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October 24, 2006 6:14 PM

CostumeFilter: I need a beating human heart for my costume as an Aztec human sacrifice victim. Bonus points for other suggestions on how to make this costume awesome.

For clarification: I want to make or somehow acquire a fake human heart. Please no suggestions on how to harvest hearts from humans or other animals.

posted by arcticwoman to grab bag (18 comments total)

For super extra awesome, pierce your foreskin with a stingray spine and tell fortunes. I'm assuming you're male, of course.
posted by pullayup at 6:26 PM on October 24, 2006

Arcticwoman. crap.
posted by pullayup at 6:26 PM on October 24, 2006

Good observation skills pullayap. :) Might still work though, if you can tell me where to get a foreskin.
posted by arcticwoman at 6:31 PM on October 24, 2006

Okay, I got a little post-happy for a sec there. What you (the female sacrificee, yeah, I get it now) need is someone who can sacrifice you, possibly cutting/pulling out your heart. You could probably buy something suitable from a butcher, if you're not squeamish. See above if you find a guy willing to perform the excruciations.
posted by pullayup at 6:34 PM on October 24, 2006

Create an anatomically correct heart out of gelatin.
posted by metaname at 6:37 PM on October 24, 2006

Here's one thing that I found. But there are other places to find cool stuff like this. Down here we have seasonal Halloween stores where you can find pretty much any costume or prop that you can imagine. One is called Spirit.

I don't know how long shipping takes, but I hope this helps!
posted by snsranch at 7:01 PM on October 24, 2006

Oh, here's another.

Aztec, Mayan? Go with lots of feathers and beads. Maybe face painted as a skull? And show some "arcticwoman" leg by all means!
posted by snsranch at 7:07 PM on October 24, 2006

Not sure what your craft/electronics skills are like, so I a possible (and at this point, hypothetical) compromise betwen easy/awesome might be to find a recording of a beating heart (and online sound library, whatever), put it on an mp3 player, and then take apart a set of portable speakers (the type made for walkmans and mp3 players etc), but the largest you can find that has a battery compartment (ie the speakers are amplified, and can run on batteries).

Take the speakers apart, and use the electromagnetic speakercone driver to move the exterior of a coated-foam heart - it has to be very very easy to move though, as the driver will not impart much force. Crank the volume right up. The movement should be clearly visible, and because there is no speaker cone, it shouldn't sound like a recording, but it will probably manage to make a quiet sound that with luck, could be perfect - as if it were beating in your hand.

For extra difficulty/coolness, if you can seperate the primary and secondary beats of the bu-boom heartbeart sound into the left and right stereo channels, then you can use the driver from each speaker to independantly drive each ventricle of the heart, which should produce a more realistic movement.

You would probably want spare batteries or a bigger battery pack - with the volume on full and the drivers loaded by the foam heart, the batteries will go flat pretty quickly. (eg 5-10 minutes), but if you only have the heat-beat track run a few seconds, then you can activate it only as needed by pushing the play button on the mp3 player.

Before commiting to this approach, you probably want to play a heartbeat into a speaker and watch the cone, just to check that it gives a good bass thump. If the mp3 player has a megabass or bass-enhance feature, crank that up, because it's the bass that will give the solid movement in the speakercone driver.
posted by -harlequin- at 8:06 PM on October 24, 2006

I reserve the right for my above idea to fail utterly in the Real World. :)
posted by -harlequin- at 8:10 PM on October 24, 2006

Actually, forget the electronics project, buy one of those $12 beating hearts and cosmetically improve it with halloween gore make-up :)
posted by -harlequin- at 8:13 PM on October 24, 2006

I don't know how adept you are with electricity and circuits, but it's possible to have a real beating heart as part of your costume.

Go to the butcher, buy a lamb/cow heart. Take a battery (9V? Car battery?) (that was exaggerating, don't take a car battery) and hook it up to the heart. As far as I know, that should make the heart beat.

Then you need some kind of tricky circuit and switch to make it beat like a heart does. You could have a switch in your pocket and just make it beat whenever you want.

Disclaimer- I'm not even remotely electrical, so you could die a horrible death if you do this. But it'd be cool.
posted by twirlypen at 12:43 AM on October 25, 2006

(From what I understand, you'd need to be delivering pulses of electricity to a cow's heart to make it beat, not just steady current from a battery.)
posted by nebulawindphone at 5:46 AM on October 25, 2006

Pulses... maybe you could do that with a switch? If only I'd thought of that before.
posted by twirlypen at 6:00 AM on October 25, 2006

You could do with a Waveform Generator
posted by wildster at 7:27 AM on October 25, 2006

I would try to include a slow-flashing red LED bicycle light iside some translucent thing associated with the heart as part of my costume. Some such lights will generate enough RF interference to be heard on a little portable radio, but it would sound like a very staticky heart under the most favorable conditions.

If worse comes to worst, you could try a transparent or translucent container with some garden hose wrapped in colored tape held against the container by a heavy wrapping of saran wrap which incorporated the flashing red light.
posted by jamjam at 12:55 PM on October 25, 2006

Maybe your partner could go as Chakmool and you could stage a scene where she rips your fake heart out and places it into a metal bowl on your lap.

I was Chakmool for Halloween last year, and my partner and I were able to make my costume out of cardboard and thrift shop finds. E-mail is in profile if you want more details.
posted by kamikazegopher at 1:15 PM on October 25, 2006

Thanks for all the suggestions. Since time is running short and I don't have an accomplice, what I am going to do is check a couple of local stores for Halloween props and if it goes the way I expect it will, I do a dumbed-down version of -harlequin-'s electronics project. I have an mp3 player case that is it's own speaker and I'll just sew a cover for it. It won't move, but it will sound like a beating heart.

Thanks for the advice, everyone. kamikazegopher: I had never even heard of Chakmool before, and I still don't think I understand after having googled it. Props to you for making what I imagine would be a pretty complicated costume, though.
posted by arcticwoman at 6:27 PM on October 25, 2006

A bit late, but clearing up the Chakmool thing: Chac-Mol.
posted by luftmensch at 12:14 PM on November 6, 2006