To make it a bit more fun, we decided to have "theme rooms" this year, so the first area you go into is the "Zombie" room, then the "Spider" room, then the "Skeleton" room and finally into the garage where the candy is which will be the "Disorienting" room. We separated the rooms by hanging curtains made of strips of plastic.
NEW: Watch the video walkthrough, click here (4 min, 21mb .avi file using DivX codec)
I decided to abandon the "corner" piece concept used the last couple of years because it is too limiting. I figured I would just start building, putting up walls and supports and braces as needed to match the plan.
The plan called for over 1000 square feet, with 600+ feet of freestanding
haunt in the driveway. I laid out the floorplan on the driveway with ductape and
purchased a couple hundred dollars of 2x4's and 1x4's and started building. It
really wasn't that hard, I built the whole structure in one day by myself. If I
had a helper it would have gone even easier. It was a lot more space than last
year and was more work though.. I was kinda tired after that day and I pulled a
muscle in my left forearm which has plagued me all the way through the month.
After the structure went up, it was time to put up the plastic. This took a
couple of weeks of evening work (come home and staple plastic for an hour before
coming in) and was a lot of work, more than I ever expected. I'm not sure why,
it seems a fairly straightforward task, to ductape and then staple on the
plastic. Perhaps it was because I did most of it myself and was very careful to
try and make it secure.
I overlapped the roof plastic so that rain would slide off and not come inside, however I miscalculated and had a 2-foot opening in the middle which I tried to patch. This did'nt work very well and quickly let in rain. I also didn't have enough slope on the roof and after 4 weeks some of the plastic roofing had sagged and created low spots where the rain formed.
I wanted each room to have at least one moving/active prop and I had
purchased a shop-vac so this year I wanted to set it up so the shop-vac blew air
at people. I purchased a double-sized foam skull from Anatomical and carved it
out so the air pipe came up the stand and through the back of the head and
pointed through the mouth. I purchased a motion-activated trigger for high
amperage devices (shop vac) from Jim Kadel. Now when people walked by the shop-vac
would activate and blow air at people, then shut off after a second or two.
In addition to the shop-vac idea I came up with a giant spider that's moving
on its web. We had the giant spider already it was just a matter of setting up a
motor that made it kind of "pulse" on its web - i.e. move forward and
back some. We hung the big heavy spider on a bungee cord and rigged up a slow
motor with big "teeth" to push the bungee cord, thereby causing the
spider to move around.
2 years ago the
SEMITB was a big hit. The only problem was the actual
connection between the drill and the box. Last year I couldn't make it work at
all and we left it out of the haunt. This year I had a much better idea for the
connection. By taking a couple of giant washers and bolting them to the
cardboard box I made a secure area for the spinner, which was a bent piece of
steel rod. The whole connectivity piece worked quite well.
For the Zombie room I wanted a glowing green canister of radioactive waste bubbling and plopping. So I took a cardboard tube used for concrete column casting and painted it to look like a canister. Then I put a light inside pointing upward and a clear tupperware bowl in the top with a aquarium bubbler in the bottom of the bowl. This was to be filled with green water, the light would shine through it and I would have my glowing radioactive waste.
Fog Chiller. Since I try not to store anything I don't need to, I typically
rebuild my fog chiller each year. Most of the time the results have been less
than stellar. This year I adapted a new concept from Liemavick. He had a 10 foot long
pipe filled with ice cubes. The fog flowed through the pipe, was cooled down and
came out. I didn't really have room for a 10 foot long pipe so I cut it up into
4 - 2.5 foot long sections and tipped them up on end so I could connect them
with joints like a giant inchworm, I could also take off the fittings and refill
the pipes as the ice melted. The picture shows it laid out before assembling,
the fog will go in the top and flow up and down and around and be chilled. The
whole thing occupies about 2 square feet of space.
The size of the haunt and the decision to separate it into "themes" made decorating a bit challenging this year. Last year one of our big problems was that it was too dim so I really worked on that this year. I purchased 6 reflectors and colored party-bulbs.
The Zombie room got green bulbs (natch!), the spider room got red bulbs and black lights, the skeleton room got green bulbs.
All the skeleton stuff went into the "skeleton" room and worked out
pretty well. We had lots of blow-mold skellys and webbing and of course the
skull that blew air at people.
The spider stuff we had wasn't nearly enough for the giant spider room we
had laid out (about 18 feet long by 6 feet wide) so we purchased several packs
of mini spiders and began hot gluing them all over the 2x4's. After that we
moved a bunch of skulls from the skeleton room to underneath the
"giant moving spider" like a pile of victims. We also made one wall
exclusively the glowing pop-out portraits since they really didn't fit anywhere
else.
