Homeowners *

* (restored, enlarged/Halloween countdown post #9)

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An Ohio woman’s Halloween decorations were so bloody terrifying and realistic, that she had to remove them out of fear for her family’s safety. Apparently the vibe in the neighborhood and the reaction she got for the gory décor made her a bit uncomfortable.

Vicki Barrett, the mother behind the gruesome setup, didn’t understand all the attention her yard was suddenly getting, considering this is the third year she went all out with her Halloween celebration.

Apparently parents thought it was inappropriate to have bloody dummies and bodies dangling from trees in the front yard, mostly because Barrett lives down the street from an elementary school.

 

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Nick Thomas’ Halloween display on Conan Doyle Road in Naperville has grown over the years, and now includes over 2,000 pieces with lights and synchronized music. Visitors to the cul-de-sac have also grown — he estimates about 8,000 people visited last year alone — which is why neighbors raised concerns about traffic and safety with the Ashbury Homeowners Association board. The board notified neighbors via its October newsletter that a “Holiday Decorations Rule” was voted on and passed at its Sept. 21 board meeting. The rule limits a person’s decorations to 50 percent of the yard, excluding lights, and restricts the display to 30 days before and after the holiday. For Thomas, that means his four storage units filled with decorations will remain unopened this year. The 600 bags of candy he buys each year will not be purchased. The donations he collected last year for Gigi’s Playhouse — in the amount of $6,500 — won’t be collected.

 

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A Halloween display created to gross out 12-year-olds is the talk of a St. Louis Park neighborhood. Some parents think the hanging “bodies” — next to Sunset Park, at a school bus stop — are too gruesome. The real-looking corpses dangle by their heels from a maple tree, trussed toe-to-head in clear plastic and dripping with fake blood.

The creatively creepy display was concocted by Kevin Amlee and his 12-year-old stepson, who wanted “to make something that would gross out his friends,” Amlee said. The gory display was a topic of conversation on a Facebook moms’ group this week. A member posted a photo of the dangling bodies, along with a plea for advice on what she could do about them. “I’m all about freedom of expression, but young children (including mine) live in our neighborhood and are traumatized by it,” she wrote.

 

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This video shares our western themed Halloween front yard for 2013. The theme was an old abandoned western mining ghost town called “Grave Rock Gulch” The haunted old west town was complete with an Undertaker Facade, Train Depot Facade, Dentist and Barber Shop Facade, an Old Spanish Mission Facade, Hotel and Saloon Facade, Southwestern Jail, General Store Facade, an Old Mine Shaft Facade, Water Tower, working Water Wheel, and Mining Area with Sluice.There are several static, motorized and animated props as well as pneumatic air powered props hiding around the town. There was a gold panning for body parts station for the little ones in the fully functioning mining area. We designed the haunt to make people feel as though they just walked into a little spooky ghost town straight out of a cartoon. All the scenery and many of the props were designed, handmade, modified, and painted by the two of us. Some of the props we had this year were a motorized kicking legs stuck in a wood coffin, a hidden air cannon inside a travel trunk, a pneumatic train station ticket stamper, a pop up dead customer of the town barber, several sculpted foam props like cactus, a giant tooth, motorized bell, working 3 tier fountain, working hand water pump, a detonating box for the mine, plaster castings of skulls, a pneumatic thrashing hangman, Several store goods like crates, jars, and supplies left and abandoned, and what western town isn’t complete with out a farting town drunk in the jail cell.

 

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A Brooklyn filmmaker has turned her porch into a surgical torture chamber teeming with mutilated baby dolls—a display gruesome enough to terrify kids and turn stomachs. Anyone strolling along Bergen Street in leafy Boerum Hill is in for a shock at her stoop: a collection of creatively butchered infant dolls and — their tormenter— a grinning, pumpkin-headed surgeon.

 

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williamson halloween house where your worst nightmares come alive

 

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One man lies on his stomach on the driveway. Blood is splattered along the garage door that smashed his head and presumably killed him. Another man lies a few feet away, run over by a truck.

