Ask Slashdot: How Are You Haunting Your House This Hallowe'en? 249
Hallowe'en is just around the corner. I've spent hours this month poring over masks, fog machines, automated monsters, and sound-activated dancing skeletons (mostly too rich for my blood), and worked with my brother and sister to haunt my mom's house with scary pictures, mounds of spider-webbing, sound effects, strobe lights, stage blood, candles, and rusty knives. Like every year, though, the best laid plans are the ones you come up with after the fact (why do I always plan to build a coffin with Bible-repelling magnetic lid and matching Bible, but never do?), and while our effort was fun and satisfying, it definitely didn't push the envelope. (There's plenty of good inspiration out there, though, for people who do want to go a little crazy.) So I ask: What are you doing to celebrate the spirit of Hallowe'en? In particular, are you using any good stagecraft-style tech to make your dwelling, yard, or neighborhood just a little bit scarier than usual? Any good advice based on previous haunting experiences, either as haunter or hauntee? What effects do you wish you could create, given enough time and money? Do you control any aspect of your display by computer? Think broadly: Links to inspiring commercial haunts, sources of interesting gear, and your favorite house-haunting projects at Instructables are all welcome, as well as relevant advice from the parts of the world where Hallowe'en isn't the major event that it is in the U.S.
We're the local light show (Score:4, Interesting)
so we do the synced music thing:
http://www.wiltonlights.com/videos/ [wiltonlights.com]
Also on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uEoQImKS9o [youtube.com]
Video projection etc. (Score:3, Interesting)
This year I'm likely to rear-project their lightning loop near my front door, and run 2 LCD TVs with the eyeball loop in the windows of two separate rooms facing the street. (yes, the house is alive!)
Audio is important too, and once again I'll be running this track through speakers and extra subwoofers (real ones, not home ones) hidden on my property: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/halloween/id289650473 [apple.com] There is no better sound effects package than one made by Hollywood Foley Effects artists. It's fun to watch the parents freaking out even more than their kids are.
Giant Floating Head (Score:4, Interesting)
Get a web-cam, a video projector, and something translucent to use as a rear-projection screen (fake spiderwebs work well). Aim the camera at your face (try lighting it from below with a flashlight) and shine the projector at the screen and you have a giant, floating, glowing, talking head.
Of course, you can add more effects like a sound system, but it is an easy and cheap (if you can borrow a projector) set-up.
Great holiday for DIY electronics (Score:5, Interesting)
Before the kids came along, I built a number of fun electronics projects for Halloween. I built a flicker circuit I got off of Wolfstone [horrorfind.com] (a great site for would-be haunters).
Along with a couple of friends, I built a coffin-leaper one year, too. I built the electronics (a pressure sensitive mat that activated a solenoid valve). Another fellow built the pneumatics and another built the actual coffin and dummy. When you'd step on the mat, the dummy would spring up and a loop tape with sounds effect and a strobe would go off.
I also built a lightning/thunder machine using a "color organ" (basically a device that causes different flood lights to flash in time to various sound frequencies) that came from a Velleman kit. I set up an old pair of PC speakers playing a loop CD of some thunder and use that to drive the color organ. I usually get a few good jumps from kids who aren't expecting it.
I have a commercial fog machine that I use with a timer to give my house a nice cloud of low-hanging fog. I built a fog-chiller out of a cheapo foam beer cooler by cutting two holes in either side and running a flexible piece of aluminum ducting through it (with a twist in the middle and holes punched in it to increase surface area). This keeps the fog hanging low. Another tip is to spray down the area with the fog using a garden hose.
I started working on animating a Bucky skull a while back, too. I added eyes attached to a servo and wrote a program in Windows that let you move them with sliders. I intended to animate the mouth, too, but my kids came along shortly after that. I still pull out my decorations every year, but my own little goblins have taken priority over my projects - so it goes.
I'd love to finish the Bucky skull and maybe build a bookshelf where the books pop out on their own (driven by a motor and series of cams). Maybe one day when I have some time to myself again ...
Hope this gave everyone a few good ideas for projects to scare the neighborhood kids -- happy haunting!!
Re:Noose (Score:3, Interesting)
And don't fuckin' hang yourself, you idiot. You think that will end anything?
I am pretty sure it will end your life...
The biochemical machinery that we recognize as clinical vital signs, yes. The abstract nature that is a human being ... not so much. Suicide means that gets stuck in a really awful place to be, plus the clarity to recognize how foolish it was to waste one's life on a relationship like that. Some would call it hell but it doesn't need little red guys with pitchforks, that's just religious fantasy designed to scare you into obedience, as if anything enlightened was done from a place of fear.
