haunt combo 2, originally uploaded by Boju.

Before I started doing film props, I was doing Haunted Houses and carnivals. They’re my first love, and I’ve learned a lot of tricks for decorating a great Halloween party or Haunt.

13 Tips for Decorating a Haunted House

1. Figure out your budget. I get a lot of people who think they can set up a haunted house for a few hundred dollars. A haunted house is an interactive environment. You can decorate a Halloween party for a few hundred no sweat, but for a haunt you absolutely need props, actors, lighting, and gimmicks. If you don’t have the budget for a a haunted house, but you want more than just a Halloween party, consider the following - A. a Tunnel of Terror: in attraction in which a small part of a larger party or event is transformed into a haunted tunnel. B. A Sideshow- set up at your Halloween party spaces for an exhibition of oddities with a host, a magician/ card trick table, a fortune teller, seance, and any other unusual performers you might want. If it’s an adult party, sideshows performances can include belly dancers or burlesque dancers as well. Also, renting haunted house props and decor is a great way to cut costs by 50% to 90% and insuring that each year will be completely different.

2. Take a Photo - It’ll last longer. You’ll need a photo op, someplace well lit where photography is encouraged (a lot of haunts are too dark or discourage photography). Preferably the photo op should be clearly pointed out and feature your name, like “Teresa’s Torture Chamber- Halloween 2008.” A souvenir like that gets shown to friends, posted on the internet, and serves as a reminder in coming years of your haunt. That’s great promotion. Popular photo ops include anything the guests can get into, like caskets, electric chairs, stocks, open graves, hearses, etc. Other great photo ops are giant monsters, celebrities, or famous stand ups that guests can pose near.

3. Give them something to talk about. Your haunt needs just one thing that really wows people to become legend, and the best haunt in town.

4.Flow - if your haunt is an attraction, people need to be able to understand where to go next. Try to avoid having guests enter a room and leave through the same door. A good haunt runs like a good carnival dark ride, with guests moving steadily along, visiting each diorama-like scene enjoying the thrills and moving on to the next one.

5. Lighting - randomly flickering lights are the best. I use plasma lamps, flicker boxes or battery powered candles. Strobe lights are migraine inducing and should be used sparingly, only where disorientation, a blow off, or stop motion effect is essential. Randomly flickering lights provide atmosphere, illuminate the area of interest, and prevent the guests eyes from adjusting to the darkness. Light and darkness is key to a haunt.

6. Go with the strengths of your space. If your building is old, go gothic or killer hillbilly. If its modern try mad science or serial killer.

7. Use actors. Make sure they’re outgoing but know where to stop (screaming kids good, crying kids bad). Also make sure they can take a punch. People can react without thinking when spooked. Actors transform Halloween decorations into an attraction. Arm them with safety weapons like a chainsaw without a chain or realistic soft foam axes.

In terms of using “plants” or “shills” with the guests, I’ve found that it often works great. A shills job can be nothing more than starting an infectious laugh, wow, or scream which helps the thrills along and diffuses the “too cool for ghouls” attitude some kids have. Once one person’s screaming it’s not long before everyone’s screaming and having fun. Shills can also be used if a gimmick involves audience participation, but be careful not to do something too transparent. For instance, say you’re doing a magic show, a poor use of a shill would be as the volunteer that picks the card. A good use of a shill would be if the trick should go horribly wrong, like sawing a guest in half and having blood and fire erupting from the box, or collecting info so your “psychic” knows his audience. I saw a haunt where a shill interrupted the performer because the gag going on was “unfunny and offensive” the atmosphere quickly became tense and everyone thought a fight was on the verge of breaking out, but instead the shill pulled off his shirt to reveal a dynamite belt that shot confetti. The whole gag went flawlessly from typical haunt gimmick to something tense and real to a genuine threat to a bizarre comedic release.

8. Stay away from animatronics unless your a geek or a gear head. You know if you are. If you have a hard time hooking up your computer to your printer, get someone technical to run the vortex tunnel and synchronize the robots. Also, tech is expensive, and haunts are dark, chaotic, and sometimes wet places. You’ll need to be able to repair things on the spot or be left with a 3K paperweight.

9. Don’t neglect the details. Things like cobwebs, drapery, bloody plastic, and chains can inexpensively help set a scene. Also set a few surprises just beyond the normal obvious spot of interest. It’s always great when people see different things in a haunt (and it encourages repeat trips). Also subtle “is it or isn’t it part of the show” kind of things can be very unnerving.

10. Mix distraction and surprises. Gather peoples attention on one large piece that seams to be about to do something. While everyone is watching in anticipation, hit them from the side with a totally unexpected gag. I’ve done this trick in a spooky doll room where while a giant doll rises and begins to lurch towards the guests, previously unseen doll people swoop in from the sides.

