'Prescott, Arizona, is a charming frontier hamlet harboring a sinister legacy its carried piggyback since its inception . . . Prescott's young adults struggling to survive not only each other, but a preternatural terror as old and alive as the town it holds hostage. Can passion, the grief and courage between family, friends and lovers rise above the frightening malice running nonstop inside Prescott's borders? Identical twins Spencer and Savannah Maitland have no mind for curses as they vie for the love of their roommate Donovan Creary; but one young woman of prominence dares to accept the challenge, taking deadly aim against the irrefutable demon, trying to save the soul of a dynamic stranger caught in its grasp and her heart. Her body and soul the only lure, one way or the other Belinda Pomeroy will be the last . . . the curse will defer to her, or she will count herself its latest victim.'Hello all: It's Halloween! My ABSOLUTE favorite time of year starts this Sunday, Oct. 31st! And coinciding with this exciting time is the launching of my eBook, "I'VE COME HOME" on both Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com! Check out the "I've Come Home" page on this blogsite for facts and photos, and on this post I want to share some tips with you for creating a fun, easy to construct Haunted House!
In this, as in most every project, planning is everything. Though several things need to be done days, even sometimes weeks before your grand fright-fest, if you don't procrastinate and just do them everything goes together so much easier. I have oodles of trial and error at this, putting on a haunted house for several years from our home in Prescott, Arizona . . . one of our last productions drawing over seventeen-hundred people in the four hours we were open! Yep, that's right: seventeen-hundred people traipsed through our home in four hours, and do you know what? Not one smudge of damage or one disgruntled or problematic thrill-seeker (with the possible exception of one startled guest who whipped their candy bag in front of them, which smacked Melody's jaw by accident.) After that we started insisting that trick-or-treat bags be left by the front door. She was our only casualty in all those years. Oh, we ended up with a lot of hoarse voices for days afterward, but isn't that to be expected? What's a haunted house without yeowls and ear-piercing screams? What I took away from our productions was that people were thrilled and appreciative to be given that kind of fun to enjoy on Halloween. As a footnote; I apologize to the people who bought our house. Their first Halloween after we moved they must've seen a parade of trick-or-treaters!
Because my haunted houses were indoors, I utilized our entire upstairs and even our garage, moving whatever furniture I didn't want to incorporate into a scene to the very outer walls of each room before assembly began. Months before Halloween I'd become a regular figure lurking at the loading docks behind Sears and other refrigerator outlets, stocking up on discarded refrigerator/freezer boxes; the big ones that when opened down the side become a 12 foot wide, 6 foot high canvas to paint on. My productions were so large I'd have anywhere from 60 to 80 of these painted and ready to throw up in a couple of days on any given year. I also availed myself of my daughters' friends and fellow band/choir/club members to play my monsters and work my props. Kids in middle-school and even through high-school loved this, a fantastic alternative to just sitting home passing out candy. Believe it or not, I actually had a waiting list. We would only run the haunted house one evening, on Halloween night. We'd be open from 5pm to 9pm, with a 15 minute bathroom/refreshment break every hour for our monsters and prop-hands.
With the cardboard refrigerator boxes I stocked up on, I'd lay out my rooms like you'd build a house of cards, after first drawing out the floorplan on paper. You quickly learn what works best when connecting your cardboard walls . . . just like card walls, the rooms are stronger when you brace one piece to another with lots of corners; L shapes, as many bends and turns as possble. Lots and lots of 'L' configurations add strength; not long spans of straight lines. Because your finished product ends up being this big maze of one room after another done this way, your furniture along the walls is never seen or comes in contact with anyone. When you've laid out your maze/room structure on paper, it'll also help to show you which cardboard wall pieces will need to be painted on both sides because a particular piece is being utilized for back-to-back room scenes (numbering them in some way is essential, even if it's with a sticky note that can be removed from the wall piece later). Only a few areas (hallways) did I bother covering across the top with a cardboard piece (to make into a tunnel with creepy stuff hanging down) because I found that the six foot walls were so high, when all the lights were out people were oblivious to the fact there was a 'normal' house behind the 'haunted' one.
I painted my walls for my rooms kind of generic, so the scenes taking place could be modified differently each year. I had the prerequisite graveyard scene, which was usually one of my biggest rooms; the walls painted with creepy black trees, dark bluish-black stormy skies, a full reddish yellow moon, the token black owl or vulture with bright red eyes and lots of headstones. I made up funny rhymes for the headstones; something like: 'Here's what's left of Barney Pruitt . . . lost his head but never knew it.' In this scene, for props my favorite thing to do was to sew or glue together big cut-outs of leaves with cheap material in fall colors: I'd make three or four 'blankets' about 5 feet long by 40 inches wide leaving the ragged leafy edges, and I'd place pillows under all of them but one, to look like mounded-up graves. Under the last one (the one closest to the footpath) I had one of my kids laying underneath it, waiting to shoot out an arm towards someone. I'd usually have this in the garage because I'd get sacks of real fallen leaves to strew around the floor to blend everything in. I got either some boxes or cheap Styrofoam and made headstones for them. Beyond that I'd have bats hanging from the few 3-D limbs I'd used in the room, and another of my favorite tricks was to have a 'flap piece' of 6 foot wall painted exactly like the rest so it blended in perfectly with the room, and some monster waiting to jump out from behind it.
