Almost Halloween 2006 and finally finishing this one.

Halloween 2005 continued

Here are some of the great freakshow billboards I had a local airbrush artist named Alan Silva create for me. I am a moderately okay artist but don't have this skill. His product was just the theme I expressed to him and all turned out really cool. I met him at a expo in Sacramento and he did a great t-shirt for me really quick. His portraits are really cool, I am checking with him before I post his contact info here. I highly recommend him.



This is a closer picture of my babies. The two with glowing eyes are the ones with the LED blink circuits. I had a lot of fun making these guys and hope to be able to use them again.

My friend Chris and what is obviously his offspring. This match was unplanned but serendipitous.




Now if we could just find mommy's remains...ummm, ahem, I mean find mommy.
Wait...no that is a guy. Saul is the fellow who has the guts to let kids get candy from his sweetly spread torso. Tim is the fella who played my freak doctor. Add some fake intestines ( hose and latex paint) and you have some nice props to play with the kiddies.

And just because I love this picture, this is Tim's wife, Rachel, in the foreground.

You can see the love.

This grizzly (and much better looking in low light, I might add) scene was inside the tent. There were a few kids who went for the "crap" candy outside the tent rather than reach into our victim's bowels. We had several actors throughout the night doing different roles. I will be posting pics of them and some of my prep work a bit later.

But for now, this is me saying, "Get some candy, little kiddies."

Update from All Hallows Eve

HALLOWEEN 2005, NIGHTMARE PLAYGROUNDS PRESENTS:
THE DARK CARNIVAL



This past Halloween we had a larger turn out from our friends than ever before. The efforts took were also bigger and more time consuming than previous years.

Our theme was a Dark Carnival/Freak Show and we used our carport tent with huge fabric panels my wife sewed together. We enlisted friends (duped, really) into helping us grommet the things so they could be linked together. This was my wife's idea and it turned a bland tan carport cover into a garish circus tent. Notice my dorky expression as I set it up. Normally I am not a bandana wearin' guy but you will see why I had it on in a later photo. My wife tied black thread from the ceiling of the carport so when you walk through you get that "just walked through a cobweb" sensation on your face. We also had help from two of our friends but for now I am not adding names to this blog until they give the okay.


We wanted the kids and neighbors to have no idea what was going on inside the carport and garage so we also set up with the carport front on.

This is the the plywood/pvc pipe cage I built for Freak-In-A-Box. Randy is the freak inside. I got the idea one day and decided that it would be really cool to have prop like this for my actors to play in. The idea is simple, have a easy to build and lightweight box with bars so an actor can swipe at treaters as they come by. When the treaters pass the bars are just wide enough a slim person can squeeze through the bars and give chase. OR....they can pick up the whole cage with them inside of it and move it behind and closer to their intended target.

I also made some very cute baby dolls for my pumpkin garden. I bought those fake foam pumpkins, carved them like eggs that had hatched and had my sweet babies inside. We also had a actor (Lindsey, sorry if it is spelled wrong) playing "Scary Mary" (left) who was the infernal nursemaid for these kids.

As you can see she has a jack'o'lantern baby doll that has LED lights inside of it's head to make it glow. The clown on the right is a friend (Channi) also who is holding my daughter. We have a neighbor who is quite afraid of clowns and we made sure she got the attention she deserved. A few weeks before Halloween our neighbor and her mother did a good "pop" scare on me by hiding on my porch and yelling at me when I came home. They wanted to get me like I have been getting the neighborhood the past few years. Admittedly, I did jump. On Halloween I got my revenge and our neighbor ran screaming into her house. That didn't stop her mom from letting us go in after her, though. Ah, sweet revenge.

Some of the babies had LED light eyes that had a circuit that did a random blink pattern. Very nice effect. I made a devil baby with latex wings, a zombie baby, Pinhead baby, skeleton baby, Jack'o'lantern, a baby that was an ode to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein with a bit of cojoined freakishness. They were cool props and the zombie baby was eating off a latex severed arm in patch. I had the thing illuminated with a pumpkin light source and two tiki torches with skulls that I painted to look like garish clowns. (in clockwise order from top) Devil baby in tree, skeleton in pumpkin shell in back, pinhead, zombie, cojoined. Jack was carried by the sweet Scary Mary.