The scene in a middle-class Oklahoma neighborhood made of single-story homes and well-manicured lawns seems out of a horror story because, well, it is. The two accident victims are in fact dummies, created as part of a family’s vivid Halloween display to shock and frighten. And it certainly has. At least one woman has called 911 to report that a man’s head had been shut into the garage door.

Jennifer Mullins, of Mustang, said she got the idea for the macabre scene from the social media site Pinterest and showed her husband, Johnnie, who was happy to scare up a display while he was on worker’s compensation and unable to work. Using Johnnie’s work clothes and blankets for stuffing, the couple first placed one life-sized dummy at the garage in early October and the next day, placed one next to the truck. A sign above the dummy in the garage door reads “you’re next.”

“People think we went too far, and you know, we’re devil worshippers and we must not be Christian folk,” the 32-year-old mother of two girls said. “They’ve said all kinds of stuff. But we’re normal. We love Jesus.”

 

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5 House Mappers

This is what our house will look like for Halloween this year. This was shot from the sidewalk in front of our house.

 

This is what trick-or-treaters were greeted with when they came to my house on Halloween, 2015. Only one, short-throw projector was used for this effect. I used Sony Movie Studio Platinum to compile and edit the video.

 

House Mapping for Halloween 2015. Used Multiple HD Download files of 6 “characters” from AtmosFear FX. Projectors used: Main housed used a BenQ MW817st , MX813st and MS504. The MW817ST does the “Heavy Lifting” . It handles the full house and garage doors. The woman in the upstairs window is actually the MX813st rear projecting on a white shower curtain. I tried having her projected by the 817st but the rear projection behind the window looked more realistic. The ms504 was for the pumpkins out on the side of the yard.

 

Creepy Halloween projection mapping on a home videoed live 2015 featuring devils, snakes, a Werewolf and more! Projection mapping created by Project Thelda.

 

Using 5 projectors we created a pretty scary scene.

 

Halloween 3D Projection mapping on our house, O Fortuna

 

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“I knew it was going to get some attention,” homeowner Matthew Warshauer said of his home’s display. “I didn’t expect how much. And this quickly.” Over the course of about 50 hours, Warshauer built a wall complete with a tiny-handed Trump, Senator Bernie Sanders “jailed by the DNC,” and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in a star-spangled tutu and riding a donkey. Last year, Warshauer built a Huey helicopter replica and a grisly, war-torn landscape to depict the Vietnam War. The year before, a Roman coliseum with soldiers beheading their ancient leaders. “I’ve never been at a loss to come up with something…The ‘Trump Wall’ is a no-brainer. It fits with how I put the display together,” Warshauer said. “Friends will say, ‘You’ll never top that one.’ And you know what that does.”

 

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For a month now, Saint-Lazare resident Scott Trainor and his fiancée Ariana Pisano have been intricately crafting a massive, spooky display inside three tempos on the front lawn of their home. Each tempo represents a different, scary zone. Each has moving mannequins that speak. Zombie babies, a creepy scarecrow, and a small child imprisoned by a demon are just a few of the horrifying attractions. There’s a sanitizing station at the beginning and only one family is allowed in at a time. All the mechanical parts are triggered by remote control, meaning the families are alone inside. “There’s no doors, there’s no coverings or anything. There’s nothing that needs to be touched,” Trainor said. At the end, candy is given from a distance down a chute. Trainor says all the candy is quarantined for over a week before being given out.

 

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After a woman allegedly tore down a scantily clad set of Playboy Bunny-themed mannequins on a New Jersey dentist’s lawn, the property owner responded by erecting even more plastic figures. The second installment of mannequins wearing sexy lingerie includes men. “I heard some complaints that we only had women, so now there are two men with the ladies,” Wayne Gangi, a dentist in Clifton, said Monday. Last week, a New Jersey woman allegedly dismantled the display of scantly clad mannequins in front of several television cameras. Desiree Shepstone, also of Clifton, used garden shears last Tuesday afternoon to take down five mannequins on Gangi’s lawn.

