Halloween Experience - Make some Halloween Decorations!

If you're planning to decorate your home for trick-or-treaters this year, or you want to hold a halloween party, the tips below should help you to make it a spectacularly spooky event!

Select a category:

Lighting

Special Effects

Sound Effects

Props

HALLOWEEN LIGHTING

As you may have seen over our past experiences, we have used lighting effectively throughout the garden, in order to provide interesting effects and a creepy atmosphere.

The most important things to consider with lighting are colour and brightness. Think about what would look good lit up in your garden at night, and then what colours would make it look eerie. Red and orange are traditional Halloween colours, and give a bright fiery wash. Conversely, blue, purple and green give a more spooky and darker tint to the garden.

The brightness must also be considered; you do not want to over-light the garden, as the creepy mood you are trying to create will be lost due to everything being clearly lit. A garden will look more creepy with less lighting, as it leaves more of the bushes and trees 'in the dark', and will leave more to the visitor's imagination as to what could be lurking there, as opposed to lighting all the plants and bushes up brightly; you run the risk of making it look like floodlit botanical gardens.

We often use spotlights that project thin beams of light onto certain props and objects, and then go for larger floodlight-type lighting to create dim colour washes over the garden and porch. Obviously, if you don't have access to large lights, then heat-proof coloured cellophane over bedroom lamps, or even your driveway light will give a similar and spooky effect.

Flashing and strobe lighting allow for effective lightning effects to be achieved. However, strobe lighting must be used sparingly (if at all) due to the potential risk of epileptic attacks on visitors, due to the extremely fast flash-rate of the lamp. For a strobe-driven lightning effect, mini 20 watt strobe effects can be purchased from most gadget and electronic shops, and these are adequate enough to surprise your trick-or-treaters with bright flashes of 'lightning'. Buy a 20 watt strobe online now, at TLC Direct, for only £4.68, or go brighter and larger and buy a 60 watt strobe unit online for only £29.09! (prices subject to change).

Over the years we have mainly used 4-light disco sequencers for our lightning effects, and we have just removed a couple of the lamps in order to break up the flashes. Any similar disco-type flashing light with blue cellophane positioned over it will give a similar and impressive lightning effect.

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HALLOWEEN SPECIAL EFFECTS

Anyone who has visited our experience will have been engulfed in fog at some point or another by either knocking on the front door, or simply setting foot in the garden! This effect is achieved by using a fog machine. These are readily available at most well-stocked electrical stores, and cost less than you think!

For a fantastic spooky effect, add ghostly wisps to your garden for this Halloween by getting yourself a fog machine. Buy a high-quality fog machine unit online now at TLC Direct, a UK electronics company for only £40.94!

Smoke and fog effects will allow lighting beams to be caught and made visible in the mist, which gives a disorientating and creepy effect. Lighting positioned in the fog or having a smoke machine at the back of the garden and giving out periodical bursts of smoke will vastly improve your experience, and made the atmosphere more immersive and scary.

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HALLOWEEN SOUND EFFECTS

Arguably the most important part of your experience, is the music and sound effects. Even with no lighting or special effects, it is possible to terrify your visitors by carefully choosing and positioning sound effects and music around your garden.

If you've come trick-or-treating to any of our experiences, you would have noticed our heavy use of startling sound effects and creepy background music. Try to locate a few old CD players to hide under bushes in your garden, and make a CD with spooky sound effects or music that can loop round over and over again. The best effect is created with the use of two or more CD players; one playing background music, the other playing single halloween sound effects over the top.

For an even better effect, get hold of a PIR motion detector and connect it to your CD player. This will therefore only play sound effects when a trick-or-treater enters your garden. This can also startle them even more by playing a 'BOO!' sound effect or similar at a loud volume, and not only does it give a great effect, it won't annoy your neighbours by having a "BOO!" sound playing loudly and constantly all Halloween night.

For some free halloween sounds and music, go to our scary sounds gallery, where you can download many of the sounds and tracks you've heard at our previous experiences.

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HALLOWEEN PROPS AND ANIMATRONICS

Another important part of the experience is to include scary props and decorations. In 2006, our experience featured five different moving animatronic models, as well as a host of cardboard props, including a graveyard full of tombstones. Obviously you don't need to go this far (unless you want to!) but you can get yourselves some fairly spooky decorations from many supermarkets near the Halloween period. In fact, we've got most of our decorations over the years from places such as ASDA, as they have quite a selection of well-made Halloween props and models. Good things to use are fake cobweb, which looks good stretched over plants and walls, with plastic spiders layed in it, and also things such as skeletons, bats and larger spiders; these are guaranteed to make your garden look more scary and monster-infested!

We also make use of 'poem-boards', which are plaques containing rhymes which can be used to guide visitors slowly down the path, and ease them into the garden. It will also make them naturally stay longer at your haunt, as they read the words, and so they can take more time to absorb the atmosphere and enjoy the show that you have put on for them. A simple
old-scroll background with some gothic text will also give an ancient feel to your experience, and these can be positioned around your garden, perhaps at various points along a path, in order to gradually lead your guests up to your front door, and build up suspense.

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