Stick This in Your Machine and Smoke it! - Master Fog Giveaway

Master Fog is giving away one Antari M-8 Fog machine and a gallon of their Code 6 fog juice as promotion to the Master Fog Facebook page. Just go to their FB page, "Like" it, "Share" it, and Promote it. Their goal is 1000 likes.

Have never used their fog juice but the prices on their website look competitive. Just in case your really into your fog, you can even buy a 55 gallon drum of their Code 6 fog juice for $1099.95 with a free delivery!

Craigslist Creepiness

Found this little beauty on Craigslist yesterday. It was listed as a "yard ornament". Question - What kind of person looks at this creepy thing and says, "ooh that would make an excellent addition to my landscaping!"? the Addams Family?

Pretty sure it's a relic stolen from some ancient graveyard or at least that it has an evil curse... Ok maybe it was a Walmart sale at some point, but still, "creepiness included"! Minus some painting to match the statue to the pillar, this is a ready made prop! Score!

Weather-vane

Something ominous about a house with a weather-vane. Maybe because it's from a bygone era, a primitive science of telling the winds direction, or maybe because it's normally only seen on the old Victorian style homes, although I think a lot of barns in the North still have them. Either way it's a year-round Halloween feel to your home that doesn't just look like a neglected Halloween decoration that wasn't put away for the season.

 I spied this one at the "Dead End" haunt during our "Behind the Screams" tour of Halloween Horror Nights this past season.  It's actually manufactured as a Grim Reaper riding with his scythe. If you look close the artist that added it to the house removed the scythe and now it's just a cloaked rider. Nice touch I think.

Backstory or Legend?

I heard Revanant from Hauntcast talking once about the importance of creating a backstory for your haunt. It was a very interesting piece as most of his haunt lectures are. Admittedly I gave it some thought, but couldn't come up with anything unique,  and I moved on to other matters of interest and it never got further attention.  Such is the frustrating limits to my imagination at times...

Recently I was looking at some You Tube videos and came across the videos posted by Brad Goodspeed for his "The  Butcher of Provincetown" haunt, and the topic of backstory importance resurfaced. 

Mr. Goodspeed has taken the art of creating a backstory to a whole new level. Using social media he managed to create and publicize a backstory that was based on so much historical fact and familiar geography that the majority of his visitors believed it was the telling of a real legend of the area. I'm thinking to myself, how much scarier is your garage or yard haunt when the people believe it was built around an existing legend, when in fact the story was made up just to enhance the haunt?

If you watch his You Tube videos it's not hard to recognize that Mr. Goodspeed's occupation is a graphic designer and he is very familiar with Adobe After Effects software, but aside from that, his ideas of using your local historical society for photos and factual data, coupling it with social media to develop a "legend" instead of a backstory, is really quite good.  Even his haunt characters get a backstory and people follow them on Facebook for the purpose of helping to make their characters come to life and believability. 

Check out Brad Goodspeeds videos if you think a backstory is important to your haunt. I don't think you'll be disappointed. It's still a "thinking" time of year for us, no prop building yet, creating a "legend" is certainly something that deserves more time than we have given to it though.

"skeletons" by House of Marrow

Was trying to do a bit of catch up on my blog reading this morning and came across a post from House of Marrow that I'm sharing for those of you that may not follow him.
 Marrow is a young man of 15 or 16 from New Zealand with a passion for prop building who decided to branch off with his own movie production. I was very impressed by this short video he wrote, directed and produced. The story was excellent. If you haven't seen "skeletons", please visit his blog, "The House of Marrow" and enjoy his short video.

Not To Late... " Be Mine 4 Forever"

It's not too late for fans of "Halloween Horror Nights" or AMC's "Walking Dead" series to enter Halloween Horror Night Crypt's Valentine "Be Mine 4 Ever Giveaway". They are giving away a "Walking Dead" drink cup w/straw, a tall glass shooter and a small shot glass from HHN 22.

You can enter until February 21 or until they reach "217" entries at the Halloween Horror Night's Crypt site. The 217 is the number of days until Universal Studios opens HHN23.

Be sure to like them on Facebook at HHNCrypt.  Even if you've never been to HHN or are not likely to go, the process and imagination that goes into building each new Halloween Horror Night season really is quite amazing. HHN Crypt keeps a historical account of each season with lots of information and photos as well as current information on the new season. For us yard haunters it's a dreamland of horror possibilities.

"Revenge" tombstone

Friend and fellow haunter John "Spyder" Nilsen gets an early start on prop building with his version of Terra Lair's  "Revenge" tombstone. Terra always comes up with some really good tombstone designs and shares her excellent videos of their construct on YouTube. Search "Scaryladyvideos" if you haven't seen them.

Spyder added some of his own touches to her latest concept and Belinda and I thought it turned out crazy good! Your setting the pace and the prop quality this year Spyder! Not sure if we'll be up to the challenge...

Be sure to 'like" Spyder's page at "SPYDERWOOD" on Facebook. Hell of a nice guy and always shares his latest Halloween endeavors.