In the zombie room I whipped up some expanding foam "droplets" to
lay on the ground, and we put all the "mutated" giant rats with the
half size "Mr. Thrifty" bones to make some good scenes. We took a picture of a mask and printed it out 5 feet high, pointed a strobe
at it and made that the entrance.
The size of the corridors (6 feet wide) allowed for extensive multiple layer webbing in front of the props in the corner and still have room for people to walk. This was a really great unexpected bonus as the webbing made the haunt look twice as good.
The Disorienting Room - in an effort do "do something" with the big
ending room where we gave out the candy my better half came up with the idea of
hanging streamers from the ceiling. Not enough to prevent access but dozens and
dozens to make it "interesting". This turned out to be a great
decoration for almost nothing. The picture is pretty grainy, it turns out I
didn't take a digital photo, so I had to grab a frame of the video I made on
Halloween night.
The red light in the spider room just didn't work, I don't think red would have worked in any of the rooms except some kind of demon-theme.
The canister of radioactive waste was a total disaster. It leaked around the bubbler tube. We finally decided to give up on water and switch to green jello but since its within reach of the TOT's we decided to abandon it and just stuck a mask in the tupperware lettign the light shine up from below. It never did look like my concept anyway..
The SEMITB didn't work at all. Not because of the new connection hardware but because of two factors, we couldn't get the drill to stay at the right speed, it was always either too fast, shaking itself loose or would slow down to a stop. Plus the sensor-switch I purchased flat out didn't work at all and finally, 2 hours before the kids started arriving we gave up and stuck a couple of hands and a stobe inside the box.
The Giant moving spider was a total bust. My concept was of a spider sitting on its web, moving itself and the whole web 6 inches to a foot towards and away from you (a kind of pulsing). Instead the motorized cam thing we came up with on the bungee cord simply made it bump a little, other props were moving more just from the wind howling around.
The fog chiller was a total disaster. In tipping the pipes up I had made the fatal flaw of letting gravity into the picture. What happened was the ice melted and then settled down to the bottom of the pipes and refroze, sealing the pipe and preventing fog from going through. After messing with it for 2 hours I ripped it apart and threw the pieces into the garbage. We had drifting fog that rose into the air (just like last year).
Smaller haunt.. This year was the big one, from now on our philosophy will be "smaller haunt, bigger party, more fun".. I really felt burned out after 6 weeks of building haunts and props and setting up decorations. I want to move towards a smaller haunt and more "ready to go" props, so I can just set them in place.. I'm willing to give up storage space to make less work.
More isolated spotlights. I think having some true "spot" lights will really accentuate the specific props and scenes, something that’s bright but only a foot or two of brightness. Also, more black lights.
Permanent fog chiller… I'm tired of building a new piece of cr*p every year and not having it work. I'm willing to store it each year if I can just get a functioning one and get it built to last.
MIB mechanics…. I'm also tired of fighting with the finicky SEMITB. Its time to remove the SE (Super Easy) part of it and make a prop that I can just take off the shelf and plug in and be done with it.
More, smaller strips in the disorienting room.. The disorienting room worked really well I think (though reports are varied) but some of the strips were a foot wide. Next year I'm thinking of taking black crepe paper, the roll stuff that you use for parties and hanging it all down, then using fans to blow it around.. I think it will look good.. We will see.
Street appeal. This is really a two-fold issue. A big surprise this year was the "driveby gawking". Since the giant spider goes up the first weekend in October there are a lot of days of spectator activity. This year we were surprised by being added to the Senior Citizens route. Every single day a small bus loaded with Senior Citizens would come by and stop in front of the house for awhile while they gawked at the spider and haunted house. I want to enhance the curb appeal even for daylight drivebys. I plan to add a couple more half-size "giant spiders" to place around the house and a motorized popup tombstone that can run all day for a month and probably a black PVC fence around the graveyard.
The second portion of the street appeal is for Halloween night itself. Partially due to the haunted house and partially due to the streetlight next to us, we seem to be a kind of central "base" where people go off in all directions and then come back, discuss things and then head off again. So we typically have a bunch of people, adults and teens, hanging around talking. I want to add some stuff for them. The first will be a pair of motorized skulls doing one-liners (why didn't the skeleton cross the road, he didn't have the guts) which I will pull from my "joke of the day" database. Possibly also a bottomless pit or a guy trapped in a box doing a "hey you, want to help me out of this thing" type of routine.
Anyway, that’s it for now.