... even if that is who you are and you think death is nothing more than a dirt-nap, a "lights out" with no consciousness remaining ... consider it from the angle of those he leaves behind. How selfish one must be to not care about the pain and heartache and long-lasting emotional scars that suicide would put his friends and family through.
Considering that every seven years or so, each individual molecule in the human body is replaced by another, that means we're not really so material. We're as material as a wave that is waving through water. Only we're waving through water and solid matter. There is an abstract nature to this. Not only could you not escape it, I have no idea why you would want to. It's a beautiful thing.
Even if you are so steeped in logical positivism that you simply cannot bring yourself to entertain this notion, namely because you have a tool (logic) that is quite useful for some things but now you think everything is a nail because you only have a hammer
So yes, come up with some little trivial one-liner in response to a serious issue. You are uncomfortable with this theme and that's your way of smoothing it over. I get it. Just understand what you are trivializing.
pop-up monsters (Score:5, Interesting)
What I'm working on was inspired by the sculptures Joshua Harris has been building/leaving in NYC [laughingsquid.com] that suddenly explode into full size when a subway goes by and then collapse again to look like a pile of debris. What I've finished: electret microphone amplifier, that tells an arduino when someone's within two meters, the arduino then closes a big monster relay, and I've built a couple of monsters using the instructions on destructables.org for inflating sculptures. (Basically cut up a stuffed animal and blow up the pattern design.) Mine are humanoid shapes about 2 meters tall with arms that stick out and a bunch of tentacle-like things sticking out of their faces.
What I'm working on is the inflation system. My original thought was to use a piece of 6" PVC tubing, about a meter and change long, with about 5 atmospheres of pressure in it, and a lawn sprinkler valve that the arduino triggered, so I have a high pressure lowish volume inflation system. I'm finding that's really loud and not fast enough to get the movement I want, which is to have the monster go from a pile of invisible black rubbish to 2 meters tall in under a second -- really, jumping out at people. So I'm playing with high volume low pressure: having the arduino turn on a shopvac with its exhaust inflating the humanocthulhuoid figure.
Unfortunately I've only got a couple days left to get it all working, and I also have a wedding ring to make before I get married in two weeks, and guess which one is being given higher priority by other involved people? So maybe I'll get lucky and get it done, but most likely it'll be next year. Then I'll have time to add strobe lights on the ground pointing at it.
I've also made most of a soliton gun, using a piece of 15" diameter, 2 meter long cardboard concrete form with a constricted front, the intent being that I can blast big puffs of air from a significant distance and hit people with them: just walking along and suddenly wham a big blast of air from nowhere. It might be interesting, especially if I can time it so it hits people at the same moment as the jumpy monster jumps.
Re:Minimal, if anything (Score:5, Interesting)
Awesome she found him.
Where has he been hiding all these years then?
Light the thing! (Score:5, Interesting)
Canada: Canadian Haunter's Association [canadianha...iation.com] US: hauntworld.com/haunted_houses, hauntedhouse.com
My wife and I run a free haunt every year. If you're in Newmarket, Ontario, stop on by: houghtonhaunt.com
Forget jump scares or loud music-- the key to any good haunt is the lighting. You can make any prop, scene, actor, etc look amazing with a standard garden flood light from the local hardware store. I've been to professional haunts that used little to no lighting, and it was a shame. You couldn't see any of the detail work that went into their sets, and usually it was so dark you couldn't even see the jump scares. Just a few extra lumens would have made a world of difference.
I've added a few smoke-and-mirror tricks this year, but what I've learned the most from doing this is carpentry. The first year was drapes held up by duct tape. Since then I've learned about blocking, wall building, power tools, and why duct-tape doesn't hold up walls. =)
Just a little trick (Score:5, Interesting)
Right at the end of September I decorated the porch with all the typical fall crap. Pumpkins (fake), hay bales, corn stalks, and a life-sized scarecrow in an Adirondack chair right next to the front door.
The neighbors are all very used to seeing that scarecrow.
Halloween night, I will be dressing as a scarecrow and replace the stuffed one with myself. Subtle movements when the kids ring the doorbell are usually enough to send them howling from the porch, without revealing to anyone farther away that the scarecrow is not as it seems.
It worked like a charm last year, and since then I've moved, which means I get to do it again with no one expecting it ;)
It's not exactly original (I remember getting the idea from some old 80's show), but it's very effective.