Create an amazing attraction for your students and their friends this Halloween. You can turn your home into a spine-tingling haunted house for under $30 by using recycled goods. This is also a great way to reduce the carbon footprint of your Halloween and save some money for candy!
Decide where you want the haunted house to be. Using your garage or garden is a great idea as it’s easier to transform these places into scenes of disturbing horror. If you want to do it in your home, choose a room and move as much of the furniture out as you can.
Cut black plastic garbage bags open along the sides and lay them down to create a path or tape them to furniture and walls to create a corridor down which your victims must walk. You can buy cheap black plastic on large rolls from the hardware store for large areas. Use fishing line to hang strips of cut black plastic from the light fixtures and ceiling.
Create a scary atmosphere by playing spooky Halloween soundtracks. You can download these for free download or tune into Halloween radio stations. Here are some you can try:
• Spooky Soundtracks
• The Blue Smoke Band
Free Halloween Online Radio Stations
• AOL Radio – Halloween
• Slacker.fm Halloween
• Pandora – Halloween Music
• Halloweenradio.net
• Doomed SomaFM
Create some gruesome and scary scenes or tableaus along the path through your haunted home. You can make a cemetery by using polystyrene packaging from your local appliance stores. Use a knife to cut out tombstones. Use a sponge and some black acrylic paint to give the tombstones some character and paint the names of party guests onto the tombstones.
Get a pile of your old clothes together. Pick a few items and stuff them with the leftover old clothing. Now add masks as faces or cut off arms and legs and add ketchup to make severed limbs. Put ketchup on your hands and make bloody handprints on windows and furniture or drag your fingers across the floor to leave ketchup marks. Attach fishing line to the dead bodies and severed limbs so that you can make them move and twitch.
Turn off the lights and use candles instead. Place them in mason jars or vases to prevent fires. Using coloured vases will add to the mood. You can also replace your light bulbs with red or blue bulbs for added effect. Jack-o-lanterns make the perfect candle holders.
Get volunteers to line the path and dress them up in scary costumes. They can jump out at students who are walking along the path, or touch them on the shoulders as they pass by.
