Spider Rider’s Halloween

Adding a little magic to the neighborhood each year.

How to make your own cemetery pillars... click here 

Rodentia and Verminella Ratt

Rat Witch joins the Creepy Cauldron Witch. The pointing arm is an old lamp . Baboon guy will be holding a cook book over his head for her to read 

Creepy Cauldron Witch gets large rings and chains added to her cauldron.

 Baboon Dude gets glowing eyes..

In the Works for 2006

Halloween 2006

Halloween 2005

                            The PVC frame was draped with black cloth. This allowed me to have the lights on in the house but from outside the blacklight ghost was the only thing visible.

Links

The motorized ghost, a.k.a. the Flying Crank Ghost plans come from it's creator here:http://www.phantasmechanics.com/fcghost1.html

The glowing eyes the witch has and the baboon skull goblin

http://webs.lanset.com/bonzell/scary%20oaks/vaselineproject.htm

Oops, his site is down right now. The eyes are vaseline glass 1 inch marbles which glow under UV light. I used UV leds to make them glow. Everything was purchased on ebay.

 The motorized witch and giant cauldron 

http://64.226.23.133/woodycarr/scarefx/project_witch.html

The cauldron foam, rivets and how to make your witch talk

http://blogcrypt.com/MrUnpleasant

 The smoke blowing giant monster and graveyard digger, look under Mr.Cheney and Mr.Barlow projects.

http://www.halloweencreations.com/figures.htm

These guys are masters and the inventors of "Monster Mud" used in several of my props

http://www.terrorsyndicate.com/tsp_mm.html

The Climbing Skeletons 

http://www.halloweenpropmaster.com/climbing_skeletons.htm

Here are some great lists for many popular projects and ideas 

HalloweenMonsterlist

The giant spider was my idea. She has a large beach ball that I fiberglassed as a body. The legs are PVC pipe that are connected by u-bolts to a plywood board. They were tightened when the legs were in the correct position. The legs and body were covered with expanding foam "Great Stuff" and the upper legs used the monster mud technique wrapped around pipe insulation to give the leg segments different thicknesses.

The fiberglass spider butt weighed so much (my first time working with fiberglass, too much resin) that I added a seperate support tube fitting over rebar pounded into the lawn. 

Because Chainsaws are Stupid

an article from www.SpookyBlue.com

How many times have you traipsed blindly through a corporate haunted house whose theme was a collection of gore, guts, blood, evil clowns, more gore, and some lunatic running around with a chainless chainsaw?It’s the same thing year after year. Pick out the cluster of tweener girls that are huddled together like a pack of hamsters in a box full of rattle snakes, follow them around, torment them mercilessly. Meantime, your guide, if there is one, leads you from one uninspired room to the next.Here is the “bloody operation gone wrong”. Next is the “Freddy Krueger” room. Next is an alien chomping on a space marine. Wait what ? 

There was a time…1974, I think, when your friendly neighborhood haunted house was populated by Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, and their pet bats. Sure, some folks raised an eyebrow, but times were changing, people were loosening up a little, and if two middle-aged men wanted to live together, then who really cared? But back to the subject. Whole flocks of ghosts roamed the dark, cobwebbed halls where black cats and witches danced around cauldrons and maybe you’d even see The Creature from the Black Lagoon because you just never knew where that guy was going to pop out from. There were hollow-eyed skeletons and white-faced zombies, and graveyards, and all manner of unseen spirits. Sadly, focus moved away from the scare, instead concentrating on the shock.“Haunted” has been replaced with “horror”, and there’s a distinct difference. Horror denotes “an overwhelming and painful feeling caused by something frightfully shocking” [reference.com]. Haunted simply means “inhabited or frequented by ghosts”[reference.com]. Sort of the difference between a midnight stroll through a cemetery and being electrocuted by a malfunctioning automatic toothbrush.

I’m not saying that there isn’t a place for a good shock, but the movie’s getting old. This fixation on grossing out the audience has taken over. Violence replaced the gothic. It’s much more difficult to evoke and maintain a sense of apprehension or full blown dread than to simply target a knot of hamster girls and scream “Rrraaaaahhrr!!”

Being shocked isn’t being scared. You may fear the shock that you know is coming, but after the shock, everything’s over. That is, until the next one. And the next. After a while it just all runs together.I want to experience a haunting. I want chills to run up and down my spine. I want to have time to appreciate a really well done prop. You should experience a haunted house. The only example I can think of is Disney’s Haunted Mansion. It plays with you. It doesn’t throw you down on the bed without so much as a kiss and scream “Rrrraaaahhhrr” in your face.

There are usually two or possibly three big “horror hotels” or “industrial nightmares” in any given medium-sized city, and they’re often run by the same company. The props are generally static, usually horrific, and every couple of rooms are sparsely peppered with actors earning minimum wage. A quick shock, then herd the sheep through the chute to the next blood-drenched room. <yawn>

Is it any wonder why home, carport, basement, and yard haunts are so popular? Their focus is on the scare, the creep factor. Not the dollar. Sure, they’ll still torment that cluster of hamster girls because they make it so easy, and because it’s fun. And without so much “blood - raar! - blood - raar!”.“Did you see that ghost floating in the window? How’d they do that?”
“What’s behind that tombstone, daddy?”
“It’s a werewolf, son. We used to see those all the time back in 1974.”
“Where’d they all go?”
“I think they were hunted down by clowns or something, but they’re making a comeback.”
“I’m glad.”
“Me too.”

 The phrase “because chainsaws are stupid” was first launched into the Haunter’s Lexicon by thehorrible folks at Castle Bloodprobably back before that one time I saw them atIronstock and bought a bumper sticker that’s still stuck to my red toolbox out in the shop.

www.spookyblue.com