11. Theme is important. It’s great if you can tie everything together along a common thread.

12. Decorate your food area too. If you have a bar with bottles on display, mix specimen jars between them. Get a brain jello mold and make salmon pate in it to really look like brains. The Dapper Cadaver edible stage blood is actually a delicious butterscotch flavor, so try mixing it into your drinks or over deserts. Pour it over ice cream for what I call a Sundae Bloody Sundae. Add red food coloring to drinks at the blood bar.

13. Go big. If you’re doing a graveyard, remember headstones are at least 4″ thick and average between 2 and 4 feet tall, with monuments as big as 12 feet. Caskets are 80″ long, and cages should be large enough to fit a person in. A lot of Halloween stores sell scaled down merchandise to cut cost. If something looks too small to be real, it’s not going to read as anything but party decor.

Thats 13 Spooky tips for putting together a Haunted House, and keep checking the blog, as there will be plenty more helpful tips coming up.

Skeletons are so white and beautiful, but usually they come with all this carcass stuck to them. What’s a person to do? That’s why Dapper Cadaver’s Strange Answers is here.

Well, you could bury the bones and let nature do it’s thing. This works quite well actually, but it takes time. And you run the risk of detritovores and scavengers making off with the remains.

A commonly held notion is that you can boil bones clean. Let me warn you, boiling rotting carcasses is a great way to make rotting carcass soup and a terrible way to clean a skeleton. You know how chicken soup on the stove fills a house with it’s deliscious smell? Imagine that’s a dead raccoon in there. That’ll cure the common cold.

Beetles are the best way to clean a corpse. The beetle in particular is called the Dermestid officially, but goes by many other names like the hide beetle, the carpet beetle, the larder beetle, and the flesh-eating beetle, because of what they eat - everything except glass, steel, and bone. Throw a buffalo sized head in to a container with a thousand or more dermestids, and they’ll leave nothing but the bones in a matter of weeks. Not overnight, but still the fastest game around. Dermestids are handy because they can crawl into eye sockets and nasal passages and get all the meat, and brains, from those hard to reach nooks and crannies.

Dermestids eat cartilage too, which is why you never see a real museum skeleton with the nose bones, ear bones, or it’s chest plate in tact. All of those parts are cartilege. Usually the sternum and center ribs are replaced with synthetics for display purpose. It’s also why you’ve never seen a shark skeleton, despite seeing shark jaws at every corner cabana.

If you want to start cleaning bones you’re going to need thousands of these little buggers. Many taxidermy shops sell guides to raising and using them, and many sell the bugs themselves. Just don’t let them get away. Eating everything is what dermestids do best. Just like the flesh eating beetles in The Mummy movie.

There are essentially two schools to making great cobwebs. Cobwebbing guns and stretch webbing. There’s a third technique I’ve devised I call Pro 90 Webbing, which I kept secret for years. Now that I’m working in the shop more than on set, I’m not doing cobwebs so much, and I’ll share my secrets in this article.

I find a lot of people when the want to go pro with awesome spider webs get the cob webbing gun without really knowing a lot about them. Cob webbing guns are great, but they’re no magic wand. I rarely use them because I find them to be a hassle to use, except for under certain circumstances. First, a cob webbing gun is basically a hot glue gun attached to an air compressor, so be aware that anything you spray down with these guns you’re spraying with hot glue, and there’s a good chance you will not be able to clean it off. The air compressor itself is noisy, expensive, heavy, and needs time to build up pressure. The final issue I have with cob webbing guns is the cheap ones and the homemade ones have a tendency to clog alot, and with most hot glue guns, it’s almost inevitable you will burn yourself if you do it enough. For these reasons I find the cobwebbing guns are best used on pro jobs like sets and haunted houses, things where you’ve got a lot of ground to cover, you never plan on cleaning it up, you’ve got some assistance, and you’ve got the cash to invest in a top quality gun and an air compressor. For doing home haunts, cobwebbing props, or cobwebbing areas you have to clean later, they don’t make the most since.

Stretch cotton webbing has a bad rap, but it’s actually pretty good if you’re patient with it. It’s also pretty much the only kind of cobwebbing that cleans up okay and doesn’t stain or stick to things.

HOW TO DO PRO 90 WEBBING
For really excellent, realistic webs, try the Pro 90 technique.
1. Start with ordinary stretch webbing, pull it tight and thin, but don’t worry about over working it at first.
2.Once the stretch webbing looks okay (not great), spray it with 3M 90 spray. This aerosol adhesive forms tiny strands that create cross webs. The glue also reinforces the cotton, so the strands are more visible. WARNING- this is glue, so it is difficult to clean up. Also keep away from open flames.
3. Now that the spider web is sprayed with glue you can sculpt the web even more. While it’s tacky, you can stretch out clumps of web, stick it to other parts of your set or prop, create holes in the web and more.
4. If you need the web to be more visible, try misting it with spray paint or dry brushing it once the glue has dried.
5. Use scissors to trim any excess.