 

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A bloody torso, mangled beneath a lawnmower along a road in rural North Carolina mobilized paramedics and an ambulance – until they realized it all all a Halloween gag. The decoration was so realistic, a passing driver saw the scene and called 911 to reported that someone was trapped beneath a lawn tractor. The lawnmower stood alone in a yard in Rowan County in western North Carolina. There were no other decorations or signs that might have given other clues that the scene was a fake. After the passer-by dialled 911, medics prepared to rush out to the home with the lawn tractor and make a rescue. Fortunately, someone who overheard the emergency radio traffic about the lawnmower called medics before they left to assure them their would-be victim was a lifeless dummy. It’s unclear who was responsible for the Halloween trick. The driveway where the lawn tractor is parked leads to several homes.

 

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A Halloween-obsessed homeowner is terrifying his small Pennsylvania neighborhood with blood-splattered dolls, severed plastic heads and even a cannibal bunny in his front yard. This year, his lawn is strewn with bloodied limbs, a skeleton in chains and hanging heads. Possessed baby dolls line cages – which he picked up from flea markets – while hanging along the fences are more plastic dolls with black eyes and signs across their chests reading: ‘Help me.’ Painted tombstones placed in the front yard show the names of his family and children. And sitting on the porch is a large pink stuffed rabbit – with blood gushing from its mouth.

 

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Halloween House, Bush Street, Mountain View, CA

 

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Colorado’s most extreme yard and garage haunt just got better! It’s out first year at the new location, and we’ve created a free haunted walkthrough the likes of which have never been seen! It took the average group about four or five minutes to complete the tour, which winded through three thematic areas; a canibal barbeque joint (Uncle Bubba’s BBQ), a repair shop owned by killer West Virginia hillbillies (Body Repairmen), and a creepy basement infested with serial killers (UNEARTHED: Into the Cellar).

 

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A Halloween-loving New Jersey family has their Bellmawr neighborhood more creeped out than spooked with a front yard holiday display of bloody babies hanging from nooses. They also just happened to be named Krueger.

Even the fact that the three young Krueger children spent hours on the unsettling creation isn’t enough to convince some unimpressed residents.

‘I like to see witches, you know goblins and ghosts, not hanging babies,’ creeped out neighbor Toni Flaherty told Fox 29 Philly. ‘It’s not scary, It’s gross. It’s disgusting. It’s horrible.’

 

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A Detroit woman decided there were scarier things in the news to put in her Halloween display than killer clowns. Larethia Haddon placed six dummies in her yard, each depicting a a real-life horror. With help from her grandchildren, Hadden dressed the dummies up to depict terrorism, police shootings, the Flint water crisis and other realities.

Last year, Haddon displayed one dummy that appeared to be a dead body laying face-down in her yard, which scared people and promoted calls to the police. This Halloween, Haddon and her family said they wanted to send a message.

“We’re trying to do something positive instead of just having a dead body laying in the yard,” Haddon told Michigan Live. “We need to stick together more. And if we don’t, this scene in my yard is going to be reality every single day.”

 

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Last year, Dallas based artist and engineer Steven Novak laid out used nearly two dozen gallons of fake blood to create the gruesome murder scene which featured a man killed by a chainsaw, a “body bag” and a wheelbarrow full of limbs. Another ‘body’ had its head pulverised by a fake safe on the front porch, which was covered in a large puddle of ‘blood’ that spilled out onto the footpath. The scene horrified his neighbours so much so that several 911 calls were placed to investigate the scene. “I made the body parts this year by cutting up mannequins then filling them with skeleton parts and Great Stuff insulation foam. There are lots of new gimmicks to this year’s caper. The wood chipper blood fountain being the clear centrepiece and easily the most challenging prop. It took me months to find an old wood chipper for sale. The sellers were not pleased with its new purpose.”

 

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Jenns Haunts Halloween Yard Daytime Walkthough and Video of yard haunt after five hundred kids went through my Halloween yard display!

