Rules For Halloween Prop Making

Rule #2: Take something unsettling and put it in an unexpected place. Sure, we don't like a stuffed clown head mask, but what if you took the vent off your air conditioner in the hall and stuck him up in there looking down??? Now, you've given him a story line – he is in the attic and he's watching you!



Think outside the box. 

Props don't have to sit on a table or stand at a window, they can be up in a tree and you catch only a glimpse and some glowing eyes and wonder what antics they are up to, they can be on a rooftop peering over the eaves, or hiding in a bush…. It's that very cryptic nature that makes us wonder at their motives. It is much more effective than standing out in the open like “here I am, a 6-foot tall werewolf.” Instead, place him behind a bush near the front door so when someone goes to ring the doorbell, they turn and see him. 

The novel approach is what startles people. Remember the movie “The Ring” when the girl comes out of the TV? That was unexpected because it defied our natural world concepts that 2-dimensionals cannot come out and interfere with our 3-dimensional realm. 

Carpenter had it right when he showed us that simplifying actually makes something more horrifying. Obscuring features instead of detailing them lets our minds be mystified. We know what a face looks like – eyes, flesh tones, frown lines… But when you remove the eyes (something we depend on to evaluate soul) and then give unnatural tones to the skin, you have just simplified something to create one of the most horrifying Halloween masks of all time. We cannot read this face, we cannot see the eyes, it is lifeless….

Sometimes, simplifying or obscuring parts of a Halloween prop is the best gift you can give it. Any artist can give every detail, but the eye tends to see the story that is written out. We view a detailed werewolf and we are done looking.

It's the faces that are missing something, somehow unnatural in color or orientation, that make our protective senses engage. Human-like, but not human….Now, look at the image in this mirror (below). If you saw this on your wall, you'd be looking around the room anxiously. This is not a hard item to make. You might want to look at my 3-video playlist of how I made my own ghosts mirrors. I plan to make this particular one to have in my home always. I will do this by spraying the glass with water and then spraying with mirror paint after I have adhered the figure's imagine to the glass and worked away the paper backing to let the mirror paint go through it and make it ghostly. You can't quite make it out, but there's someone standing there that shouldn't be….

What if your guests had to weave through a pathway made in an enormous grouping of gnomes? 

Rule #5:  Consider mixing things that are unnatural. To see something levitating that shouldn't fly, to mix two kinds of creatures together into one chimera, to put a head inside a jar, is very disconcerting.