Slashdot Mirror
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.)
"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..."
Too late. The kids know you as creepy.
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.
Not quite a home haunt, and unfortunately I didn't take pictures, but I saw a guy driving a tardis down the street. He was following his kids as they did their trick or treating. He had built it using an electric wheelchair as the base. I don't give a crap about Dr Who but even I thought it was awesome. At one point he got out, said his wife had called and the lasers weren't working at home, told the kids to drive the tardis, and ran home. Unfortunately I didn't catch where he lived and we didn't see the house on our rounds.
timothy is merely trolling. He's being a spelling hipster. He does this every year.
In my community, there were fliers left on every door requesting that people not hand out candy from their homes due to concerns about children with dietary restrictions and "safety."
Instead, organizers designated several areas around the community where residents could reserve a spot for a table (table not supplied) to hand out candy under supervision from local volunteers. If the tables were not suitable, families were instructed to take their kids to the mall for "an authentic trick or treating experience."
I happened to need something from the mall, so I got to see their idea of a fun Halloween first-hand. Those shops handing out candy had hung photocopies of a tiny bitmapped 1980s "The Print Shop" style picture of a pumpkin near their doorways. They weren't permitted to hand out anything with chocolate, peanut, dairy, etc. so it was basically nothing but hard candies, mostly peppermints. 'Didn't look like anyone was hanging around for very long.
Halloween: Sanitized for your protection.
There are 365 more shopping days. You can also shop on February 29th next year.
What in the holy hell are you doing living there?
Only people can be pedants, but "common usage" is an abstract noun. You have a type mismatch.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Turn, turn, turn.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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
I tried to go all high-tech this year. What a disaster! First, let me tell you that when the manual for the revivification table says it needs a bolt of lightning, you can't just substitute wall current. You need real lightning or you don't jump-start the corpse, you just end up charring the internal organs. Right away that puts a requirement on the weather and limits you to working during thunderstorms. And you don't want to deal with a thunderstorm on Halloween night. That keeps all the trick-or-treaters home. It's getting harder and harder these days to lure kids into your basement. Halloween's the one time of year when kids are *supposed* to accept candy from creepy guys in poorly-lit houses! You don't want a little thing like the weather screwing up that chance or you might not harvest enough test subjects to last through the year.
Next year I'm going back to good old-fashioned necromancy, just like we did when I was a kid. Sure, it takes a little longer and the entrails really make a mess, but you know you're going to get an unliving minion out of it instead of just a charred corpse that's too burned even to bother to eat. With necromancy, even if the ritual goes wrong the worst that could happen is you'll end up with an unholy abomination that will try to turn on its creator. Anyone who can't handle that once in a while doesn't deserve to call himself "mad".
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Trick or Treating has just changed since when we were all younger. A lot of parents don't like the idea of kids going up to strangers houses anymore, much less in unknown areas or communities. I've noticed that in a lot of places I lived, most parents seem to prefer community events as opposed to the classic Trick or Treating, and you might just be losing all the kids to organized events instead. For better or for worse this just seems to be the trend, and you can try to buck it, but ultimately the kids are going to go where their parents let them.
If you're in a fairly tight knit community, it may be worth trying to organize something with the other members so that you too can participate a bit in the spooky festivities. For example, once place I was at had the main street shut down for about an hour or two and all the shops participated in Trick or Treating. A few neighborhoods also decided to do their own Trick or Treating as well, but no clue how well that went over. My apartment complex at the time made the pronouncement that the building was "opting out of" Trick or Treating, but someone just wedged the security door open and kids came anyways.
Probably can't legally just block vehicular traffic in many neighborhoods, but IMO one of the biggest annoyances and detractors of Halloween fun is a bunch of SUVs carrying Trick'R'Treaters around house-to-house. Discourage driving and encourage walking in the neighborhood. Those wanting to visit a neighborhood with more activity need to go there, park, and walk around.
That said, for a couple of years a neighbor with a tractor and flat trailer loaded it with straw bales and carted a dozen or so kids on the street around house-to-house (at a very slow speed). Aside from the crowds ringing the doorbells all at once, it went very well and those kids, now around 20, still recall how much fun they had.
This year a number of neighbors dragged their metal firepits around to the front and built fires in them, then sat nearby in lawn chairs handing out candy. I plan to do the same next year (include some decorations/costumes, of course). It really encouraged escorts as well as the kids to socialize and have a good time.