advice for home grown haunted houses

[girly-ghost]

when your under 18, got low to no budget and live in a absolutlly tiny apartment, where do you haunt? HOW do you go about creating a good haunt? any dos and don'ts I should know about?

[MacPhantom]

Save your money for after-Halloween sales. If you buy this year in preparation for next year, you can maximize every dollar you spend.

As for don'ts, in a tiny apartment, I'd advise against any open flames.

You can get lots of black material pretty cheap at a fabric store, which is great for decorating and making props out of. Hang some up as curtains, or over walls. Paint lots of little white skulls on them to break up the monotony!

[girly-ghost]

thanks, any ideas on how to make little space look BIGGER? its a shot gun apartment, where the hall way runs straight through the house from front door to back door, with the rooms branching off, only two rooms plus the usual bathroom, kitchen, ect...
I have a theme, haunted carnival, or a kinda haunted freakshow, I'm not sure which it is, Im also doing a kinda twisted spinoff from the Addams family on another week, but I get stuck on decorating ideas besides the usual, spider webs, strobes, fog, bones, rats and ghosts. what do you think?

[MacPhantom]

Well, the best way to make a space look bigger is with mirrors. If you can cover an entire wall with continuous mirror, it makes the room look double the size. If you line both sides of a hallway, it will look bigger and fit in well with your haunted carnival theme.

Also, if you have a place to store them, you might want to take the doors of all the rooms off their hinges for the party (have someone hold the door while you pop out the hinge bolt) to create a more open concept. You, um... you probably ought to leave the bathroom door on, though.

[shanda]

I would also invest in a good black light. A good one around 24" or so should last you several years if you take care of it, and it will work alone in an average room. Then test stuff you already have to see what glows. A lot of glasses and dishes do. And hilighter markers glow great. Soak one opened in water for a day or two and you have a cool glowing science mixture.

You could make a cool spooky science lab in a small space.

[girly-ghost]

"this is halloween, this is is halloween,
everybody scream, everybody scream,
in this town of halloween."

nightmare b4 x-mas, your speaking my languege thanks for the advice guys.

[Andybev01]

Tonic water glows under black light, of course since you're under 18 you can't mix anything with it.

[RomanOne]

Small, homemade props scattered throughout is a fun way to go. See how many people notice some of the small details...i.e. I replaced recipie cards in my holder, with haunted recipies...I picked up small items all year (and add to my collection every year) at thrift stores and second hand stores for a kitchen display that looks like a witches kitchen with small jars full of dried plants, plastic spiders, slime (like you find in the toys section at Walmart) and made my own lables, aged with coffee or tea with names like zombie blood, pickled goblin brains...ect. We also made our own "Vampire hunting Kit, Werewolf hunting kit and Excorcism Kit" that we display on little tables, that we put together using everyday items. you can find 'dried garlic' at Hobby Lobby or places like that, along with a cross of anykind. We found an old bottle at at second hand store that we filled with holy water. And you can make a stake out of just about any piece of wood. Our homemade stuff is always the biggest draw at our parties. People love em.

[girly-ghost]

sounds like a lot of fun, I'll try it, I'm trying to decide whether to go with my old theme or to go with a new one, the old is kinda an "Addams Family" twist, the new one is like the freakshow half of a haunted carnival. what do you think?, the old one is a classsic, fun and easier to do, the new is alot more challenging, its untried and different.

[Mourning_Manor]

With a small space, I would let the TOTs let their imagination scare them. I have found that if you keep things simple, that usually people scare themselves better than you would. For example, keep the apartment completely black and use surround sound to blast sounds like zombie groans or people screaming. Disorient them with strobe lights and actors popping in and out of rooms. People will imagine something greater than what we could ever create. That's the fun part about it.

[jadewik]

The best thing to use to cover walls is black (painters) tarp. They sell it at Home Depot or Lowe's for about $20 a roll. It takes 1.5 Rolls to cover my whole garage, so it's great. There are a lot of things you can do with it too... paint it with glow-in-the-dark paint-- which is good if you're doing the "dot room".

The "dot room" is where you have a room painted in all dots, often glow-in-the-dark, and there's an actor in a matching all black with dots costume. The black-on-black creates depth perception issues. Add a strobe light... and you suddenly have freaky moving dots that turn into a person's shadow about 3-feet away.

Strobe lights are about $8 each... but Target-- mine, anyway-- had some for $2.50 in their dollar bin.

Also, hit up the Back-to-School sales (right before Halloween comes out). In a college town, it's the best time to buy white sheets. They're clearance cheap and available. Lots of people buy white sheets in October when people want to be ghosts so availability goes down. You can get a sheet set for $8.

Glow-in-the-dark paint is available at Michael's. You can also use florescent hilighters to make glowing effects. Blacklights are expensive... but worth the money if you have a lot of glowing effects.

Carnival foods-- popcorn is fairly inexpensive. Shaved ice and snow-cone flavors might be a hit... they might be on sale if somewhere stocked them for summer fun. Peanuts are also carnival-type food.

You could also do carnival games-- that three-rung ball-toss thing (yeah, I know... not even close to the actual name)... milk can + baseball game... ping-pong ball into containers... bean-bag toss... "go fish"... apple bobbing... Jacob's ladder + hay bales... etc... etc...

Just have fun. =)

[writerpatrick]

As far as externals, many apartments have balconies. If you have one then you could decorate that, particularly with lights. The lights can be seen from some distance. And I've seen cheap lights in the dollar store, although these are always common sale items after Halloween. Even if you only have windows you can put Halloween lights in the windows.

Don't forget about your front door. You could easily cover it with stickers or cut-outs. Many just stick a skeleton or something up, but there's no reason you can't put up a good diorama.

[witchy]

You could take mini pumpkins & cut out a hole and put a tealight in them & put them everywhere!! I luv candles!! If you can't use real candles buy the battery operated ones.

[jadewik]

Making a correction here.... black painter's tarp is $10 a roll at Home Depot. (A roll is a 10 foot x 25 foot sheet.) I bought 2 this past weekend and put some grommets in it so I can reuse it year-to-year. The old tarp I had in years past was pretty cut-up so we used it when we finished the garage.

Really, a Halloween party should work with the space you have. There are ways to have a fun time with a limited amount of space... but it all depends on what you want to do, what sort of party you're having, how many people are going to be there. If you're just doing a haunt for Halloween, do a table. (That's my preferred method.)... or find someone to loan you their house for the night. (I've also done that.)

[girly-ghost]

Hmmmm..... contemplating running my haunt again this year. So the question is...What theme shall I use, I like the idea of a B-Movie theme, all of the classics, like frankenstien, black lagoon, the wolfman, ect. How would this look? any advice? Any inspirations?