Season of Shadows Blog

What would Halloween be without it? For years, it was used in our haunt in homemade fog chillers, along with being dropped in strategically placed buckets of water throughout the yard. If you’ve ever done the latter, you know it never lasts for long. We were always having to change out the water and grab new blocks of ice. The awesome image in this post comes from danmcneely on Flickr. At first glance, the “fog” looks almost like soap bubbles, but upon closer inspection, you can see it curling around the edges of the cabinets and dishwasher.

This photo reminds me of something we used to do when I worked at a grocery store:

The ice cream loads would always arrive packed in a huge cooler full of dry ice. A co-worker would break off some chunks and drop them in the men’s and women’s toilet bowls! I would always toss several pieces into mop buckets around the store. It never caused any harm, just startled a few fellow employees and customers. Imagine walking into the bathroom and finding fog pouring down the edges of the toilets and onto the floor.

This photo was taken last Halloween (2008), but I left it out of the 2008 page because of the blemishes in the paint job (if you click on the photo, you can see them easier). I originally built this corpse in 2006, so it was one of my earlier designs. After finishing the paper mache, I used a white spray paint as the initial layer of coverage and then went to darker additional coats of latex, applied with a brush. This probably would have been alright, except for the fact I chose the desert southwest as the location to set up my yard haunt. New Mexico usually hits around 98 degrees in the summer. My props get stored in different locations – none of which happen to be air conditioned.

Because of the heat, the mache has a tendency to tighten up. Once it constricts, it reveals little nooks and crannies which were only covered with the initial layer of white paint. The result: white blemishes begin to peek through the darker top coat. Once I finally dig this corpse out of storage, in preparation for Halloween night, I inevitably have to do a ton of extra touch up to cover the blemishes. And, even then, some are hard to detect until the camera highlights them.

For me, the moral of the story is to no longer apply a base coat that’s lighter than my final top coat of paint. Doing this on my most recent props (plus a slight change in my mache technique) has made a big difference and I no longer have any lighter color playing peek-a-boo.

In the next couple of months, as the weather begins to warm up, I’m hoping to film another Halloween Haunter’s Reality Video in which I’ll demonstrate some groundbreaker painting techniques.

Related Halloween Prop Posts

Halloween Prop Building Q & A
Halloween Haunter’s Reality Videos
Return of the Scarecrow Corpse
Halloween How-To Projects