The photos in this post show the same candelabra decorated with both stretch webbing and stretch webbing that’s been given the Pro 90 treatment. 3M 90 is available at most hardware stores and currently costs $9 - $15 per can.

The question of the day here at Dapper Cadaver was “How do you make fake human sashimi?”

It’s a familiar horror movie set up, knife wielding maniac slices some choice parts off their victim, nothing unusual there, but the part two of this gruesome torture involves slicing the bits and pieces thin. There will be close ups. And the budget is practically non existent.

If budget allows, pieces can be custom fabricated so there’s meat and bone looking material built right in, but budget didn’t allow this time so we need to go with off the shelf pieces.

One of the pieces getting cut off is the thumb. Now the detail on our thumbs is great, you can see the pores and even take a fingerprint. Add a nail, and you got a close up ready piece. Skin tone is going to be repainted to match their actor. The problem though is the thumb is hollow vinyl. How do you cut it thin without spoiling the illusion.

We came up with 2 possible solutions.

The first involves stuffing the thumb with meat and bone so you can cut into it and see the gore inside. It’s good because you can maintain a steady shot, but you’ll have to hold it carefully so the skin doesn’t slip and spoil the illusion.

The more classic effect is the old switcheroo. Knife maniac goes for actor and the first switch is pulling off the fake thumb for the real thumb. The maniac slams the thumb down on a table - close up on bloody thumb - then cut to close up of the knife coming down. Switch the fake thumb for a similar piece of meat, say a raw chicken wing, the fat part with the single bone inside and a thumbnail glued on, but don’t do a close up. The maniac starts cutting, you can go as thin as you want and it will look real because it is real. Leave the damaged nail for even more impact.

Here’s a tip, if your character is female, give her a noticeable nail polish, then match the nail polish on the fake finger. It keeps it clear whose parts your dealing with. Worked in The Big Lebowski.

My penis has really gotten around. Traci Lords, Kenneth Anger, and Margaret Cho have all had their hands on it. It was for Margaret that I originally created it, and here’s her review, from Alarm Press

“I went to a special effects specialist, who is a friend of my husband and made a very light yet very realistic flaccid latex penis. It was very hard to find a dildo that was like a flaccid penis!

I needed one that would fit into panties and still look like something when I stripped them off, so it had to be collapsible, and it is — fully collapsible and will stick onto my crotch with double stick tape!

The choreography is simple, just a classic fan dance really, but with a big surprise ending. The audience really doesn’t know what to do. At first I try to seduce them, being very feminine and coy with myself, a very shy, teasing kind of dance. But then at the end, when I reveal I have this very real looking and startlingly plain penis, people really freak out.

I almost cried the first few times that I performed it because the audience reacted so strongly — screaming! People were literally screaming. I love that. So that is my most exciting number right now.”

Screaming for my penis, that’s what I like to see in print.
When asked by Lawrence.com about size, Margaret had this to say
“Q: Why didn’t you borrow Mark Wahlberg’s from “Boogie Nights”?

A: That’s too big. Mine is big, but it’s not big like that.”

Thank you Margaret.

There’s a real problem with the over the counter Halloween CD’s available out there. Check them out. I love “The Humpty Dance” as much as the next skinny weird looking dude, but it’s just not spooky.

I’ve been collecting Horror and Halloween themed records for years (and I’m working on putting together a radio show, watch this blog for announcements!). My collection reaches back into the early days of Appalachian Goth and Voodoo Blues in the 20’s and 30’s to the novelty record boom of the 50’s and 60’s, horror metal and prog rock ghost stories of the 70’s, right up into the current psychobilly revival of today. I’ve compiled the below list as just a sample, 25 tracks I consider an essential Halloween party soundtrack.

You might notice there is no “Monster Mash” on this list. That’s only because everyone knows that one already. I love the Monster Mash, i own Bobby “Boris” Picketts original LP, I’ve licked the grooves and I can swear it tastes like candy corn and glow stick goo. I named my grade school bike gang “the Crypt Kickers” after his band, and I’ve played it backwards for our midnight “orange mass” on Halloween. So no blasphemous Mash bashing allowed!

25 Essential Halloween Hits

1.“This is Halloween” – Danny Elfman or Marilyn Manson

2. “Dragula” – Rob Zombie

3. “Dead Man’s Party” – Oingo Boingo

4. “Day of the Dead” – The Misfits

5. “The Human Fly” – The Cramps

6. “Coolest Little Monster” – John Zacherie

John Zacherie was a Horror movie host, like a male Elvira, in the fifties, this song is a little like the 12 days of christmas, but with much better gifts like “a hat pin of bat skin” and “your own noose for home use”
7. “Bloody Hammer” – Roky Erickson