Frightguy Live! Episode 4 of BlogTV Tomorrow Night!

Hey Frightners!!

Come talk with me tomorrow night at 9PM EST on Blogtv! I will be talking about Halloween, Haunting, Haunt tactics, prop making and more!! Hope to see you all there: http://www.blogtv.com/People/Frightguy

Old School Panels Part 2 - Grimlock Flashbacks

Hey Frightners,

So tonight is flashback part two of Grimlock Manor. I just showed our Main Foyer wall panels two posts below and will start with a few pictures of them set up at the haunt but tonight I wanted to post a few pictures of our "Study Room" panels as we called them.

Now these shots show these panels in two different settings and set ups in both day time and night time so you can see all the details. The Study Room panels probably took the least time to create. The top was painted green and bottom brown with a wood base board divider. We used a stamp to create our fo-wallpaper pattern using a gold paint on top of the green. It was quick and easy and I think it gave it a nice effect as apposed to using wallpaper again.

The Study Room followed the Main Foyer in our haunt and had a creepy vibe about it. We played old muisc that skipped and had people dancing in the room. You had to walk between our actors to get through it. They didn't really try to scare you as much as they try to freak you out and make you uncomfortable and they help slow and control the pace of everyone coming through our haunt. It was a nice transition room that helped set up the big scares that were set up in the room ahead.

The next two rooms I will feature is our "White Room" or "Lucillas Room" and our Lab!

If you have any questions about the panel creations or about any of the props you see in the room please post a comment and I will do my best to answer. I hope everyone is enjoying the "Old School"pictures of Grimlock Manors beginnings, I know I am! I look forward to bringing you more this week.

Frightguy~

Thank you for the shout outs!

Hey Frightners,

I just quickly wanted to thank a few bloggers for their shout outs recently. Us haunters are a tight knit community and it's nice to know we all continue to try and help each other out and spread awareness of one others haunts and all that we each have going on.

 Please take a peep at the following blogs below.

Scary Visions
The House Of Marrow
Devils Eve

Each of them has really helped me with my blog in the past few months and they each have some great blogs of their own that as a haunter you wouldn't want to miss!

Just a bit about each -

• Scary Visions is a blog written by a true haunt fanatic. Scary Visions covers most everything about the Home and Pro Haunt industry as well as doing some great interviews with haunters and also providing coverage for RFR Radio while producing some great videos from all the various Halloween Conventions especially Transworld on his YouTube Channel.

• The House Of Marrow is a blog written by one of our younger yet very experienced haunters named Marrow. We recently did an interview with Marrow in our Deadtime Stories series which you can find here on our blog. Marrow details all of his props and builds on his blog Marrow House. He has some pretty cool stuff in the works!

• Devils Eve is a blog written by a personal friend of mine Ghoulish Cop. I met GC while attending the NJ/PA Make and Take Group and I must say he is a talented guy! Ghoulish as I will call him is a true Home Haunter. He shares the same love and interest in home haunting that I do in the way that we just cannot get enough and are always looking to try out all the techniques we see other haunters posting about. He provides great details and pictures about all the props he is building on his Blog while also providing cool insight on the home haunt world.

I hope you will check these blogs out and show your support for them and I look to highlight other blogs soon as there are so many that I love and follow daily. I find inspiration in each and hope you will too!

Frightguy~

The Messer Chups

Hey Frightners!

Well first let me say Happy Memorial Day Weekend. It looks to be a hot and sunny one here in NJ so I hope everyone else is enjoying some nice weather.

Before I get to my post for today I want to quickly say that something seems to be up with blogger? For whatever reason I can no longer see my Grimlock Manor Fans/Followers in the menu bar to the right. It seems to be a problem that I see on most of the other blogs I am following as well. I do hope that this is a problem that will be resolved shortly, I know it's nothing I did but if anyone who reads my blog know how to fix that please leave me a comment in this post. Hopefully you all haven't left me! =(

Well back to our regularly scheduled program! So today I wanted to write about a band I came across last week who are called the Messer Chups. They are an Indie Band, I can't really pin point the type of music they play which I am sure has a name but its that Surf Guitar Wipe Out kind of music. There are no lyrics just simply guitar, bass and drum. When you listen to them you simply want to be sipping a My-Tie in while lounging at a Tiki Bar overlooking the beach while the surfers ride the waves haha! It's that cool!

