Haunted House Ideas..?

[Hawaiibadboy]

I will try to make /build a haunted house this year. Anyone with ideas please pipe in.


Aloha

[Charles]

Where, in Hawaii or Japan?

Maybe you should explore some of the weirder regional customs. I have a video I was planning to post as a vague sort of "Japanese Halloween" that takes place in Okinawa I think. The local custom is for a group of young men to dress up as a boogeyman in rags and straw, cover themselves in mud from head to toe, and then go from house to house trying to catch people and get them muddy. For the little infants, the boogeyman will be gentle, the mother will hold her child up so he can daub a little mud on their forehead, and oh you should hear the kiddies wail and scream.

[dimwit]

Why do you want to build a haunted house? For a kid party/ adult party or the lower real estate values in the area?

By the way, I just learned about a haunted house just around the corner from my apartment. It is a old corrugated tin walled place covered in ivy. I was walking past the place one night and I saw a light in the window. It barely registered on me until a couple of weeks ago when the neighbors were all gossiping about how the woman who used to live there hang herself several years earlier. When I mentioned that I saw a light on in the house the neighbors all looked rather mortified. It turned out that the place has been empty for since the woman dead. I argued that it was probabley a relative of the deceased. My wife countered that the electrical power was shut off so there is no way that there should be any lights on in the place. I am sure there is a good explanation for what I saw but I have no idea.

[hundefar]

We went to that haunted house attraction they have in LaQua next to Tokyo Dome. 13 Doors I think they call it. My 8 year old son started crying 20 seconds after we entered and was too afraid to look, so I had to take him by the hand, and the wife had to cover his ears and eyes. I was like having a handicapped child. I am sure he was traumatised by the whole experience. Ah, the fun we had.

[IkemenTommy]

The local custom is for a group of young men to dress up as a boogeyman in rags and straw, cover themselves in mud from head to toe, and then go from house to house trying to catch people and get them muddy.

"Boogeyman will come take you away!" That's exactly what my parents used to say to scare me when I was little when my brother and I didn't behave. I believed in that crap for a while too.

[Hawaiibadboy]

Im in japan

I am not interested in anything japanese. I want to scare the shit outta the kids. Any prop ideas.

[Big Booger]

Go down to the local slaughterhouse or meat packers market and see if you can score a pig's head, cow's head, or even better a horse's head. I remember going to a haunted house when I was 10 or so and this mofo chased us all through that place with the pig's head and it scared the living shit out of me... just one of countless ideas to scare kids.

Make sure it is real though, because a fake one sucks.

[Big Booger]

Other ideas:

A chainsaw without the chain is also pretty fucking scary.

Lots of blood splattered all over the walls works good.

Have a table in the center of the room, and a host tells all the kids to gather round. The table should be covered with a table cloth so kids can't see under it. The table should have a hole sawed through so that a head can be put up through the hole.

Cover the hole with a lid or pan that is large enough to allow a persons head to sit under it.

Then have the host ask one brave little kid to see what is for dinner. When they pull the lid off, then have 4 or 5 other people in scary costumes jump out and chase the kids to the next room.

You could use a couple of bungie cords and have someone jump down from a high place to scare the shit out of kids... be careful with this because the person jumping can get injured.

Meat hooks and all sorts of deadly looking cutlery also make for some spook material.

While you are at the slaughter house pick up some internal organs too.. that always scares the shit out of people.

Freddy and Jason are wonderful horror costumes to use on kids.

IF you have a field, you can even use an old beater of a pick-up truck to chase the kids and in the back have people with chainsaws, weadeaters and any other tool that makes a lot of noise.

You could set up a scene with a man who is doing some "home repair" with a skill saw and have him cut of his hands and then fall down and cut off his legs with shitloads of fake blood... that should get you started.

[hundefar]

How about rape? Thats pretty scary..oh wait, you weren't interested in anything Japanese. Sorry.

[Blah Pete]

Get a air comprseesor (or a filled tank) and mount a hose where it can't be seen and hit as they walk by. I was in a haunted house that had this right at the exit and that made everyone jump more than anything.
Make sure you mount the hose low so it only hits then on their legs because you can get particles and debris that wouldn't be nice in the eyes.

[Hawaiibadboy]

Other ideas:

A chainsaw without the chain is also pretty fucking scary.

Lots of blood splattered all over the walls works good.

Have a table in the center of the room, and a host tells all the kids to gather round. The table should be covered with a table cloth so kids can't see under it. The table should have a hole sawed through so that a head can be put up through the hole.

Cover the hole with a lid or pan that is large enough to allow a persons head to sit under it.