 

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A man who put up a gory Halloween display of disembowelled corpses outside his home has been told by police to tone it down after a passer-by said it made their child cry. James Creighton, 25, has decorated the outside of his house with skeletons, bloodied corpses and cobwebs every year since 2009. But he had a nasty shock when two police officers knocked on his door to tell him a parent had complained it was frightening children.

Creighton said: “The police came round knocking on my door. They said they were sorry to disturb me but they had a complaint from a member of the public who walks past my house in the morning. Apparently their child starts crying every time they walk past my house. I was shocked – more to the point that the parent couldn’t come to the door themselves and speak to me personally, but had to get the police involved and waste their time.

“Police have asked me to put black tarpaulin along the fence so the kids can’t see it, but why should I do that? It ruins the whole rest of the display for everyone else. All the other kids love it. It is just this one who doesn’t like it.”

 

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Hawthorne, NJ man Antonio Rodrigues said his attraction of 190 dead body statues was dismantled on Saturday night when police warned him that his visitors would be ticketed if they blocked the road in front of his home. The “Dead House” is such a draw that visitors have traveled from as far as Vermont to see it, said Rodrigues, a native of Portugal. The appeal for adrenalin junkies is that Rodrigues dresses up like his dead statues to blend in among the walking dead. He then leaps out to scare the shit out of visitors when they least expect it. “I don’t want people to have tickets because of me,” said Rodrigues, 50. “I don’t want them to be mad.”

 

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Kyle Chen didn’t give one piece of candy to a trick-or-treater in 1998. Now hundreds stop by just to see his house. Chen moved to Wauwatosa in 1998 and flocks of trick-or-treaters would completely ignore his street on Martha Washington Drive. He found out they were headed to Two Tree Lane to see the decked-out houses and their Halloween decorations. He had to do something.

The house today is a macabre scene of ghouls, goblins and ghosts. Life-sized mannequins with melted faces fall out of broken windows on the home’s second story. Dozens of rats and crows infest his lawn, some perched as ghoulish sentinels. A spectre holds a flickering lamp, beckoning unsuspecting trick-or-treaters to the asylum.

The coup de grace, however, is Chen’s moving ghoul-suit — 12-feet tall, draped in black rags and is worn like a backpack. Since the suit doesn’t require stilts, the Chen family can run after trick-or-treaters, chasing them down the road.

Chen said he likes to stand motionless in his yard, waiting for unsuspecting trick-or-treaters to wander within chasing distance. The suit makes such a presence that, one Halloween, his wife told him firmly not to scare a little girl who wandered into their yard. “This is Halloween,” Chen whispered to her before tearing after the little girl, causing her to run squealing from the house. He was scolded by his wife until the year she wore the suit. Her personality completely changed and she wanted to instill fear in the children, he said.

 

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James Faulk from Dallas in Texas has decorated his home inspired from the city’s recent fear of Ebola virus. He is very fond of this sinister holiday so he decided to create an unusual Ebola-themed décor to create panic among his neighbors. Faulk spent about $150 on a hospital auction and four to five hours decorating the townhouse to make it look like a decontaminated building. He has enrobed his University Park home with red waste bags, brightly colored bio-hazard bins and yellow caution tape. The alarming house decorations were displayed last Sunday when Faulk’s neighbors called police in fear of the virus.

 

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Every Halloween for the past four years, 18 year-old Cleveland high school student Frank Mischen has taken over every inch of his family home, inside and out, to create what he calls “the slaughterhouse living environment of his dreams.”

 