They have a lot of great videos on Youtube and there are plenty of albums of Theirs on iTunes for you to download. They have even done a cover of Tales from The Crypt called "Tremolo From The Crypt" which is pretty good!

I've posted two of their videos below for you to enjoy. I recently reached out to the bass player whom you can also find on Facebook, her name is Svetlana Zombierella. She was super cool and instantly wrote me back. I asked if they were playing any shows in NYC but she said none are scheduled currently so I guess I will just have to wait to see them live but I may look into trying to get an interview with her for my Deadtime Stories series seeing how she loves Halloween!

Well enjoy the videos below, I hope you like them and will enjoy a nice fruity My-Tie while listening to them on this beautiful memorial day weekend. Now back to building them props!

Blog TV Episode 3 in the books.

Hey Frightners!

I just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who stopped by tonight to participate in Episode 3 of Blog TV or what I will dub as Fright TV!

It was great to see you all there and get to catch up with everyone once again. I had to wrap up a little earlier than usual to get some rest for work tomorrow but I think we still all had a great time as usual. If you happen to miss this episode than do not worry as we will be back again soon!

One thing that came up again was the interest in seeing some of my past work on the haunt so tonight I am going to start with some progress pictures of the wall panels we did. We had 7 rooms in our haunt and over 40+ 4 x 6FT wall panels to fill the entire space. The panels below were part of our main foyer. We build the frame using 2x4's and then each side was covered with 2" foam board. In these specific panels we detailed the base to look like wood by using a hot pen to etch in the details. We then painted the base brown and added a black wash  to pick up the details. The top half of the panels were then detailed with wall paper that we bought at Lowes. We then added some trim to separate the wall paper and the fo-wood base. Finally we painted the wallpaper to make it look moldy and dirty.

Take a peek at the pictures below to see the steps of building the foyer wall panels. I will slowly add more pictures of the other panels we build, our pillars and the concept and creation of our icon characters. I think this will all help lead everyone to where Grimlock Manor is now and it's evolving storyline for this year. The prop building has already begun and excitement is high!!

Enjoy the pictures and please feel free to leave comments or feedback! You can click on the pictures to enlarge them and see the details better.

 

BLOGTV Tomorrow at 8PM EST!

Hey Frightners!

Come on over and talk to me tomorrow ( of if your reading this and it is Thursday than TODAY!) I will be hosting a Live Blogtv tomorrow at 8PM EST! So be there or be square!

Love'n Me Some Tshirt Bordello!

Hey Frightners!

During the National Haunters Convention I got to meet a lot of cool new vendors I never heard of before one of which was TSHIRTBORDELLO. These guys had some really cool T-Shirts and swag that I think you Frightners would really like! One item in particular that I was debating on getting and didn't but still ended up purchasing online was the Zombie Targets! This was a real cool set of 3 individual Zombie Targets each 18x24 in size. These would be super cool to shoot with your Red Rider BB Gun or simply as wall art in your home or office. Mine will be hanging in my office shortly but for now take a peek at one of them below.

I actually went and bought another set tonight and am thinking of running a contest with them live on one of my next Blogtv episodes speaking of which!!!...

Check me out live tomorrow on BLOGTV at 8PM EST!  I will be on for a few hours talking about Halloween and Haunting as always. I will also be giving some design tips on how to make your very own spookily aged photo using basic house hold items as well as various graphics programs and we will be discussing the first ever Blogtv Make and Take! So get your butts on over to Blogtv with Frightguy of Grimlock Manor tomorrow at 8PM! I hope to see all you Frightners there!

American Science Surplus.

Hi Frightners!

Two posts in one night Woo Hoo!!

Well the other night I was on Blogtv watching dEdmonton from dEdmontonTV host his first every show (It was a great show by the way!) and we were talking about budgets and if any of us had actual budgets or allowances each year and that got me to thinking about budget props or great website you can go on to buy some really cool stuff for your haunt at prices that won't break the bank and American Science & Surplus came to mind.

