Halloween Props and Displays

I’ve always been obsessed with Halloween and we were That House when I was a kid: Each year I helped my dad build props from scrap wood and papier mache and random scavenged materials. The dummies were blocky and bulky, 2-by-4 frames filled out with old clothes stuffed with leaves, but that didn’t make them less terrifying if you glanced out the window at night once the garish floodlights were off and spotted a mob of misshapen forms shambling toward the house. Each year’s display featured a new theme, like Weird Al’s Scarf-n-Barf, a cannibalistic diner, to keep the neighbors worrying. In true Gomez Addams style, my dad specialized in a hefty dose of silliness and macabre puns to balance the horror and gore.

I have a lot less space to work with now, living in London, and access to more sculpting materials than my dad would have known what to do with. For the last few years I’ve been building large and impractical displays for our tiny front yard — despite the fact that Britain doesn’t really celebrate Halloween much. I’m on a mission to win them over. We’re definitely That House again.

For 2023 we’ve got a haunted cemetery, and my biggest build this year is a reusable facade for our front wall, since it blocks a lot of our decorations and looks much too plain. I built frames to support plywood panels that I can repaint for each new theme, and I built wooden tops for our columns that support a cemetery arch. I could swap in other archways or signs for other themes too.

I also made a Weeping Angel (who was originally going to be just a standard creepy cemetery statue, but I couldn’t resist turning her into my favorite Doctor Who monster — and making her move).