Spooky season is here and Halloween is just around the corner. Regardless of whether you already have your yard decked out or if you’re just getting started – take some tips from the pros.
MAC’s team has come up with easy and scary tips to make sure your yard is the spookiest of them all.
Decking Out Your Basic Décor
Do you have a plastic skeleton that needs a bit of spicing up? Wrap a plastic skeleton in plastic wrap and hit it with a heat gun. Then, stain it, heat gun again and it makes it look like decaying skin on a corpse. Don’t have a heat gun? Try a hair dryer, though the process will take longer.
Spooky Sounds to Scare the Neighbors
If you want your trick-or-treaters or party guests to be truly unnerved – experiment with sound.
Reproducing frequencies too low for human hearing (around 20 cycles) has been shown to create anxiety and general unease even though you can’t hear it. For this you’d need a beefy subwoofer and some experimentation. You can also find 20 hz or lower test tones on YouTube.
If that isn’t in your wheelhouse, hide Bluetooth speakers in your yard and find a playlist of random sounds, voices, or animal calls. Just don’t make them so loud it’s obvious, we’re going for eerie, not jungle noises. There are also tons of spooky playlists on Spotify.
Leverage Lighting to Horrify
Jim “Tut” Tutorow, MAC lighting designer, said using lighting to create weird shadows is a great way to step up your Halloween game. People get creeped out when they cannot quit see what things are, so use lighting to accentuate your setup.
You can backlight tomb stones on your lawn and from the ground in front of them.
You can uplight your trees, or better yet, get your ladder out and attach lights in the trees and light as many branches as possible down to the ground. As the tree and lights blow in the breeze it creates moving shadows.
If you have a side of the house that is open, create a scene on your lawn using tombstones and skeletons – whatever you have. Then light it up from the ground toward that part of the house. By adjusting the lights you can create huge shadows on the side of your house.