Last year I was looking for some inexpensive motors or motors that I can run off of simple batteries you can buy at any ol' store and after putting some posts up on various Halloween related forums I was given a lead to sciplus.com. Once I went to the site I was instantly hooked! Not only did they have all sorts of motors but they had all different kinds of science toys, kits, cool tools and goodies that could be put to a haunters use for a number of things. I mean do you need stuff that glows in the dark? They got it! Are you going on a trip to Europe and need a wall socket converter? They got it! Do you need an inflatable life size Torso with LED lighting? WHO DOESN'T!!! THEY GOT IT!!! It's a truly amazing site with cool little things that with a little imagination can be put to a million and one uses.

As a  home haunter haunter this has become one of my favorite sites to check out from time to time and I highly suggest you give it a whirl too! I actually just invested in the life sized LED Torsos...I mean who doesn't need those for their haunt?!!!

Halloween Adventure Walkthrough.

Hey Frightners!

Finally! Here is my quick walkthrough of the Halloween Adventure superstore in NYC which is located at 808 Broadway, 104 4th Ave, NY, NY, 10003.

This is one amazing store which is open all year round. They have everything you could imagine for Halloween, my video doesn't do it justice but I hope you get the idea and will enjoy it.

If you cannot make it to the store or do not live close to NYC then you can also visit them online at New York Costumes Online.

Tom Devlin - 1313FX

Hey Frightners,

Welllllll....I'm still here and if your reading this I guess the end of days hasn't come yet as perdicted..silly rabbits, tricks are for kids! Now back to our regularly scheduled program!

So my haunt season is in full swing. I have started my first big prop (the twisted toybox) and I am steadily working away on it and other projects for this years carnival haunt. At the same time I have been looking around at some vendor sites for new props that will fit my theme. Now of course I build a lot of what is in my haunt myself but I am always interested in adding to my prop collection! This is why I love going to conventions as well as watching the videos that everyone posts from all the Halloween Tradeshows because not only will vendors inspire ideas but sometimes you find some gems among them and some really cool props for an affordable price and of course being a home haunter as you all know we like when buying a prop won't break our bank accounts!

So this brings me to Time Devlins company 1313FX. Now unless your living under a rock you probably have watched or at least heard of the SYFY Channels reality competition show FaceOff. If not then shame on you! JK. But if you haven't seen or heard of it then I seriously suggest checking it out. Like with any reality contest show there is a group of contestants pitted against each other in various challenges that are presented to them with one winner winning it all at the end. In the case of FaceOff the contestants are some of the best in the special fx makeup industry, many of which have their own companies already or have some credits to their name in some familiar films. All had their own unique talents and skill sets and they all produced some pretty amazing pieces of work. One contest in particular that I really enjoyed watching was Tom Devlin.

Tom won the Iconic Horror Villain Challenge with his custom character "Teddy Told Me Too!" He was an awesome character and now Tom is offering up the mask that he made for this character (which is awesome!) on his companies website 1313FX.

While watching the show I kept saying to myself "I wonder if these contestants know about the Halloween Industry" I thought if any of them actually made their products and offered them up to the haunters of the world for sale they would probably do pretty well for themselves and low and behold that is exactly what Tom is now doing.

I learned about 1313FX from watching some of the West Coast Haunters Convention videos on Youtube and then saw that the Bloodshed Brothers did a Vlog showing off one of the masks that bought from 1313FX.

The cool thing about these masks was not only how nice and detailed they were but also how affordable they were. Each mask was only $20! Now these aren't full pull over masks, they only cover the front of your face but simply add a wig or a hat or your own flare to them and you've got a really nice start to a costume. Considering that most masks you will buy in a Halloween superstore during october will cost you $30 or more I would definitely consider purchasing one of these first without question.

So to wrap up, definitely do your homework when considering buying any prop for your haunt. I suggest watching the tradeshow videos, take note of the vendors and explore their sites because there are some gems to be found out there that are affordable on a home haunters budget, Tom Devlins 1313FX is and pure example of that and I myself look forward to adding some of his works to my collection.

BlogTV Time!!!

Hey Frightners!

