX/makeup maestros Glenn Hetrick and Ve Neill, as well as showcasing weekly guest judges synonymous with the horror and VFX community, Face Off pays homage to the greats while launching new stars. Unleashing everything from evil ice cream clowns to slithering serpent soldiers, no show possesses gnarlier fodder for potential costumes.

All-Star Halloween Spectacular

Discovery+

All Star Halloween Spectacular hosts in costume

Combining the structural skills of HGTV and the confectionary expertise of the Food Network, All-Star Halloween Spectacular is a Battle of the Network Stars for the home and lifestyle scene. Pitting the Property Brothers, Drew and Jonathan Scott, against each other with Duff Goldman and Tia Mowry-Hardrict as their respective teammates, the teams must construct two haunted house parties, building not only the structures, but the cakes, cupcakes, and refreshments to be served throughout their sinister schematics.

RELATED: Flip Or Flop & 9 Best HGTV Home Design Reality TV Shows, Ranked By IMDb

Taking place over 2.5 days at the Linq Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, the winning team gets $10,000 to donate to the charity of their choosing. While the cross-channel competition only spawned one special, its amalgamation of builds and skills makes it a unique addition to the Hallo-streaming library.

Halloween Cake-Off

Discovery+

Halloween Cake Off's Duff Goldman

Hosted by the omnipresent Duff Goldman, Halloween Cake-Off takes the familiar concept of thematic cake building and cranks it up to 11. Not only are contestants given an ingredient challenge to start each round, but the surviving bakers are then tasked with a transformation challenge that sends them home to build an elaborate showpiece cake that moves and transforms in a randomly assigned way.

RELATED: 15 Best Baking Competition Shows

Combining baking, engineering, and even pyrotechnics, the one-season spinoff is a conflagration of sorts to confectionary fare. With $10,000 hanging in the balance, Halloween Cake-Off shows that as delicate of an art form cake can be, throwing a little danger into the mix only heightens the end result.

Haunted Gingerbread Showdown

Discovery+

Haunted Gingerbread Showdown hosts sitting at a table

Echoing Tim Burton, Haunted Gingerbread Showdown takes a confectionary quirk synonymous with Christmas and buries it firmly into the undead world of Halloween. Over two, four episode-long seasons, nine contestants (and their assistants) are tasked with building seasonally relevant gingerbread scenes as well as being surprised with an adjacent tasty treat challenge.

Baking and building for a shot at $25,000, the themed gingerbread houses cover everything from the home in Beetlejuice and eerie theme parks to Ghostbusters and mummified Egyptian ruins. With the surrounding scenery as important as the main structures, no grave is left unturned in the pursuit of monetized and gory gingerbread glory.

Halloween Baking Championship

Discovery+

Halloween Baking Championship cake with an axe

Now on its eighth season, Food Network's Halloween Baking Championship returns every September to whip up some devilishly decadent fun. Following the "Preheat" and "Main Heat" format, contestants are given an hour to create a deliciously odd pastry before building their main dessert over the following 90 minutes.

Fast-paced and family-friendly, the creepy confections cover everything from witch toes and bloody hearts to tombstones and jack-o'-lanterns. With a revolving door of judges dressed in costume for each main heat and commercial bumps filled with easy at-home recipes, Halloween Baking Championship is an immersive experience that's as fun to watch as it is to mimic at home.

Outrageous Pumpkins

Discovery+

Pumpkin that's carved to say Outrageous Pumpkins

Hosted by vampire-fighting flutist Alyson Hannigan, Outrageous Pumpkins corrals seven of the most preternaturally gifted pumpkin carvers into a $25,000 competition. Whittling away the competitors over two, four-episode seasons, the artists are tasked with a "Quick Carve" and "Big Carve" round, turning their hand-picked gourds into grandiose and gruesome works of art.

While the cake-building talents of other competitions deserve their dead roses, the artistry carved into each gourd and episode of Outrageous Pumpkins is unparalleled. As fun as it is to butcher a pumpkin stencil while battling hand spasms, reaping the rewards of other, more talented artists without all the grueling work is hard to say no to.

Halloween Wars

Discovery+

Halloween Wars pumpkin cake with a green skull in it

While Halloween Wars was long a two-tiered competition with a Hallmark-friendly host, celebrity guest judges, and moderately macabre designs, the show shifted in 2021, attaching Ghost Adventures' Zak Bagans to its name and tasking each team with creating one bone-chilling creation.

Haunting the studio space like the ghosts in Poltergeist, Bagans pops up periodically on old tube TVs with prompts and pivot points related to the haunted artifacts in his museum. Returning on September 18th, 2022, Bagans (and in-studio hosts Eddie Jackson, Shinmin Li, and Aarti Sequeira) is back in apparition form to guide the latest contestants through a labyrinth of dark confections inspired by the most unsettling locations investigated by the Ghost Adventures team. Whether viewers crave the surprisingly spooky creations of the Bagans era or the lighter and less marketing-motivated prior seasons, Halloween Wars is the ultimate comfort watch for everyone whose calendar resets on November 1st.

NEXT: 10 Most Iconic Locations Ghost Adventures Has Visited