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Slashdot Asks: Notes For Next Hallowe'en?
There are 364 more shopping days until next year's Hallowe'en. But while this year's is still fresh in the memory, I'd like to start gathering ideas for next year in the hopes of actually making my neighborhood worthwhile as a trick-or-treating destination, specifically for fun projects to actually give my yard a haunted-house feel. (For the second time in three years, there were zero candy-seekers, and I'd like to convince my neighbors to make the whole block more decorated and spooky, even if we never get all Alek Komarnitsky.) Did you create an animatronic zombie for your yard? Glowing eyes to appear from behind the bushes? Poltergist-style rising graves to frighten the children? Remote-controlled candy dispensers? If you used any kind of complex haunt technology at home, what things worked and what didn't? (I hear too many stories about fog machines leaking to make them sound like a good idea.)
Seriously. Go down to costco. Buy 10 boxes of full sized candies. It will cost you $200. Much less than a lot of crappy Halloween decorations. I guarantee you, the kids will remember. Often into adulthood. "There was this one house that gave out full sized bars!"
For bonus points, keep your receipts, and return any box you didn't end up opening.
This year I added some interactive sound effects to the porch using some synths and a Theremin.
For the base soundscape, I used two synths running loops that were out of sync to create a basic gloom-and-doom texture. The first synth (Korg Kaos Pad, using SYN-9 with Pad Motion for the loop) had a low-frequency sound that moved around a bit to create the sonic floor. The other synth (Korg Monotribe) was looping at at the lowest temp setting (maybe 1 Hz?) with a simple noise-based sound with the LFO set to sweep both pitch and filter to create a knocking sound. It was creepy.
For the interactive element, I placed a plastic skeleton on the vertical antenna of a Theremin (Moog Theremini) and set it so it would start "screaming" when kids were about 2 feet away (I initially set a larger radius, but that led to it constantly sounding when kids were on the porch and diluted the effect). A note on the skeleton invited kids to shake its hand
I placed my studio monitors under the table with the Theremin. They had enough bass to let the synth effects sound spooky (rather than hollow). Combined with some lights and the fog machine (fog machines work fine - I just have the cheap one from Walmart), the effect was pretty good. Some kids refused to get near the skeleton after they heard it the first time, but others would play around with it and try to figure it out (the Theremin was covered in a blanket, so it wasn't obvious how it worked).
Next year I plan to expand the set up a bit and add some additional speakers and proximity effects around the walkway.
Fun stuff.
-Chris
Our 400-foot driveway is too much work, compared to the nearby 11 houses/acre development that went into what was a cornfield 20 years ago.
Kids do a cold-hearted calculation of [candy/time]. Decorations make little difference. I have an affluent neighborhood in one direction, and a working class, mostly Hispanic neighborhood in the other direction. I asked my kids where they wanted to go, and they unanimously agree to go to the working class area. I asked them why, and they said that in the affluent neighborhood the houses are too far apart, the driveways are too long, and rich people tend to be stingy, because, hey, thats how they got to be rich. Those are astute observations, but I was surprised to hear them coming from an 8 year old.