If your reading this then I hope to see you on Blogtv tonight! Come talk with me at 9PM EST! Swing on over to my channel at 9PM or any time after and talk some Haunt and Halloween with me. Ask questions about Grimlock Manor, prop making, Halloween or anything at all! Simply click the clink below! See you at 9!!

FRIGHTGUY ON BLOGTV!!!!!!!

ParaNorman Movie

Hey Frightners!

Before I get into the post I just wanted to remind everyone that tomorrow night at 9PM EST I will be on Blogtv. Check out the video in the post below for more info and for the link to my Blogtv site. I hope to see you there! Now on to the post..

So I heard recently that the makers of Coraline, Focus Features and Laika, will make the 3D, stop-motion project, ParaNorman, slated for August 17, 2012.

I am pretty excited about this! I really enjoyed Coraline as well as Corpse Bride and my favorite Nightmare Before Christmas so of course I can't wait to see ParaNorman.

The plot summary is as follows: In the comedy thriller, a small town comes under siege by zombies. Who can it call? Only misunderstood local boy Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee), who is able to speak with the dead. In addition to the zombies, he'll have to take on ghosts, witches and, worst of all, moronic grown-ups, to save his town from a centuries-old curse. But this young ghoul whisperer may find his paranormal activities pushed to their otherworldly limits.

This really sounds like it's going to be a fun film and I am looking forward to the trailer which is said to be coming soon so keep your eyes and ears out for more information about this film soon and for more about the cast of the film go HERE.

Hope to see you all on Blogtv tomorrow night where we can talk more about ParaNorman along with everything Halloween and Haunt related!

Stay Frightful!

Frightguy~

Blog TV This Thursday Night 9PM EST!

BLOGTV LINK - FRIGHTGUY

Twisted Toybox Part-1

Hey Frightners!

So this past weekend I started on my first big prop for my carnival haunt, my Twisted Toybox!

I meant to start up my carnival booths but I am still in the process of drawing up the plans for them and didn't want to rush through them. The toy boxes seemed to be a project that were a little less complicated to so I got started with them.

The construction of the boxes are pretty simple as you can see in the picture below. Now I didn't build a full frame for the first one because I had some left over pieces of furring strips that I was able to use to join the panels together but for a more sturdy design I would suggest framing it out first than adding your side panels.

You can see in the picture below that the furring strips were used to join the panels together. Like I was saying, normally there would be a full framed out box built first  but because I had these individual pieces left over I opted to re-use and recycle!

Once I built the basic box I added moulding to the 4 corners of the box for both safety and aesthetics. I think it will help the boxes look more polished in the end. I am still playing with the idea of using thicker molding to frame out each panel but in order to keep cost down I might just stick with what I have.

Next I decided I didn't want the boxes to lay flat on the bottom and wanted to give them a little extra height so I added small 2" legs to the box. I think it gives the box that little extra something and if I made smaller versions like this it may be interesting to see them stacked on top of each other with a little space in between provided by these legs.

Next on the list for the box is adding it's lid with hinges so that it can open and close. I may instal a mechanism that opens and closes the lid  or I may choose to make this into a Jack in the Box and have a handle that slowly spins but I will decide that as I move along. I intend on making two more of these in small and medium sizes so I can do something different with each if I am feeling ambitious. 

For this specific box I want to try and actually print the designs for each of the 5 panels on a water proof canvas then apply those canvas designs to the wood. I think this would give the boxes a unique look rather than painting on them. Other options were to dress each panel with 1 inch foam and carve in designs or cut out diecuts in each panel, add plexi glass and light the boxes from inside. Again...I am still playing with these as I go and will be making at least 2 more so I can still play with a few of these ideas but if any sound interesting and you would like to see them please feel free to comment.

I've got lots of work ahead of me but I am up for the challenge and am looking forward to watching this haunted carnival come to life! I hope you guys enjoy the ride as I start my prop building for the season.

Stay Frightful!

An Interview with The House of Marrow!

Hey Frightners!!!

It's been a long while since I posted an interview in the "Dead Time Stories Page" but we are back with a great interview with Marrow from House of Marrow.