Speaking of camouflage, another of my most effective rooms was a black and white checkerboard room, the blocks of paint being a foot square. Then I'd paint three or four large empty boxes (varying sizes, but averaging about 2' x 3') with the exact same checkerboard pattern and place them slightly in people's way along the path. Lastly I got cheap black and white material and stitched together the exact pattern into a complete ghost shroud to cover a couple of kids. They'd merely fade back into the wall or curl up in the least visible corner. People would be paying such close attention to the boxes, thinking something was going to jump out at them, that when the kids jumped out from the background people fled that room like their heels were on fire; some running the rest of the way through the haunted house. See, that's a big key to success with a haunted house: you want to distract people's attention away from what you're doing with something else to focus on; something that looks like it might jump out at you or move or something, but isn't the real 'gotcha' in the scene.
Another great generic wall is the dungeon block wall, big blocks painted over the entire wall. So many different scenes can be used with that. As for paint, I'd go to the discount art supply stores and get the big kiddie bottles of poster paints. They work very well, or I'd make several checks at stores like Home Depot for discounted cans people didn't want. With some basic experimenting, any color can be mixed together with enough other colors to form the dark gloomy colors you want to use.
Now, for blood. How to get the effect without the mess? Again I'd go to a store like Lowe's or Home Depot and buy a pint of high gloss fire-engine red acrylic paint. Taking out my cookie sheets at least a week before Halloween, I'd cover them with aluminum foil or plastic cling wrap, then drizzle blobs of 'blood' droplets and drizzle long blood flows on the sheets, fairly thick, and let them dry somewhere safe and where I didn't have to smell the fumes (usually the garage) for several days. When they were thoroughly dry, I just peeled and they were great for sticking to mirrors and glass, or taking a glue stick to them for porous surfaces.
Securing my walls together was accomplished 99% of the time with the great ol' American fail safe: duct-tape. A couple of days before Halloween is when I'd start assembly, and after duct-taping the walls together like a fiend I'd go over the tape with touch-up paint to blend it into whatever wall I was using (but not necessary, AND if I did this I was sure to put a drop cloth down first!)
As for props? Large appliance boxes make GREAT props! I painted one oven/range box to look like a chimney, cut a hole in the top and had one of my kids dressed like 'Chucky' jumping out of it one year, a 'demon' clown the second . . . speaking of clowns; remember the movie "It?" One of the scariest things I did was to make up a costume that looked like "Pennywise" the clown, got some helium balloons and merely had one of my kid's parents slowly walk up our stairs, balloons in hand, saying; "We all float down here!" I'd made a 'hallway' of my refrigerator boxes in front of the stairs to prevent people falling down the stairs, and merely cut out a good-sized peephole for them to look in to see "Pennywise." Geez, did I get a stream of "Ohhh____'s" over that one. For other props, I'd have a look around. My husband's motorcycle was incorporated into a city scene I'd done, and I plunked my husband on it dressed as 'The Terminator' complete with an empty shotgun sitting on his lap, pointed up to the ceiling. I also incorporated our bedroom . . . our rustic poster bed we had. I reclined one of my daughter's smallest girlfriends on a piece of 1/2 inch plywood with her arms stretched out and drew around her form, then cut it out with a roto-zip, cutting inside the drawn border about an inch all around (so the form wouldn't be seen under her). I cut the end of the board straight across a little above where her ankles would hit, so her feet would dangle over the end. Then I took a hundred-pound test clear fishing line and secured the form to each of the four posts using four strands of the fishing line, with the plywood form hovering about two feet off the bed. Halloween night she merely dressed up in a long-sleeved cotton nightgown and stretched out on the form and, abracadabra! The exorcist levitating scene! I had a hidden fan blowing on high to billow the bed sheers, and I rigged a door on my nightstand with elastic to slam open and shut with a teen hidden behind the bed pulling on the door with the same fishing line. The bedroom door had a rope in front of it so people couldn't actually walk into the room, only pass by it. That ended up being one of my most realistic-looking scenes.
I made tons of different props out of paper-mache'. That's done with one inch wide, long strips of newspaper dipped in pure liquid starch, then crisscrossed over whatever base mold form you dream up and left to dry for several days and then paint. Needless to say, you need to start collecting newspapers well in advance, or find a way to raid a recycling bin. I made 'pods' from the "Alien" movies, with paper mache' beasties inside; I made the neck and shoulders of a headless ghoul one teen strapped on top of their head with a long gown, really the possibilities are endless. I even went so far as to do a 'dummy form', it's abdomen made out of paper mache with a hole in the middle in which I popped up the alien beastie through it. This dummy looked to be laid out on a table draped around with a curtain effect, when in fact the teen was sitting in a low recliner underneath, only his head and one arm poking through the dummy, his other hand under the 'table' shoving the alien up through the stomach. That was such a hoot! It is a lot of work, but it really is so much fun! We went for monsters and such, not real hard-core gory stuff, but that was just us. We also had a rule for our monsters about 'no touching' because honestly, to grab onto someone just seemed to throw them into too much panic.
I hope this has given you some ideas if the ghoulish urge hits you to whip up your own fright-fest for your fortunate neighbors and friends. It's a little late this year for lots of advance planning, but with just an hour or two spent every so often throughout this upcoming year in preparation, by next year you can give them a night they'll not soon forget! In the meantime, I'd love for you to give my book a read . . . it'll put you in the mood for things that go bump in the night! All my love!
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