Spooky Effects for Your Halloween Party or Haunted House

Whether you are planning a serious Halloween party or an actual Halloween haunted house, you can’t help but improve the scarifying atmosphere with some nicely done special effects. Although to get the greatest effect you may want to pluck over a little extra to buy semi-professional equipment, it may be possible to get around even that. To be honest, however, if you are looking for those satisfying sounds of appreciation from your guests or customers, it really is worth it to go the extra mile and rent some basic equipment. But even if you are just working with some lamps or some inexpensive lanterns, you can still make your Halloween even more frightening.

For instance, let’s say your Halloween party theme or Halloween haunted house tour features a visit to the domain of Lucifer himself, the fiery depths of Hell. Well, what’s Hell without some flames? Of course, you could get them with actual fire, but that’s not only dangerous, it may violate enough safety codes to get you shut down. The best method of achieving flickering flames from Hell is to rent a theatrical lamp and fit it with a composite gel made up of red and orange. You can then also either buy or rent what’s known as an effects disc that will be placed in front of the light. An electric motor turns the disc, which in this case is basically nothing more than squiggly lines of various thickness that approximate flames when cast against a background. The result is a really cool projection of dancing flames.

Since Halloween is all about things that go bump in the night-but takes place during a time of the year when it’s simply too cold for many people to actually want to be outside-providing a reasonably realistic outdoor Halloween setting is often important. Of course, you’ll want plenty of stars. The first thing you need is some black background cloth. Next, and it certainly helps if you’ve planned ahead, cut tiny little holes into the cloth and insert either those super-small Christmas lights or-and this provides a much better skylight effect-get your hand on some fiber optic cables. The fiber optics make much better Halloween night decorations because in the first place they appear more star-like. In addition to that, however, you can buy ones where you are able to control them. So you can program in a lighting pattern so that they give off a more realistic twinkle effect. If you really want to get sophisticated, you can also get what’s known as a color changer to give you the ability to control the coloring of the stars. If all that sounds like way too much money, here’s a far cheaper alternative. Instead of putting lights through the holes in your cloth, tie small pieces of aluminum foil. Then make these stars twinkle by use of a moving light.

When it comes to a foggy Halloween effect, you will have to put out some money. There are two questions, however. How much money and what type of fog. The second answer will pretty much take care of the first. If you need fog to rise, then you should invest in a fog-making machine. Nowadays, these can be found at any store that sells Halloween costumes and supplies. Just be aware that you really need good ventilation before using those things because before you know it you’ve got a room filled with fog where nobody can see any of your cool Halloween creatures. If, however, you merely need fog to creep across the ground-your moors, if you will-then don’t even bother with the fog machine. Get yourself some dry ice. Dry ice creates a fog effect that is particularly suited to Halloween-themed locations such as graveyards because it has the tendency to creep across the ground and doesn’t rise and create a huge fog like the machine-created stuff does. Be careful when handling dry ice, however, because it can leave with some pretty bad burns.

Getting back to fire, if you need the effect of a fireplace or a wood fire-such as you might need if your Halloween haunted house plans on burning some witches-then just hide a light beneath or behind your prop wood. You can either invest in a lighted bulb or you can use a gel like with the hellfire and the necessary flickering effect can be accomplished simply by investing in a wheel that slowly turns in front of the light source.

A Halloween party can be turned from something just run of the mill into something memorable with the investment some low-grade professional lighting equipment and a Halloween haunted house can definitely benefit by going the extra step. If you aren’t sure where to get this kind of equipment, simply look in the phone book under theatrical equipment. If your town doesn’t have one, then call up your local community or college theatre. They may just have an old used one they’d be willing to sell, and if not they will certainly know where to send you to rent one.