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How to Make Your Own Haunted House Attraction |
Making your own haunted house attraction is an ideal family project. Sometimes you end up with such a scary and professional looking creation that you can practically charge money for it. You can make your haunted house as big or a small as you want. The ideal haunted house utilizes your front yard, where the trick or theaters come in. Some people make their entire house into an attraction, including the basement, but that can be a very ambitious undertaking. Also, you do not necessarily want all of these people tramping through your house and possibly taking things or hurting themselves.
Your first step is to utilize eerie lighting in order to create a scary atmosphere. The first thing you should do is replace most of your regular light bulbs with color and ultraviolet lights. Portable lights with different colored bulbs can shine crazy light effects where you want. You can also use strings of inexpensive Christmas lights to create special effects as well.
You can get strobe lights cheap in dollar stores nowadays and these are great for creating disorienting effects both outside and inside the house. It is important that your haunted attraction is lit just enough so that people get around but that it is also still dark enough to be spooky.
You can find spooky sound effects and music on CDs. This is money well spent because of the great atmosphere that is created as a result.
Black plastic sheeting can be used to cover existing walls and heavy furniture that you cannot move out of the rooms. These items are good for covering windows so that the right amount of light flows into your haunted house. You can also use these and grey Styrofoam sheeting to create strange little rooms.
Never estimate the power of cardboard and garbage bags to create room dividers and interesting entrance ways into each "scare area." You can attach plastic sheeting to a door and then cut a slit in it, so people have to part the sides in order to enter from one room into the next.
One idea for a scare area is set up a small dinner area with a table on it with a human head on it as the main course. Yet another idea is to buy cheap picture frames and hang it so someone with a mask on can scare people by starting to talk. If you light this type of thing right, it can be very scary.
You can also make a very simple fake electric chair by taking an old chair, painting it silver, and attaching a colander on top.
You can also spray paint stone masonry or fake brick onto large gray sheets and hang them on your house to disguise it so that it looks like a haunted house.
Yet another trick is to hang long threads from the ceiling. This will feel like spider webs breaking and trailing over your visitor’s faces.
Another great old idea is the bowl of peeled grapes. Each visitor sticks their hand in them and is told they are eyeballs. You can create similar effects with other foods. Cold spaghetti can pass for guts.
You can either make or buy novelty props for decorating your haunted house. One thing that works really well is to scare people in a dimly lit room is a large stuffed body posed in a rocking chair or elsewhere. Strew large spider webs out of fake cotton every where you are. It is easy to find fake tombstones, scary tree limbs, and other haunted house accessories online or at your local Halloween supply store. You can also get very simple and inexpensive display with moving parts, such as the skeleton in a coffin, that keeps lifting the lid. Full-sized plastic fluorescent skeletons that dangle and even scream can be had for about ten bucks nowadays.
Large appliance boxes are wonderful for creating small crypts or chambers with horrifying scenes in them. You can also use them to make tombstones, coffins, and fake walls. You can also use PVC piping, tape, and cardboard to create a maze through which your visitors can meander.
If you want your guests to feel like they are being watched everywhere, you go then paint ping pong balls so they look like eyeballs. You can also buy or make stuffed dummies of body parts and strew them everywhere.
It is also a good idea to recruit family members to dress up like ghouls and ghosts, and have them jump out and surprise people in your house. Making slight moves where you stand right beside them but do not say anything scares them.
One way to make money off of your attraction is to offer to take picture of people inside your attraction or with a particularly spooky feature. A nice photo op could be lying inside a coffin or inside an open grave that you have dug in your front yard.
Another issue to consider about where you let people travel in and around your home is liability. If anyone hurts him or herself on your property, they could sue you. This is why you want to keep your attraction a reasonable size and also why you want to let in just a couple of people at a time. This way you can keep your eye on people and make sure that they stay safe.
One word about safety. Always use electrical light as candles are too much of a hazard in this type of scenario. Be sure to abide by all safety rules. In fact, one of the safest and most creative ways to establish the boundaries of your attraction is to decorate it with police tape.
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