One Room. Big Scare.

[heff]

Hey guys,

I am really interested in setting up a little display in my garage, but I'm looking to do a small one, heavily themed, room.

Do you have any "BIG SCARE"s that are fool proof for such a small haunt?

[witchywoman]

When I was a kid, I remember one garage that freaked me out. They had the gorilla behind the bars with the strobe light, and he would bend the bars to get out. That was over 25 years ago and I still remember it as if it was yesterday!

[MotelSixx]

How about some sort of autopsy/morgue scenario. You can incorporate all kinds of ideas into, and blend them well. you could make it old and abandoned (as in the middle of autopsy) with a hint of some wrong doings on the side. the selling of body parts, skeletons. and the nice thing is you can make it as gory as you like, or no gore at all, and it will still have a genuine fear factor.

[Revenant]

If you're going to put all your scare eggs in one basket, fight dirty -- go for phobias. I always vote for spiders. Have lots of webs and several giant, realistic spiders... and a motion sensor so several of them start moving when people get near. That'll git 'em.

[ScreamingScarecrow]

We got a big scare out of a single, heavily detailed room. It was a witch's hut room complete with shelves and fire place and everything! The witch was at her table which was quite close to where the Tot's were - We would draw their attention to her 1st with a microphone voice then visually, a boney hand in a cyrstall ball (infront of her) would move, further drawing their attention in then a small creepy prop on the table would jump and that got most people just fine - BUT just as they were relaxing from their minor fright the person hiding under the witch's table would really get them with a pair of huge latex monster hands coming out from underneath the table! After all the little leadups nobody was expecting the last big scare tactic! Good Luck have Fun!:jol:

[Dark Angel 27]

If you're going to put all your scare eggs in one basket, fight dirty -- go for phobias. I always vote for spiders. Have lots of webs and several giant, realistic spiders... and a motion sensor so several of them start moving when people get near. That'll git 'em.

Just thinking about that scares the hell out of me.

[Haunted Bayou]

A friend of mine used a fog machine. He waited for kids to get candy then shot them with fog....kind of like an air compressor. Worked great.
I think he had it coming out of a large skeleton face that was hanging behind the candy.

[Nephilim]

We had a similar problem in 2004 - we wanted to do one big thing in our garage instead of having a walk-through. The problem is that if you only have one room, you can't just do a pop-out scare and expect to get a lot of mileage out of it, because that's not much time engaging with your visitors.

So, we decided to go with something a little longer form by scripting out a story.

The thing we did with our garage was a black light puppet show that essentially starts with a seance and summons ghosts. The demographics in our neighborhood have really young kids, so ours is a little less on the scare and more on the spooky, but you could adjust for your audience. You can see what we've done over the years at our Carnival of Souls home haunt page (http://homepage.mac.com/nephilim/imagineerieing/) and clicking on the "Madame Sarita's Spirit Parlour" stuff under "Featured Attractions."

It turned out to be a huge hit with the visitors, young and old, and although there was a fair amount of work involved, it wasn't anything you couldn't set up in a garage. Black light puppetry allows you to do all sorts of cool and mystical-looking things, so with a little creativity, you could put on a longer-form show.