Call of Duty’s Halloween event has a Zombie royale and horror crossovers

Activision today dropped the trailer for its Call of Duty Halloween event: The Haunting of Verdansk. We’re getting a few new game modes, a bunch of horror themed packs, and rewards, both in Modern Warfare and Warzone.

Warzone players will get to experience Verdansk at night, and it’ll come with “more than a few Halloween-themed frights” — and I’d be content with that, to be honest. But Modern Warfare‘s also getting a fright-themed coat of paint. My favorite new addition is that, if you get three kills in a single life, your operator’s head will turn into a jack-o-lantern. Get ten kills, and it’ll light on fire. MW also gets two new modes: Snipers Only, which is just what it sounds like, and Onslaught-er, which involves finding and seizing a Juggernaut suit that spawns on the map and doing something with it — I imagine I’ll find out if/when I ever get that far.

CoD appears to be taking a leaf from Mortal Kombat‘s book, including some classic horror movie villains to spice up the roster: namely, Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Billy the Puppet from the Saw series. Both will get appropriate skins and content packs, as will a character called Dr. Karlov. I won’t pretend it’s not darned spooky to see some familiar faces in the trailer, and it appears Billy and Leatherface will both pop in Haunted Verdansk, if the above trailer is anything to go by.

And of course, there are zombies — it wouldn’t be a Call of Duty spook-fest without zombies. In this case, we’ll have Zombie BR, a limited-time mode in which dead players are resurrected as zombies, with potential to turn human if they slay enough of their fellow players. You can’t wield weapons as a zombie, but you can run, punch, and generally overwhelm with numbers, as zombies are wont to do.

The Haunting of Verdansk starts on October 20 and runs through November 3. Activision will also apparently drop some more themed bundles during the event, including one inspired by Dia de los Muertos.