You may have seen his video on the Home Haunters Video Awards DVD, on Hauntforum or Youtube or read his BLOG (which is pretty great if I might say so!) He has a great style and look to his props which is a bit reminiscent of Pumpkinrots which Marrow talks about in the interview. 

He is a young haunter with his best years still ahead of him but he is already doing our community and better yet Halloween proud. Please enjoy my interview with Marrow below!

Also don't forget to check out the Dead Time Stories Page to the right for our past interview with Mr. Macabre. Next up will be Joiseygal of Bloodcrest Manor so stay tuned!

Stay Frightful!

• TEN QUESTIONS WITH MARROW of HOUSE OF MARROW

Late last year I stumbled upon some great photos of a haunt named The House of Marrow which reminded me a lot of Pumpkinrots. The props, scenery and setting where all beautifully displayed and SCREAMED of Halloween. The most interesting thing about this to me was two fold. First, it is done in a small storefront window in Wellington New Zealand. Second it is done by a teenage haunter that goes by the name of Marrow.

When I found out Marrow was only 13 years old I was blown away! His artistry rivals some of the best in our community. I seriously thought The House of Marrow Haunt was being done by a haunter with years of experience but I was proven wrong. It goes to show you that no matter what the age, the passion for haunting and love of Halloween can inspire anyone to make such wonderful works of art.

Marrow has truly taken his passion for haunting and has ran with it. Though he works in such small spaces he brings those spaces to life using his unique ability to set the scene with great lighting and beautifully hand crafted props.

I want to thank Marrow for taking the time to answers the following questions and share his "Dead Time Stories!"

1) Tell us a little about yourself. Where did the interest in Halloween and Haunting come from?

I was first exposed to Halloween when I was three years old, and I immediately latched onto it. I began 

drawing countless vampires, ghosts and monsters. I had a particular obsession with Ghost Trains and Haunted Attractions, and fell in love with a book called ‘Come for a Ride on theGhost Train’. You can read about it on my blog http://marrowhouse.blogspot.com/2011/02/deep-in-amazing-arty-bees-bookshop-you.html I read heaps of Goosebumps books and loved movies like Scooby Doo on Zombie  Island, or The Haunted Mansion. Every time I visited the video store I would run over to the horror section, sit on the floor and just stare at the covers. The obsession grew, and when I was five I stumbled upon FrightCatalog.com. I was fascinated by all the gory props, the animated electric chairs and the elaborate masks. And all for sale! I began printing off photos of costumes and props, then writing short horror stories about them. I still have all the stories in the attic, and I’ll post some on my blog sometime. Eventually, all the scary-bloody stuff became too much and I got sent to a psychologist. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. It was really intense for about nine months, I was washing my hands till they bled and terrified of germs and poisonous things (e.g. Foxglove plants). I overcame it when I was 7 and was taken off all the macabre stuff, (secretly still really interested in it). But around the age of ten or eleven, I started watching horror movies, and getting back into my spooky groove. One day in 2009, I was looking through Magic Trick videos and stumbled upon ‘How to make a Halloween Corpse’. I set to work and corpsed an old plastic skull with a t-shirt soaked in brown paint. I didn’t want to go for the whole PVC body,(which the video instructed), so I browsed the internet for better corpse how-to. Almost immediately, I came across SpookyBlue’s awesome Groundbreaker tutorial. I made a rolled newspaper body and corpsed it with cloth. I called him Archibald.

Addicted, I made a scarecrow, a groundbreaker, a paper mache pumpkin and a Spookyflicker light. I found my way to Pumpkinrot and Stolloween, and the rest is history.

2) What are some of the reactions you get when you tell people you are only 13 years old? It must be a good feeling to know so many people appreciate the artistry of your work at such a young age?

I get a lot of people on HauntForum really amazed by it. It’s really cool to get such nice and encouraging feedback from y’all, thank you to everyone. However, people here in Wellington always say the exact same thing. “You should be at Weta Workshop!”(Peter Jackson’s Effects Studio). Every time. It’s really nice of them, but I’m sooo sick of it. Can’t blame them, I live very near to the place, so it’s all anyone ever goes on about when they see my props.

