Backyard Haunts! Update 10/31

Halloween is coming up and I am wondering who makes haunted houses or mazes in their yard? Or even Theme their frontyard and just scare kids? Well that is what I do every year. This year my theme is Werewolf Canyon! Some friends and I are dressing up as dead farmers and werewolves to scare the crap out of kids! I plan to enclose my entire porch with garbage bags and cornstalks. Making it completely dark inside with fog and lights. Outside is more fog with dead farmers and animals. I try my best and plan this 2 months ahead. I will post pics as soon as everything is up (Probably the Saturday before the special holiday of death and destruction![dorkhat]).

My question is who else is obbsessed with the holiday and does this?

no offense, but you have no life whatsoever







my idea of a fun halloween is taking a dump in my neighbor's mailbox then running from the po-po.........fog thats pretty cool. I had a fog machine once.

I have two fog machines for this year![dorkhat]

ive always wanted to make my house like all hauntd and make like a little scary maze...jus never have...

but i was at busch gardens hallowscream this weekend and there new haunted house maze type thing Wicked Woods was really awesome scared the poopy out of me to but i loved it.

I'm gonna put on a warewolf mask and wait for toddlers

[hyyyper]

we just got few pumpins lying around, nothing more

i will have scare zone this year at my school and i am actor,But i guess i will do the same at home again .My scare zone free to enter and i always put some stuff up in my front yard,this year i will dress as a statue so when peeps walk bye i will jump out.

It's the time of the year were Americans express there stupidity. Year after year I fail to see the obsession, it's good for most the companys though, they can easily cash in on the suckers who buy all this crap

wow slow down there edge. i must say i think its cool what the americans do for this holiday. i mean they didnt have a presidents birthday in that week to have a day off so they invented one and i must say i like it. mostally cuz drayton manor is haveing a haunting at the park this year and i get to dress up as a zombie on the saterday night

[hyyyper]

Originally posted by Edge

It's the time of the year were Americans express there stupidity. Year after year I fail to see the obsession, it's good for most the companys though, they can easily cash in on the suckers who buy all this crap

what's wrong with it? it's just tradition, looks at all the x-mas things that are but up in december, some things are really over the top, this is just one of these things, and it's just bigger in america

To the original poster:

I used to be obsessed with halloween. I made haunted houses and trails every year and always tried to be creative; I planned ahead for weeks. I don't know now why I enjoyed it so much, and I suppose I still do, except these days it seems I'm just too busy to keep it up. Also there seem to be fewer and fewer kids that come down my street.

Two years ago the local Mariott resort decided not to hold their annual haunted house. I used this as an excuse to go all out on my own haunted house. My house has a 3-car carport and I enclosed it completely with walls made from hanging tarps and dropcloths. I even had internal walls so it wasn't just one big room; visitors were forced to follow a path. I had 3 strobe lights, a few black lights, two fog machines and a modified holiday projector. Other effects included loud halloween stereo and a propped-up motor scooter that when revved, sounded just like a chain saw. Also I had a "central command" area from which everything could be operated. Aside from the few crying children, we had a state trooper park his car and walk through. A few streets over someone told me they heard someone say "That house down there has a chain saw!"

I learned that a good idea is to have lots of bloody sheets. Sheets are cheap and can usually be picked up for one or two dollars at Salvation Army. I think I happened to find a bucket of returned red paint at home depot.

Walls are really the hardest thing to figure out. Tarps work well but you need some sort of support structure to hang them from. I remember spending a day or two just devoted to figururing out that engineering problem. (My solution was specific to my house so writing it here would just waste space) Basically see if you can use light fixtures and other things that are already attached to the ceiling. I'm not sure how well trash bags will work out for you. Also those plastic stackable shelves work perfectly for holding crap and you can easily hang sheets over them.

The most important thing to remember while building and operating your haunted house is to make it completely safe. The last thing you want is a lawsuit on your hands.

Anyway, I uploaded some pictures from that year that you can look at. Note that some were taken with flash and others werent.
http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v287/ ... ween%2004/

Anyway, just be creative! The secret is to make things that would not normally be scary into something that is very frightening.
have fun!

yet i come from england and live in england.

[coolbeans326]

I plan to enclose my entire porch with garbage bags and cornstalks. Making it completely dark inside with fog and lights.

Lame! Spend more money and use wood to enclose the maze. Anybody can throw a trash bag over some plastic pipes and call it finished. Anyways, I've seen some pretty cool backyard mazes in my time. Usually they're fund raiser for like a high school soccer team so the quality is a little higher then just trash bags, though I have been to a few trash bag haunts. Anyways, the one I vivedly remember the most was a house for some soccer team. And at the front they were selling different kinds of foods, and entry tickets. The maze was about 4 minutes long and you went from thier backhyard to inside the house into the garage and then you exited. It was pretty cool. They had a LOT of monsters. So when one thing would happen, another person would jump out at you. Pretty much they devised clever tactics throughout different rooms for the scare. They also had a chainsaw room which wasn't very scary, but it was cool. My favorite part of the maze though was a poka-dot room and everything seemed to form to the wall then people jumped out at you with shaker cans and scared the crap out of you. Though at the time I remember blaming my being startled do to them shaking the cans in my ear, but I'll admit now that it was definately a good scare. The finally was some giant Frankenstien and then he'd talk to you and that was it.

