How to Make a House Scary
Decorating for Halloween has gained popularity in recent years, and there are lots of products on the market today that you can use to make your house look scary for this spooky holiday. You can also use common materials, often found around the house, to create a scary atmosphere, both inside and outside, for your next Halloween party, or just to scare away those pesky neighborhood trick-or-treaters. Does this Spark an idea?
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Instructions
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Create weird lighting and sound effects. Carve scary faces on pumpkins and place electric Christmas candles inside with green, red or orange lights. Place them outside and around the house. Replace regular outside and inside light bulbs with colored bulbs and black lights. String orange, purple, blue or green Halloween or Christmas lights in convenient areas throughout the house and around doorways, porches and windows. Use black trash bags to cover windows and block out natural light. Play heartbeats, rattling chains and screaming sound effects on your stereo or boom box to intensify the scary atmosphere.
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Place an old TV on your porch, turn it on, and make it play on a channel that has only static. Turn the volume down enough so that guests can still hear it, but it's quiet. Playing this alongside the heartbeats and screams will be a very effective and scary combination. Splatter fake blood around your house using ketchup or another homemade solution. Use harsh lights or spotlights to shine on this fake blood, so that you can call attention to it.
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Make a giant pentagram with red tape on your driveway or living room floor, and place candles at each of the points (use electric candles if children or alcohol will be involved in the celebrations). For an elaborate but effective touch, place standing skeletons around it, clothed in red robes, and play chants on a nearby boom box.
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Place horrifying zombie dummies throughout your yard and house in positions that make it look as though they were just killed. Cover them with fake blood. You can easily make dummies by stuffing old clothes, including socks and gloves, and assembling the parts---or not. Use a stuffed pillowcase with a mask on it for the head.
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Make bats out of black construction paper and hang them from the ceiling. Buy as many fake cobwebs as you can afford and hang them in doorways, scatter over furniture, and hang from low branches outside. Make ghosts by placing glow lights inside air-filled balloons that have faces drawn on them. Drape cheesecloth or white netting over the balloons and tie loosely at the neck. Hang these ghosts in closets and from rafters or branches.
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Make a graveyard with thick cardboard or Styrofoam cut out in the shape of tombstones and painted gray. Use a black magic marker to write "R.I.P." and similar inscriptions. Place the tombstones between two bricks to make them stand upright. If this graveyard is outside, imitate the look of a freshly dug grave with mulch. Stick fake hands and feet in the mulch to make it look like a zombie is rising up out of the grave. If you can afford it, buy a fog machine to make your graveyard foggy.
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