By: Jennifer Flaten
The best haunted house decorating ideas let the whole family work together to create something creepy and memorable. There are lots of ways to make haunted house props; the ideas your family provides are often better than the premade decorations found at party stores.
Choose a Mood
Whether you are decorating for a Halloween party, building a scary haunted house to shock the trick-or-treaters or just want to throw a little fright into the neighborhood, the first thing you need to do is decide how scary you want to make your house. For adults and older kids, be as scary and gory as you like. For younger kids, it's best to stick to ghosts and witches and leave the fake blood on the shelf.
After deciding how scary you want to make your house, you will need to decide how much money you're willing to spend. Visit any Halloween shop and you will see a huge range of prices, from simple cutout decorations for a dollar to interactive animatronics costing hundreds of dollars. Shop with your budget in mind; you don't need the latest electronic creations, but having an automatic item that pops out at your guests can be effective.
Tips for Setting the Mood
- Add eerie lighting to your house. With a few colored light bulbs, you can change the overall atmosphere of your house. Strobe lights are very effective for disorientating your guests and revealing shocking scenes in little bursts. Black lights add a creepy touch when they're paired with flourescent paint or glow-in-the-dark cutouts.
- Luminaries or Jack o'Lanterns with creepy designs can light the way to your front door.
- A lot of haunted houses feature a graveyard out front. The effect can be heightened by adding glow paint to the tombstones and hanging "victims" or ghosts from the branches of trees.
- Adding a fog machine or a few discreetly placed buckets of dry ice can ensure your scene stays shrouded in mystery. You can rent a fog machine from most party supply centers, if you don't want to buy one. Keep the dry ice outdoors or in well-ventilated areas, and make sure nobody can pick it up or handle it.
- Inside the haunted house, make sure to have plenty of eerie music and odd noises.
- Add a few mechanized surprises, like a skeleton that pops out from a closet or a witch that swoops down and runs the entire length of the room. Bats dangling from a ceiling fan can be very effective as well.
- Consider making a trip to a Halloween supply store. They have amazingly lifelike mannequins. The cost vary depending on quality. A simple mummy can run anywhere from $50 to several hundred dollars, depending on how lifelike you want him to be. You could always make your own mummy, if you have access to a mannequin and some old sheets.
- Some of the best gags are the small ones. There are animatronic cats that look astonishingly real. Some of the body parts you can buy look good enough to be in a horror movie. Place a realistic-looking severed hand on the counter top or have it sticking out of an open doorway.
- Have a section of the haunted house where the guests touch gross items. Peeled grapes feel like eyeballs. Cooked spaghetti bundled in a bowl can be worms. A chain of sausage or hot dog links can be intestines.
- Recycle things you don't use anymore. You can make great headless zombies by filling old clothes with crumpled newspaper. Add a potato- or coffee-sack "head" to make a scary boogeyman. Old sheets make perfect ghosts when you use an inflated balloon as a head and hang them from trees or ceilings. A dusty old crib is scary by itself; add some fake cobwebs and a doll painted with a scary face and you've got a creepy tableau to scare your guests.
- Never underestimate the human touch. Having real people sneak up on the guests and frighten them never fails to get screams.
