Neat Homebrew Halloween Tech?

aibrahim asks: "I just saw a proton pack (alternate site) a friend has built. It made me wonder what other neat high tech things the Slashdot crowd might be brewing up for the coming holidays. What I am really after is stuff that one of you made, better yet would be diagrams or explanations of how you made it. Doesn't have to be a costume item, anything interesting that fits the season would do." This is a follow-up to the earlier article. So what are you dressing up as for Halloween, and how do you plan on making your costume interesting?

Comments

cool!

[stuuf]

How long would I get suspended for if I wore this to school?

I've got a neat gorilla outfit

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using it for three seasons. It's not very high-tech, only got a hidden diskman and loud speaker with real gorilla's scream on a CDR. The most high-tech is the amplifier which I made myself, because the bare diskman was to quiet. Some people are actually scared when I say, I quote: "GRRRROOOOOAAAAAWWWWKKK!!!!!"

Homemade blood

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Get a knife
2. Cut yourself with it
3. Profit! (or die)

My Halloween Costume

[Ummagumma]

This is what I am going as for Halloween. I figure it will scare the hell outta anybody.

Screw high-tech

[blogan]

Get yourself a green t-shirt, a grey sweatshirt, some Robitussin and go as Ellen Feiss.

Head on a platter

[gentlewizard]

For controlled environments (i.e., haunted houses) the head-on-a-platter gimmick is hard to beat for great reactions from the kids (and some parents!)

Basically, you get a thin aluminum serving platter, the throwaway kind, and cut a neck-sized hole in the center (tape the edge with transparent tape to avoid cuts). Cut one slit from outer edge to the hole. You can easily bend the platter open to put it on someone, then fold it back flat and tape up the slit.

Then get a board and cut a square notch into one of the long sides, about the middle. Put the board across some sawhorses. The person with the platter sits comfortably in a chair below table level, with the platter appearing to rest on the table. Throw a tablecloth over the whole thing and arrange eyeballs, worms, or whatever on the table.

If you're the head, keep your eyes closed until someone is nearby and speculating about whether you're real or not. Then pop open your eyes wide and scream as if just noticing you have no body.

When we did this one year, we picked up a ton of candy off the floor from kids who didn't stop to check what they'd lost! evil laugh

War Pumpkin

[jonv]

here

Halloween craziness

[Telecommando]

The best bit I ever saw as done by a neighbor when I lived at my old house. He got a big cast iron cauldron, filled it with candy and put it in front of the house. Next to it he put a stuffed scarecrow in a chair. You know the type, old shirt and pants stuffed with straw, old gloves, plastic pumpkin head and an old floppy straw hat. Next to the cauldron was a sign that read, "Sorry Kids, We had to go out of town. Enjoy the candy!"

Now the trick was, the scarecrow wasn't what it seemed, it was actually my neighbor inside some oversized clothes stufed with straw, newspapers, etc. He sat there motionless, arms and fingers askew for a couple of hours and waited.

When smaller kids came up, usually with their parents, he'd do nothing. But when some of the older "punks" came up, thinking it was easy pickings and they'd just take the whole thing, he's jump up screaming, "I'm gonna eat your face and knaw your bones!"

They'd run off screaming and more than a few would literally 'wet' themselves. One even dropped to the ground and started screaming for Jesus to save him.

I and some of the other neighbors sat in the house in the dark with his wife, drank beer and watched the fun.

Now here's the funniest part. Late in the evening a little girl and her mother came up to the house. The mother prodded the little girl, dressed as a princess, to go up and get some candy. The girl cautiously crept up to the cauldron and reached in, never taking her wide-open eyes off the "scarecrow". She took a couple of small handfuls of candy and ran back to her mother.

Half-way back to the sidewalk she remembered her manners. She turned back to the scarecrow and waved saying, "Thank you, mister scarecrow!"

Our neighbor waved back saying, "You're welcome!"

The little girl was unfazed, but the mother let out a scream that could probably be heard for blocks.

In the house, we couldn't stop laughing for several minutes.

Now one of the best costumes I ever saw was done by a college roommate. He put a piece of gauze over one eye, then covered it with extra-thick, congealing, red gelatin, which hardened on his face. Then he stuck a plastic eyeball on his cheek with more gelatin. some frayed, yellow, nylon cord was dipped in the gelatin to look like an optic nerve and pasted between the plastic eye and his eye socket. (I helped him get things placed just so.) A pair of sunglasses with one lens broken out and pieces of the lens stuck in the gelatin around the eye completed the effect.

More gelatin (green this time) on the side of his head was sculpted to look like an oozing head wound.

For the rest of his costume he put on an old, tattered, overcoat, some hideously ugly, green, monster-like, rubber gloves and carried a large plastic knife.

He took 3rd in a contest held by a local bar. He lost to a thin, blonde girl who had painted herself white with black lips and black eyeliner wearing a white wispy gown and a muscle-bound guy dressed as Rambo whose costume consisted of a pair of torn jeans, a bandanna and a kid-sized plastic gun.

First and second place got $250 and $100 cash respectively, 3rd place got a $10 gift certificate to the restaraunt next to the bar. Found out later the ghostly girl was the bar owner's niece and Rambo was his cousin. After that, my roommate never really bothered to do much for Halloween.

Software Pirate

[elemental23]

I went to a costume party the other night as a software pirate. I wore traditional pirate garb but was carrying a canvas bag labeled "w4r3z". The bag was full of CDs labeled "Photoshop 7", "Windows XP Professional", "Mac OS X 10.2", "Windows 2000 Server" and so on. I then let people at the party help themselves.

I'm still waiting for the responses from people when they find out that these CDs are all identical Debian install discs.