 3) You’re from New Zealand, what's Halloween like there? Are there any other haunters there, halloween conventions, etc?

Ick.  Halloween doesn’t exist. Important to note, Halloween is in the spring here, so there’s none of that Halloween magic stuff - leaves falling, smoky autumn air, darkness descending faster than normal. It’s a shame.

There is ONE other haunt in the neighbourhood (and probably the only other one in the country). You can see photos here.http://www.bebo.com/c/photos/view?MemberId=4141625358&PhotoNbr=1&PhotoAlbumId=11800837367#photoId=11800860572 They got on the NATIONAL NEWS. ON TV. I guess I’m kinda jealous. Not of the haunt, hell no, not jealous of the haunt. See, they got 1138 trick or treaters a few years ago. We got two.

4) What or who inspires you the most when creating new props?

I have to say I am an absolute PumpkinRot fanatic. I check the blog far too many times a day. His site is my main source of inspiration. Other blogs, artists, movies and even music have also inspired plenty of dark ideas. I find that I get a big creative burst when I’m on holiday. Something about the change of scenery.

I keep a ‘Haunt Book’ with me, and when I get ideas I scrawl them down in it. No-one else has any idea what I’m going on about in the book. It’s written in my own language. You tell me what ‘Sticky Igor Steampunk’ means.

5) Your haunt is very unique since it is designed in a small store front window. Can you elaborate on the process of designing a haunt in such a small space and what is the story behind landing the spot that you display your haunt in currently?

I was walking home from school one day in late August, and I saw a big display window with a sign on it saying ‘Window for Lease – Display purposes only’ and a phone number. I had recently been feeling a little frustrated that my groundbreakers and witch had nowhere to go on Halloween - my front yard is tiny and completely filled up. It was 100% unsuitable for haunting. So the idea suddenly popped into my mind that I could set up here, in this window.

 It was perfect. Two large display windows with a path up the middle. And it was on a street with a lot of foot traffic, next to a busy intersection. Cars would stop at the red light, and children peering out the car windows would be in for a surprise. I tried multiple times to get hold of the window owners, but never got any replies. Until one October afternoon, five days till All Hallows Eve, they phoned us back. They had really taken their time to reply. They said no.

 I began frantically looking for other display windows, and found that the answer was right in front of me (almost). We know a lovely lady called Jeanie, she runs a florists very close to home. She has a little workshop on a corner, with a juicy big window. She kindly let me use the window, free of charge. And she had no idea what the display was going to look like.

So I had four days to put together a haunt. I made some crosses and a cauldron stand, and I ventured up into the woods, collecting up bags and bags of pine needles and branches. I bought some coloured lights, and my dad made a sort of string, with lightbulb holders attached to it. We actually started setting up the haunt on October 30^th. We ran wire across the room, then draped black cloth over it to form the backdrop, set up the props and lights, added tree limbs and littered the ground with pine needles. It was all pretty frantic on those few days, be we got it done. Thanks Dad, I could never have done it without you.

6) What are some of your favourite materials to work with when creating a new prop? Do you have any tips or tricks you can share with other haunters?

I’m a newspaper and mache person, so the props are mostly newspaper and masking tape. I like playing around with using different techniques for corpsing with tissues, and experimenting with veins and tendons. Making guts is the best part, just tissues soaked in white glue and water, rolled up and arranged carefully. I also like to gloss the entrails for the freshly spilt look.

 I’ll let you all in on a trick I came up with for deep, black eye sockets. Once I’ve finished making a mache skull, (SpookyBlue style) I cut out the eye sockets. I then tape toilet paper rolls in where the sockets were. This gives a much deeper eye socket, so when it’s painted black you can’t see any end to it. They look like deep, black pits of evil. This technique was used on my Wind Ghost, Santa and Wallbreaker Ghost.

7) The back story you created for your haunt is great. A lot of haunts these days are starting to work back stories into their haunts. What was the process of coming up with yours? Do you see it as story that will continually evolve?

