Part Two... Back to Part One
I called it The Maze, but it wasn't much of one.
There weren't any significant twists or turns, it was just PITCH BLACK and you had to feel your way around,
But I pulled a few dirty tricks. For instance, notice the main wall back there... I covered it with bones and
Great Stuff, so that it felt really creepy and weird. Plus, I divided the room with that chainlink fence,
so that it seemed spacialy distorted by sound but you couldn't get to the other side straight away.
Also, I placed a wall of burlap up that covered the path if you followed the fence. On more than one occasion
I walked straight into that wall. I thought the mixture of textures was subtle and creepy, but most people
just freaked out because it was dark and they didn't know the way.
Coming out of the maze, you entered HELL!
I had lots of plans for hell, but we had to tone them down. My neighbor gave me these EXTREMELY
bright orange X-mas lights that I draped over the door, and we painted the walls with dark red paint.
Additionally, that stubby column in the corner was a brasier, but we couldn't get the flames to work right.
We put some of those bright orange lights on top of a box fan, surrounded the box fan with chicken wire and
black plastic and put crepe streamers tied to the wire. But the streamers only vaguely moved, so it was more
like an orange floor lamp than anything... but I thought it looked really cool.
Those are Amanda's hands on the door out of hell.
The door led you to a square room of doors with a chandelier of flicker-lights. This whole room
had a great, dim ambience. Plus, with all four doors shut, it was kinda cool being faced with choices.
This is the Teeter Room.
The Hall was skinny and the walls had handrails, because the floor would rock back and forth as you walked along.
It was great because if you went in groups, the floor would shift back and forth with no predictability.
Welcome to the Pumpkin Room!
This was my third Monster Mud creation, The Pumpkin King. Originally, his head was a bit more inflated
and he held a tiny jack-o-lantern in his left hand, but things suffered a bit during my party. The room was
illuminated by the light of the pumpkins, and we placed a mag-light between his legs to shine up on his
face so you could see his grimace. This is one of my favorite themes and I do it every year. My neighbors
gave me some cool cornstalks to put behind my King and the walls were a mix of burlap and pressboard.
I notice now that I forgot to pull the black plastic out from under my dude...
I bet he would have looked cooler just sitting on hay.
This is the Hall of Heads.
Cut in the wall here were 9 holes that contained skulls, heads, and masks illuminated VERY DIMLY by
dark purple bulbs placed over their shelves. The effect was really creepy. Plus, on Halloween, we switched
out one of the heads with a real person, so that when the kids looked closely the head would start moving.
One thing I didn't get to do, and it's a shame: The ceiling of this room was my trampoline suspended 8 feet in
the air. My original plan was to put a remote controlled dimming light in the area above the trampoline and
put someone up there to scare people. When people walked in, they would think the room had a regular ceiling,
but then the actor would turn up the dimmer and the victims would be able to see through the roof above them...
unfortunately, we never had time to flesh this out, so I was left with
a trampoline to take down when this was all over.
The Hall of Heads doubled back to the Room of Doors, and you left through the spookiest door of the lot.
Welcome to the Prison.
Here we had chilled fog hugging the floor and skeletons hanging in cages with rats gnawing on their legs.
I had this whole section lit with exposed bulbs powered by a Fright Light from Hauntmaster Productions.
The prison in front of you had a working electric chair in it, but I couldn't get my event control timer
up and working for the event, and was afraid of leaving the chair running for a minute at a time
(as that is how long my motion sensor would have to let it run). But on Halloween we would manually activate it.
Tastes like chicken...
It's the Spider Room.
Illuminated by strobing light, the big hairy spiders sometimes dissapeared when the fog overwhelmed them.
And finally, The Flying Crank Ghost!
The Coup-de-Grace of my Monstrocity was this flying marionette that was illuminated by black light...
it got lots of oohs and ahs. My only problem was that the winshield wiper motor that I was using was too fast,
and trying to vary the voltage would burn out the transformer... so we had to run her at about one cycle/2 seconds...
She was the disco FCG.
That's my Haunt... I hope you came and enjoyed it, but if you didn't then I hope you enjoyed the pics...