All Hail the Great Pumpkin!
July 22, 2015 8:54 PM   Subscribe

For the first time ever in my life, I have a giant display window at the front of my house, and I want to do the biggest, baddest Halloween display ever! But I have no idea what to do! Help!!

My house has an awesome, giant display window (6'x8') at ground level at the very front of the house with no obstructions what-so-ever. Just a giant glass window. I want to do a totally kick-ass Halloween display. But there are a couple things:

1. I don't want to buy lots of junk to put on display because a) money and b) then I have to store it. So ideally we'll use things that we already have around the house, are really cheap, and are compostable (i.e. Papier-mâché - that's compostable, right?)
2. It has to cost close to nothing, because...money.
3. It has to be kid friendly, because we've got loads of kids in the neighborhood.
4. I'm willing to put in lots of time. We have 100 days until Halloween, I'll use them.
5. Also, as a bit of weirdness, here. Several people have died in my home (before I lived here), and the neighbors know it. So "graveyard" or "ghosts" or "dead bodies" theme is probably going to be not cool.

What we have:
A. a torso of a manikin
B. A video projector
C. A radiation suit
D. Usual junk people own
E. Willing to take a cheap trip to Michael's to get some crafting supplies.

I saw the previous posts from AskMe but the suggestions were lots of corpse/death and fog machines. Let's say corpse/graveyard is out and fog machine is too $$. Got ideas?
posted by Toddles to Home & Garden (14 answers total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
When my parents were first married the house they lived in had a similar very viewable-from-the-street window that they dressed up for halloween. They were also broke. No matter what else they had going on in the window, the backdrop was always the same: the creepy sheet. It was literally an old sheet that had been dyed gray.

On this sheet they painted silhouettes of ghoulish figures in black. Nothing detailed, just enough to look like something/someone scary was coming up on you. Bats, too. And then in day glo colors they painted stuff in the foreground. I don't remember exactly (it's been a while--it got pulled out only a few times in my lifetime; we just didn't have the right windows (or entertain enough) to bother setting it up every year), but in addition to a few ghosty things were words like "DANGER" and "KEEP OUT" and stuff in drippy letters. Then they hung it up several feet behind whatever else was going on and shined a blacklight on it.

The effect was neat. It had enough depth to really transform the space so it wasn't just stuff in a window.
posted by phunniemee at 9:15 PM on July 22, 2015


Oh, and another thing, THE BEST halloween house in my neighborhood was this guy who always made his yard REALLY spooky. He constructed a fairly elaborate maze/tunnel system up to his door with black tarps and some scaffolding and dressed it like a haunted house inside. Eerie noises, skeletons that would fall from the ceiling, the works. But then he'd answer the door dressed in something really sublimely stupid like a bumblebee costume or a sparkly fairy with dainty little wings. The bait and switch was just hilarious and great, and even kids who were scared going through it came away laughing and happy. So that's another thing to consider if your house has legit scary place cred to begin with.
posted by phunniemee at 9:19 PM on July 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


I really like the skeleton on this page.
posted by raisingsand at 9:39 PM on July 22, 2015


Paper or cardboard silhouettes stuck on windows an backlit! Martha Stewart sells some pre-made ones to stick in your windows, but you could make your own. Spooky trees, ravens or sea-monsters would all work.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:45 PM on July 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


A Pinterest search on Halloween silhouette is good for inspiration. Lots of spooky, not-explicitly-dead-people things there.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:55 PM on July 22, 2015 [1 favorite]


Radiation suit plus mannequin torso says Alien Autopsy to me.
posted by MsMolly at 10:27 PM on July 22, 2015 [1 favorite]




You want to delight the kids? How about getting lots of corrugated cardboard boxes and some paint and make a MineCraft themed window. Not all the kids will recognize MineCraft but those that will are going to be delighted and the rest of them will recognize the zombies and jack-o-lanterns as suitably spooky.

Many of the MineCraft items can be two dimensional, like the sword you place in the hand of the mannequin and the flowers that you put against the glass in the very front of the window.

When you kill a skeleton or a creeper or a zombie you sometimes get a head drop. Those can be made out of fairly small square boxes. To make the spider you might want to collect a number of tin-foil and plastic wrap boxes from family members and coworkers to construct all the legs.

The materials you would need are tape, used cardboard boxes, a ruler and an exacto knife to cut things, possibly primer and paint. You can use children's poster paint which is inexpensive. Almost all of this display could be disassembled and stored flat for next year, or possibly next year you would want to try something new.

The jack o lantern(s) could be made out of a square cardboard box to make a frame plus yellow and orange tissue paper for the walls and black construction paper for the features with a regular compact fluorescent light bulb inside.
posted by Jane the Brown at 5:54 AM on July 23, 2015


How are your artistic skills? You could pick a movie and make a scene from it if you can draw or print photos from the movie. You could do a different one each year. Some suggestions:

Nightmare Before Christmas
It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown
the Jason movies
Oh, who am I kidding, I hate horror movies, so I'll let someone else suggest a good one.
posted by CathyG at 7:07 AM on July 23, 2015


Best answer: I have a similar window setup and I have gone the silhouette route in past years. I just used some cheap leftover black construction paper I had an excess supply of, closed the blinds or curtains and then set up a red light in a desk lamp for a backlight. Because the paper was flimsy I didn't bother trying to save them and just made them new every year. I get several comments every year on how the kids enjoy the display.

Pictures: (self links)
Blurry bats
Bats 2.0
Short on time so one big bat
Monsters this time
Under the sea
Fish detail
posted by mikepop at 7:16 AM on July 23, 2015 [2 favorites]




Yea, if you have a video projector that you can hook to a computer, scour Youtube for something you can project from the inside (they exist). The thing I still need to work out is what to put on the window to make it visible. Depending on the content a white sheet might be a little too opaque/scattering. Maybe parchment paper.
posted by achrise at 9:44 AM on July 23, 2015


Best answer: Every year, I put up the big spider silhouette I cut out of black paper. Cost: zero dollars.

They go all-out for Halloween over at Brooklyn Limestone. Like way more than you're probably interested in/can afford doing, but maybe some parts will inspire, and lots of it is DIY:
posted by mon-ma-tron at 10:29 AM on July 23, 2015


Hallowindows
posted by BoscosMom at 7:10 PM on July 23, 2015


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