Building Spook Houses

Sitting here approaching the halfway mark to Halloween has given me some time to reflect about the Halloween that was.  Halloween 2023 was really exciting... and very different.  In a lot of ways it was a risk.  

I have never really blogged about where my Haunt themes/concepts come from, as it always felt odd or like some kind of embellishment when I tried to put it into words.  The easiest description is that each Haunt concept just popped in there.

What?  What just popped in there?

Every year, I'll be minding my own business when an image of some kind will flash in my mind...  it could be one simple thing like a cloth sack with torn eye, nose, and mouth holes, with ugly rotting skin underneath, or it could be something more complete, like the Devil, a Witch, and a Ghost around a massive cauldron.  It could be the color green and a series of corpse-like Ghosts rising from a cemetery.  There was even one that I ignored... it involved a row of ancient "statues," resembling the different icons of Halloween - a made-up origin story of the essentials/elementals of Halloween:  The Witch, The Jack O'lantern, the Scarecrow,...  the Ghost.  I have always felt intensely grateful that my brain worked in this way, sending me Haunt concepts... letting me know it was time to get to work.  

This year, the Haunt theme came in the form of a suggestion.  It was during a conversation about a Hallmark Halloween sound effects cassette from 1987.  Jenna asked if I'd ever consider doing a throwback Haunt, something that screamed the 80s, with all the usual tropes.  She suggested it should be called 1987.  We started talking about those things we loved in Old School Haunts:  coffins, bats, strobe lights, hay bales, quickly-constructed props and dummies, old plastic masks, and an insane amount of spider webs.  At one point she asked if I was writing any of this down.  I wasn't.  So I grabbed a small tablet, and it became the "1987" Haunt idea book. 

"Are you writing this down?" was something of a regular routine as we worked out the details of our SPOOK HOUSE display.  I filled its pages with chicken scratch and crude sketches.  Our discussions eventually led to two other "chapters" in this small booklet... future Haunt concepts for the coming years.  

Over my many MANY years of home haunting, I have received an abundance of suggestions and Haunt ideas from other people.  Coworkers telling me I should do Pirates or an Evil Carnival... neighbors saying I should make a lawn of moving props... family and friends telling me I should do some bloody, gory display.  I ignored all of it.  The Haunt Themes that appeared in my head were enough.  Outside intervention seemed like a foreign concept, to put it mildly.  My ideas were exactly that - mine.  Until 1987.

As with all of my previous Haunts, SPOOK HOUSE was a ton of hard work, and definitely the usual amount of stress.  Stress to get things right, and to work out the typical problems and issues that occur when putting on a one-night-only Dark display.  But unlike previous years, it was also the most fun I've ever had building it... both in my head and on the big night.  We dreamt up a Spook House from the late 80s while remembering to have all the fun that should accompany such a thing.  We savored the Halloween season.  We visited haunted attractions, traveled to New England, drank autumnal cocktails, and went on photoshoot outings with a strange Witch wearing a very tall hat.  We had fun.  And loads of it.

Halloween 1987:  SPOOK HOUSE was our love letter to those peculiar houses you had on your block or remember as a kid while on a school bus in late October.  Those houses with all the appropriate iconography:  witches and ghosts and scarecrows and an old coffin with a corpse inside.  It was also our attempt to say that this was where it all really began.  It wasn't a spooky world on a porch trying very hard not to be a porch...  it was a Spook House on a porch, with a funeral for someone named Morris.  There was a pumpkin-headed ghost nearby in a fake lawn cemetery... there were three masked witches with glowing red eyes.  There were screams and evil laughter and scary sounds from a Hallmark Halloween cassette from 1987.  And it was fun.

I owe so much to Jenna's involvement with this display.  Her ideas and hard work helped shape it into what you see below.  So many choices were hers... the coffin, the cemetery, the lighting colors, the strobe light, the hay bales, orange lights inside each corn stalk, the pumpkin faces from old 80s photos and advertisements, and those glorious spider webs (if I never touch another fake web for as long as I'm alive that will be perfectly fine with me).  And I'm EXTREMELY grateful.  She kept us on schedule during the entire season, and she made sure we had fun the entire time.  She also helped me realize that my brain will do perfectly fine cultivating an idea that wasn't my very own.  And she proved the old adage that sometimes two heads are better than one.