I think the contents of this list deserve some explanation...
When I was a child, my parents took me to Disneyland quite a bit. And my favorite rides were "Pirates of the Carribean" & "The Haunted Mansion" -- and actually they still are my favorites. They show more imagination.
I dreamed of building my own amusment park, of building the magic of the Disney haunted house in my house, garage, home. I would think about it all day and literally dream about it at night.
And years later I get on the Web and find that people are doing it. From the smallest desplays in the yard to full-fledged multi-attraction haunted amusment parks and everything in between -- they learned the skills, they found cheap ways to create wonderful effects, they let they're own taste guide them as they created wonderful Halloween attractions.
So here is a list of some items I have found on the net -- along with links to the interesting sites you can obtain them at -- that are useful for a home haunter.
I hope you find my list entertaining and enlightening...
When you are going to haunt your house, what is the first high end prop you're going to want... A DEAD BODY! These are availible from Distefano Productions: Corspes For Sale (http://www.distefano.com/).
Corpses from Di Stefano are available in your choise of Male or Female, Heavy or Light Decay, Light, Medium, or Dark (dis)coloration, and a wide choice of hair colors. They come fully dressed in rather clean clothes that you can weather and stress yourself. For an extra $50, you can have lights put into the eye sockets in your choice of red, green, or blue.
$550.00 1 MALE CORPSE, LIGHT DECAY, MEDIUM SKIN, DARK GREY HAIR
$ 50.00 EYE LIGHTS, BLUE
$ 40.00 S/H
NO TAX CHARGED FOR SHIPMENT TO CA
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$640.00 TOTAL
Haunt Masters, Inc. is a company dedicated to the more unusual electronic devices "haunters" use -- at a more economical price for the small comercial and amature haunt.
Haunt Masters Strobing LED Eyes are a pair of red LED lights powered by a battery and with the use of a control unit, they flash on and off. It would be more economical to build LED eyes: building would be cheaper then buying and quite a few "eyes" could be run off of one battery. But if one is going to buy, Haunt Masters price of $16.70 (S/H included) is the best I've seen as yet.
TOTAL = $16.70
A "Thunder and Lightning Controller HD" from Terror By Design will produce both. From there web site:
TOTAL=$124.95
And, of course, one needs a costume... My favorite shop for costumes is Nightmare Factory. They sell the best brands and they only once did not have every item I looked for.
No good slasher film style haunt would be any good without two items: The Mask (from Halloween: H20, not an earlier film -- those are not good versions) & The Ghost Face Costume from The Scream Trilogy.
$38.00 FCG VIDEO
$30.00 SCREAM ADULT COSTUME
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$68.00 TOTAL
What would a haunt be, if the hauters put all of there energy into the visual and sometimes tactile aspects of their haunt and none into sound?
K-TEL is a producer of cheap ($5-$6) CDs and tapes 17 of which (at last count) have songs and music, stories and sound effects with a Halloween motif. KTEL lists allof their Halloween recordings on KTEL's Halloween Listing. They are also availible from Amazon.com & CDNow.com (and others I'm sure).
Below is one of the best sound effects CDs according to home haunter Cliff's Haunted Projects (http://www.startle.com/):
$4.95 SPOOKY SOUNDS TO HAUNT YOUR HOUSE
Music: Often haunts feature more then sound effects (general or event-specific). Music is often played out front to keep waiting patrons happy. (At Knott's they always play Oingo Boingo's "Dead Man's Party" and White Zombie's cover of "I'm Your Boogie Man" by a fountain which pours red over posed skelletons-- I really need to bring a camera next time.)
Industrial or Goth music is often plasted at patrons at mind-numbing, ear-splitting levels making intellegent though imposible (at least, I find it so, particularly at "Knott's Scary Farm Halloween Haunt"-- I bring ear plugs for myself and my friends). As I am not too fond of this last effect, I would like to suggest something else.
One of the most evocitave film scores of recent years (it was grammy nominated) is
Howard Shore's Score for "ED WOOD"-- the wonderful score to one of my favorite films -- it somehow evokes the era beautifully.
The makers of "Halloween: H20" did not use most of the score they comissioned from John Ottoman. Instead they suplemented the small sections of the Ottoman score that reworked the themes of the original Halloween score by John Carpenter (over the opening credits, most noticably) with selections from "Scream" and "Mimic." When I saw the film opening night, I didn't think all the score worked. It didn't form a cohesive whole among other things. I thought it was the weak link in the chain. So I was happy to hear that Ottoman's original score has been released as Portrait of Terror. Those who have this score have told me it is excellent.
The score for the home haunter to own has just come out in a more complete version:
Halloween: 20th Aniversary Edition. The director/composer John Carpenter tells the story about showing it to a studio executive before it was scored. The executive was not scared in the least. Carpenter decided to "save it with the music." After it was released he saw the executive on the street and this time she loved the film. But Carpenter is quick to point out that she was right in her previous assesment -- the film is not scary without the music. A friend of mine told me that she thinks that one of the scariest parts of the film is the credit sequence... in which the camera moves closer and closer to a jack-o-lantern as credits appear on the side and the "Main Theme" plays. That is it: no scares, no fake outs. I think that the sequence would not be nearly as scary if not for the pulsing score.
Another important score is that of composer Marco Beltrami for "Scream & Scream 2 Scores" available on one CD. While the soundtracks -- filled with rock, pop, and industrial songs by famous and not so famous bands -- for both these films have been available for some time individually, not until recently has the unnerving orchesteral scores for these films become available.
$11.49 ED WOOD SCORE
$14.99 PORTRAIT OF TERROR
$14.99 HALLOWEEN SCORE
$14.99 SCREAM 1 & 2 SCORES
$ 4.97 S/H
$ 4.90 Tax
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$66.33 TOTAL
Reel.com (as well as others, such as, Spree.com) has those classic horror films for inspiration. One of my favorites is "Peeping Tom," a rare film that shares some motifs with "Psycho" and, like "Psycho," is a precursor to "Halloween" and "Scream".
$22.99 PEEPING TOM