Then have the host ask one brave little kid to see what is for dinner. When they pull the lid off, then have 4 or 5 other people in scary costumes jump out and chase the kids to the next room.

You could use a couple of bungie cords and have someone jump down from a high place to scare the shit out of kids... be careful with this because the person jumping can get injured.

Meat hooks and all sorts of deadly looking cutlery also make for some spook material.

While you are at the slaughter house pick up some internal organs too.. that always scares the shit out of people.

Freddy and Jason are wonderful horror costumes to use on kids.

IF you have a field, you can even use an old beater of a pick-up truck to chase the kids and in the back have people with chainsaws, weadeaters and any other tool that makes a lot of noise.

You could set up a scene with a man who is doing some "home repair" with a skill saw and have him cut of his hands and then fall down and cut off his legs with shitloads of fake blood... that should get you started.

Good stuff.

The "screaming teachers head" for dinner sounds like a good one

[halfnip]

This sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Please keep us updated on your progress. LOL

[Big Booger]

Other ideas

Air horns. These are some beasty devices to really scare the shit out of those little boogers. You just have to somehow isolate the sound in the room that you use them in, otherwise when the second group goes through they already will have heard them and be expecting them.

Hidden items where people pop out and grab or scare the crap out of you also work well. If you can find things that won't attract attention, like cabinets, floor trunks or chests, with space for someone to fit in and be able to jump out at the right moment, works a treat.

Rubber snakes hooked to a ceiling that can be triggered to drop on the heads of kids in the dark also can scare the living shit out of them too.

Flashlights when used right can also scare the piss out of them. For example, they should have a leader or host taking them through the entire haunted house. But right at the end, when they get ready to exit, take them into a room that is totally dark. Then the host quickly puts on some scary looking mask, and uses and flashlight to quickly frighten them while chasing them out the exit.

There are literally hundreds of ways to scare these kids. You can use sounds, touches, chases, popups, popouts, and props to really get them horrified.

I remember one haunted house I went to they squirted mustard on you as you left. That really pissed me off. So I don't recommend anything like that... try to use props that aren't going to ruin clothing or anything like that.

You can use those snap-N-pop fire crackers you throw on the ground to scary the willies out of the kiddies too.
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I can remember going through this huge maze in a haunted house, and being chased by a man with a leaf blower made to look like a flame thrower. It scared the living shit out of me... you could try something similar.

[Big Booger]

One other thing that really scared me rightly was killer clowns. I remember after watching Stephen King's IT on TV, I was afraid to go to the toilet alone for fear that fucking clown would pull me down the drain.

I don't know how you might incorporate killer clowns into your haunted house but if you did I am sure you'd leave those kids with some sort of psychological damage like I got as a kid.

While you are at it, you don't have to just make each room in the house terrifying, you could experiment with haunted horror, try to make the kids sickened with a gross scene of guts and carnage, you could create a sense of wonder by making a hologram or something like it with smoke and a video projector to project the "ghost" of a former occupant of the house...

You can use a lot of suspense to build up the different scenes of the house, with scary and creepy music, bloody murder screams, dealthy throes, zombie like comedy acts (difficult to pull off), you can even put in a little fake historical reading for the kids (make up some scary ass story that they have to read about the haunted house before they go it to really get their teeth chattering)...

A prequel scare is also always good. Like if the house has a porch, and some steps, as the kids walk up, have someone grab at their ankles or something like that.

[Blah Pete]

Use a camera flash and mount it behind a skeleton, or some other scary type shape. If done in a dark area the victims will be seeing the image of a skeleton for a while wherever they look for a while.

[Charles]

Use a camera flash and mount it behind a skeleton, or some other scary type shape. If done in a dark area the victims will be seeing the image of a skeleton for a while wherever they look for a while.

You know, I just saw a really interesting web page about a device that projected slides, it was a rolling cart that would throw haunted house images onto sheets, sort of a primitive rear projection system. The interesting thing was that it had rack focus linked to the wheels, as you rolled the little cart backwards, the image would project at a larger size, but it would keep continuous projection focus. These "phantasmagoria" date back to about 1850. Anyway, if you like geeky camera and cinema stuff, check out the "Fantascope." There's lots of other goodies on that site for photo and film buffs.

[Hawaiibadboy]

For my Haunted house.
Anyone seen those for sale in Japan?


Thanks

[Mr Doricar]

Google ストロボ　Comes up with a few things straight away

There's one　http://lightshopneo.com/products/products_strobe.html

[Russell]

[wagyl]

Spooky!

A zombie thread, rising from the dead!