The Munster's cars

Until I came across these photos, I'd forgotten all about the Munster's cars.The dragster (named "Drag-u-la" and built from a coffin for the episode "Hot Rod Herman") was used by Grandpa Munster to win back "The Munster Koach" after Herman lost it in a race. Today, "Drag-u-la" hangs from the ceiling of a Planet Hollywood in Atlanta. Both of these vehicles were created by George Barris, the king of custom cars. He's the person who built the Batmobile for the 1960's TV series.

Click here to see these two cars in action.

Skull face tattoo

What the hell was this guy thinking? Click here to learn more about this lunatic.

Magic trick

Here is a very clever Halloween-themed online magic trick. Click on the link and a ghost will perform it for you right through your computer screen.

Dumb idea of the week

AnimalHead.com produces over 100 different types of animal heads for their line of wall-mountable
"faux taxidermy". They also do special orders, like the hats seen here that were created for an “ecological performing group”.

It's hard to look cool wearing one of these. The only thing that they're good for is embarassing your teenage daughter in front of her friends.

Animatronic singing skeletons

I wish I was able to bring animatronic figures to life the way that this person has. His quartet of singing skeletons blew me away. Click here to see them singing "Halloween Spooks" by Lambert, Hendricks & Ross.

(Click here to learn see some more amazing animatronics by this yard haunter.)

Inflatable decorations

I'll be the first to admit that I've never had much respect for inflatable Halloween decorations. I'd rather see a few well-carved pumpkins than a 6-foot-tall Scooby-Doo dressed as a witch. Creatable Inflatables has made me change my tune though. Their figures are much more impressive than anything you'll find at Party City. They carry 15 and 25-foot-tall witches, and a Frankenstein that measures a whopping 35 feet tall!

I'm sure that these inflatables are way too expensive for most residential decorators, but business owners may want to consider renting a 20-foot-tall grim reaper for the Halloween season. I'd certainly be more likely to patronize a business with one of these out front.

Light for those who prefer the dark

If lavender and lilac scented candles are too bourgeois for your taste, you may want to give "Dark Candles" a try. They provide gothic and horror themed candles to people "who have a penchant for the macabre and the darker side of life." You wont find any cinnamon scented votives here. Their unusual scents include:

Coffin ("It’s a dead ringer! A bit of old rotting wood with a bit of earth underscored with a masculine lavender to give it some 'body'.")

Corpse ("A dark and full base pierced with a stinging balmy mint scent, pleasantly reminiscent of a cold embalmed corpse.")

Graveyard ("An old forlorn, crumbling cemetery with strong tones of wet earth blended with a hint of Frankincense and a touch of myrrh.")

Haunted House ("A spellbinding blend of haunting forest woods, spooky spices and the witch’s little dark secret. A dark sensual fragrance with a musky quality.")

You can check out all of their scary scents here.

Awesome costume

Here's another great costume... This one, created by D. Strand of North Dakota, won 1st place in the "Adult Costume" category of 2005's "Picture Perfect Halloween Contest".

How to make zombie clothes

If you've got some old clothes, a patch of dirt and don't mind waiting three months you too can make amazingly realistic zombie clothing. My friends over at Skull & Bone will show you how.
(I followed their method and achieved great results in less that three months, so don't be discouraged if you can't invest that much time in your zombified clothing. It'll still look great!)

Rubik's Cube costume

Rubik's Cubes must be making a comeback. At Christmas all the toy stores carried a new "Anniversary Edition", the film "The Pursuit Of Happyness" added one to it's storyline, and now I've stumbled across this guy's instructions for making a Rubik's costume. Next thing you know, some television reality show will pit Rubik's Cube solving celebs against each other. (Hmmm. That's actually not a bad idea...)

The world's cutest Humpty-Dumpty

I'm not usually one of those people who go all moon-eyed over pictures of adorable babies or kittens playing with yarn, but even I have to admit that this is the cutest little Humpty-Dumpty I've ever seen. Apparently, others agree with me because this shot won 1st place for "Cutest Baby Costume" in the Picture Perfect Halloween Photo Contest.

Prop idea of the day

In keeping with today's lighting theme, check out GrimVisions' skeleton lights. I love these things. Very creative. I'm sure they look amazing hanging on the front of his house.

UPDATE:
According to Krough at GrimVisions, the "skin" on the ribcages of these skeletons was made by coating waxpaper with "Sculpt Or Coat" (by Sculptural Arts Coatings)

Click here to see a picture of these lights at night.