But it was pretty cool, though that did happen when I was like 10 or 11 years old, so maybe it wouldn't be as cool as I remembered it to be?

i so wish this happened in the uk. i wnt to com to america just to go trickor treating round some of your streets.

lol gazag: you think we have off from work and school because of halloween? Think again! Although we do have off for presidents day (week) Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Columbus day, Thanksgiving (i think thats only American), Labor Day (pretty stupid holiday), 4th of July (Independence Day, otherwise known as "blow up as much Shiz as you can day"), upon other non-important holidays that we do or don't get off for.

The best holidays are the Jewish ones! Very few celebrate them but we get the day off! (no homework either!) Thank god for inventing Jews! (lol im kidding I'm atheist and I really don't mean to offend anyone)

All in all, Halloween is just like valentine's day in that it is a holiday invented by companies such as Hallmark so that money can be made. (although Halloween is more fun)

to nate dog.. lol, did u actualy put the money to UNICEF, or did it go to 'construction fees'

lol, it actually went to UNICEF.. as far as I know. Wherever my school's Key Club sent it.

Nate dog thanks a lot for your advice as next year is when I start my maze. I have a 4 car garage and I am raising money for supplies. So if you have anymore advice please do tell.

Cool I do not have enough time or money to use wood to enclose the porch... My house looks like this in the front.

wow thats a nice house! The styling is amazing! If you had any work done to the house, it looks very good on the outside!

r u the homeowner? or are you living in your parents' house (i am not sure how old u are)

He's 13 and acts even younger so I highly doubt he owns the house.

[coolbeans326]

I find it funny that my house could sell for about $450,000 dollars even though its sh*t, imo. I would really like to move, but to move to a house of suitable taste for our family, it would cost around $700,000 - $800,000 for a 3 - 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom, 2 story house. The plus size is that when my dad retires, he could sell the house and move some where with a lower property rate and get a much nicer house, and still have some money left over.

Anywho, now that I'm done talking about how rediculous house prices are, and why that's both bad and good, I will go onto my suggestions of how to build a maze.

First things first. I would come up with a story idea with the house, not a theme[;)] While the story may not neccissarily be very imparent when you do go through the maze, it will definately help you decide good location for your scares, props, ect.

Now that you have done that, I would then design the maze. While it may not be designed with everything engineered to fit perfectly where you want it, you can still get a basic idea of whether or not this will fit in your allotted location. Allow for improvisation. Also, to have you maze designed to be ran by a realistic number of people. For example if I was doing this at my home, i'd lay it out so that way it can be effeciently ran by as few of people as possible, but make sure that you have enough people running around that it will still be fun for your guests. But if you're being supported by a club, or a church, then you can pull people from there to help you with the maze, which is also good because then they could also help you fund it, and build the maze as well.

After that: Experiment. Make sure that you'll be able to pull of everything you want to do. Maybe you'll want to go to the hardware store and buy some a pate and a piece of ply wood. Try making different textures on it, ect. Basically just figure out how exactly your going to build it. Then maybe a couple of weeks before you plan to start operations of your maze, I'd start construction on it. But that's just how I would go about things.

I personally am working on a concept for a maze for my church next year. Though I doubt they'll be able to pull it off, I'm mainly doing it for the fun it. Really I just like designing things. Creating stories and new concepts and different way to entertain people. But even if you don't ever turn your concept into a reality, it will still be cool to see what you come up with.[:)]

After you do that, and you have

I'm glad this topic came up[:p]

I actually have a maze in my back yard every year (for the past 3 years at least, and then the 4th this year). I lay out a path every year with posts(wood or rebar) and make the "walls" out of the cotton spiderweb (which takes forever to get right by the way, but the finished look is pretty cool).

What I do is I have maybe four or five people down on the ground level and scaring people or helping with the fog machines, and maybe one or two people up on the porch dealing with the sound and something new I'm trying this year with a fishing rod and a bat, but anyways; I make a little grave yard area and put tons of props up around the maze, which is why I make the walls out of spider web. I buy all my props from a website called frightcatalog.com, it's really expensive, but if you just buy little things, it's not too bad. We also give out candy at the end of it. It's really a lot of fun to do and to see how afraid some people really are.

[coolbeans326]

^ Dude! That's an awsome site. Thanks for sharing!
One day when I'm rich, or I have a good paying job with no kids and all the obligations that make you spend your cash on people other then yourself, I'm going to me myself this!
Some of the animatronics are really cool! On par with anything they have at Knott's Haunt, possibly even better!

I have looked at frightcatalog for a while it gives me a lot of ideas. And thanks to the people that said they like my house...

ok tip actors must go for the legs thats my job in a maze at school and for a first maze go for something easy to do for (i did an old castle) then the next year do somthing even scarier.
OH and have a chase at the end so the can get out because it scares them.