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Miscellaneous

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I have seen Noel Burch’s ‘Noviciate’, but I had no idea that was her. From that to October Magazine. Crazy. Thank you! ** Dominik, Hi!!! And such a long year too. But all is forgiven. Gisele’s busy getting ready to head off for ‘Crowd’s’ US tour, but I’ll corner her in LA if nothing else. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a book fair that wasn’t inherently nice due to its nature but also sadly lacking in OMG moments. Well, I guess you could be proofreading documents consisting of nothing but soccer game statistics, so that’s an improvement? I’d pay you to proofread my escort and slave posts if I could afford it. I’m getting my plane tickets in the next couple of days, but I’ll leave around mid-month and be there for three or three and a half weeks is the plan. Lucky, saintly, fleet-footed love. Snails are sweet and innocent and deserve to live out their natural lives. Love making this young guy whose audition tape Zac and I watched yesterday agree to play one of the main roles in our film because he’s perfect, G. ** Jack Skelley, Jazz with a ‘k’! ‘NDA’, I’ll check it. I’ve heard of Jonathan Ames, yeah, but I don’t think I’ve read him. ‘What is?’ indeed! Oh, I might in fact and pretty likely be there for that reading on the 23rd! Awesome. Taylor Lewandowski is very cool. I had a great time meeting him over here. Excellent. He’s in LA? I thought he lived in, like, Montana or somewhere. Saw your email. Yeah, I’m just a bad emailer. I’ll write to Kim pronto. I’ve been meaning to for ages. Bonnest! ** Jamie, Hey, man. Oh, awesome, it’s a fantastic book. The problem is that there are very good books on experimental film, but nearly all of them are very out of print and very pricey. There’s a superb book by one of my two all-time favorite filmmakers, Hollis Frampton, but it’s so pricey that I don’t even have a copy. If I can think of affordable ones, I’ll let you know. The Michelson is def. good. Oh, it’s not exactly or rather wholly on experimental film, but Semiotext(e) just published a collection of essays by arguably the greatest ever French film writer Serge Daney that is surely incredible. Leaden sentences can become jaw dropping magicians if you’re patient with them and don’t expect immediate rewards. I think your draft revision counts as a very exciting day, abso-fucking-lutely. My day was alright. Zac and I finished revising the treatment of our film for a grant submission today. We watched a video audition by this young guy in LA, and we were blown away by how perfect he seemed to be to play one of our films main roles, a role that we have been anticipating would be very hard to cast because it’s a complicated character, so that was very exciting, and now we have to convince him to do it. And it was chilly and gorgeous out. No so bad. Ha ha, mistakes are where genius hides or something like that, I think? Love like the first drag on a cigarette after attending a screening of Rivette’s ‘Out1’ (which is very long). xo, DC ** Nick Toti, Hey, Nick. No big. Maybe it’s easiest if we just meet up in LA at this point because Zac and I will be there in a couple of weeks? But we can Zoom too. I hear you: at one point we thought about doing a gofundme for our film, but it’s so much work we nixed the thought. ** _Black_Acrylic, My great pleasure, Ben. How’s everything with you and your situation at the current moment? Will the govt. having scrapped that tax thing ease your progress at all? ** GusCaliGirls, Hi, Gus! Good to see you! Oh, man, that is a whole bunch of piled up roughness in your world. Fucking hell. Not the same thing, but I broke both of my wrists at the same time about 12 years ago, and, wow, things got difficult for a while on almost every level. You sound very cheerful though, so that’s a boon. And you’re watching great stuff. Still, high speed recovery vibes from Paris where the October air is really, really friendly so far. Gentle hugs, me. ** Robert, Sounds so great: your fall so far. My dad was a character and a half. Oh, that’s interesting how your therapist tried to put your judgements back on their launching pads. I don’t think mine did that, or else I just secretly rolled my eyes in judgement of her when she did, ha ha. Glad you’re writing and reading. I’m fighting to get those things into my goings-on right now too. We wanted (and still want) to shoot the film just after Xmas, but it’s starting to look like that might not be feasible, in which case it would start shooting between January and March. We have three performers in the film that are under 18, and one of them is a main character, and we either have to coordinate the shoot with her ability to not be in school, which is why we wanted Xmas vacation time, or find a girl whose parents are chill with letting her miss a bunch of school. Complicated, but we’ll sort it. Great day of unforeseen greatness! ** Paul Curran, Hi, Paul. Awesome about the Sato post’s appropriateness! Great, I’ll go check my email and get back to you. Thank you so much, man! ** Right. Today’s Halloween venture is a restored oldie, but it’s been added-to so it’s almost a newbie too. Weird. See you tomorrow.