I think I knew when I started making the haunt some basic backstory about it. It was a graveyard in the middle of a forest, without proper tombstones. Maybe the people buried were murderers, and whoever buried them had no respect for them. Maybe they were victims of the Black Plague, or something like that - only a small part of a mass burial. Or maybe the haunt was set centuries ago, before tombstones existed, or in a very primitive village, away from civilisation. Nonetheless, there is a witch in the graveyard. She has brought along her cauldron and is now casting spells to bring the dead back to life. The spells work.

I’ve always been into writing, so it seemed fitting to make a backstory. Plus I really wanted to say “putrid black entrails spilling from beneath their exposed ribs,”. I just sat down at the computer one day and blurted out the whole story. It had been sort of floating around in my mind and I needed to get it down on paper (or pixels). There will definitely be a backstory for my next haunt, and all my future haunts. Plus the 2011 will be VERY different, so the backstory will be different too.

8) What advice would you give to a novice haunter or even anyone of the same age who thinks that maybe they can't do the same things you do because they are afraid to take that first step or they think they are too young to start haunting?

I’ve taken some fencing lessons before, and I saw parents bringing in their 4 year old kids, teaching them to fence. They started out early - the same goes for haunting.  You can’t start too young. Eric, who runs the amazing HAUNTED OVERLOAD attraction starting haunting when he was 12. Since then, his haunt has grew to a professional level, and is known as one of the best haunts in America.

A message to all haunters starting out, no matter what age – jump into it. I recommend that you sign up to HauntForum or HalloweenForum (I did this far too late). You can get LOTS of feedback and help on the forums, the people are really nice and supportive. Start up a blog too, so other haunters have an easier way to see photos of your props and your haunt. And don’t start with really hard props, or really expensive ones. I’m not really qualified to say which are the best props for beginners, ask someone on the forums.

9) If you had an unlimited budget to build the prop of your dreams for your haunt what would it be?

Does a ghost train count as a prop? J

One of my life-long dreams would be to own or make a ghost train. I’d give it one of those old-school front facades, with the spray painted monsters. You step into the carts (which have big evil skulls on the front of them) and the cart takes into a big door made to look like a monsters mouth. You enter the mouth of the beast and darkness smothers you. I won’t give you a whole run-through of the ride, but there is a haunted forest, with monster trees that grab at you, there is a long dark tunnel, with skeletons popping out of the walls, there is a graveyard, a pumpkin patch and cornfield, a vortex tunnel, a swamp, a mad laboratory - with a Frankenstein of course. And I would hand-make all the props. Top-of-the-line animatronic inside/rotting Marrow-mache outside. Plenty of strobe lights and cheesy evil laughter – ghost train essentials. There would be all sorts of monsters – bats, spiders, zombies, skeletons, vampires, the mummy, pop-open coffins and a few signature haunting props too.

Sorry for blathering. I’m sure you’ll hear more about my dream Ghost Train on my blog sometime. And for the record, I have never been on a Ghost Train J.

10) What's in store for the future of The House Of Marrow?

*places hands over crystal ball* In the near future, I see... A ghost, with a gown as black as night, and a skeletal face full of malice and menace. Reanimated corpses spewing forth from the earth. And soon, so soon, I see a trail. There is great evil at the end of this trail, and YOU, alone, must walk it.

Out of gypsy mode now. Yep, there is a new wind ghost. I finished it a few days ago, but I won’t post pictures for a month, at least. I am trying to keep the blog balanced, the juicy posts regularly spaced. The blog was bone dry between my Santa Claus and my Wallbreaker, it was all just filler, and I don’t want that happening again. I’m starting some groundbreakers too, they’re easy and keep me in my comfort zone (Santa and my Wallbreaker were very difficult). And as for that whole trail thing, you’ll find out soon enough.

I’m thinking of setting up an Etsy Shop sometime, and selling things like Wind Ghosts, and Trophy Heads. Things that won’t cost a fortune to get shipped to America. I’d also like to set up a proper website, but I don’t have the right skills, or enough material to fill it - maybe in a couple of years. I’d like to start making more abstracty props. Things a little out of the ordinary, a little surreal. I’ll be exploring that sort of abstract stuff with the haunt this year.

Thats wraps up our interview with Marrow from The House of Marrow! We want to thank Marrow again for taking the time to answer our ten questions. We hope you all enjoyed as much as we did. Stay Scary!