Steal this idea

Check out this facade! I'd love to see someone turn the front of their house into a giant demon face. This is a photo of "L'Enfer" ("Hell") a Parisian nightclub, circa 1900. (This historic entrance was recreated by the makers of the film "The Moulin Rouge". They used it as a supposed gateway into the Montmartre section of Paris.)

Ghost lamp

Now this is more like it! Reasonably priced and oh so cute, the "Saddest Ghost Lamp" by Marcel Dzama would be perfect for any Halloween-loving child's room.

Another expensive light

Though not quite as expensive as the bronze skull lamp I wrote about yesterday, this lighting fixture still carries a hefty price tag - $1530. From the company's website: "The bat & serpent design originates with Celtic mythology and symbolizes the triumph of science and modern medicine over witchcraft. Inspired by an Art Nouveau and Victorian fondness for artistic design, our 'Sunset' is hand cast using the 'lost-wax' technique to capture all the stunning detail of a circa 1892 period original - and we do mean original."

Magic mirror prop

This is definitely one of the most original props out there. It's a magic mirror (a la the one in "Snow White") that can actually interact with your trick-or-treaters. And the best part? You can download the necessary application for free from the ImaginEERIEing website. (The website also includes full instructions for building the prop's facade.)

Monster maker

George Higham is many things - a writer, sculptor, photographer, and filmmaker. If you ask him what he does though, he'll boil everything down to the very succinct phrase, "I make monsters."
Ranging in size from one inch to over seven feet tall, his monsters can be seen in many places, including on a deck of tarot cards, in a book of fiction and atop Joe Coleman's wedding cake. Check out some more of these magnificent monsters here.

Bronze skull lamp

I saw this lamp in a design magazine and thought it looked great. Then I found out how much it cost... $2200!!
Can you believe that? For a lamp! I mean, I would pay that much for an bronze skull cheese grater, but a lamp? That's ridiculous. (Click here to learn more about the artists behind this lamp.)

Picture of the day

This fantastic photo was taken by Dan Plumpton for the fine folks over at Haunted Overload.

Fake newspaper clippings generator

Is your yard haunt plagued by an escaped mental patient? Is a chainsaw-wielding maniac loose in your neighborhood? Let your visitors know the entire gruesome backstory by creating an ultra-realistic (yet fake) newspaper headline here.

What a witch!

That's right. I'm the lunatic with the giant witch on his roof. As promised, here are all the gorey details... I discovered the witch in Media, PA. She was created as an advertising piece for the local theatre company's production of "The Wizard Of Oz". They told me I could have her for $100 as long as I "got her off of the marquee before Saturday." Otherwise, she was headed for the dumpster. With the help of some strong friends and a 20 foot UHaul I was able to get her back to NJ. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to take her lower half (which was approx. 20 feet tall!), but the torso is more than big enough for me. I like to say that we used to have a two car garage, but now we have a one witch, one car garage. The torso is approx. 12 feet tall with an 11 foot armspan. She weighs about 300 pounds, so each year I have to hire a crane to lift her into place. She is tethered to the house at four points. In the yard, I poured two steel-reinforced concrete columns (hidden in the bushes) so I could attach her to the ground with a pair of aircraft cables. I've watched her during 50 mile an hour winds and she doesn't move an inch!

Living in a haunted house

Painted jet black and decorated in a campy gothic horror-style,
"Surreal Estate" is an installation by artists Rob Pruitt and Jonathan Horowitz.

(The following article, originally published in Budget Living Magazine, was written by Laura J. Vogel. Click here for additional photos from this display.)

Picture yourself on a dark night ambling along an empty road in Fleischmanns, New York, a town haunted by the ghosts of bygone Borscht Belt glory. As you pass Peacock Hill -- a strikingly ghoulish three-story black Gothic mansion -- shrieks of terror ring out. Once your heart starts beating again, you run to the victim's aid. Rushing past the funereal peacocks that stand guard on the sloping lawn, you throw open the front door in alarm to find the owners lying in a pool of red -- is it blood? or carpet? -- when you hear more cries.

"Good God," a voice in the living room calls out, "now that's scary!" And there the real horror is unspooling:

A hapless houseguest watches the TV as a video spews images of the sprawling 1895 Victorian before it fell under the delightfully dark spell of New York artists Rob Pruitt and Jonathan Horowitz. The exterior was clad in rust-stained, peach-colored asbestos siding. Polyester sheers covered the windows. Awful wall-to-wall carpeted the floors. A porch sign bore the sickly sweet name rosebud cottage. The rooms were so cluttered with mismatched bric-a-brac that mustiness seems to seep out from the screen. Luckily, both Pruitt and Horowitz delight in fright, so they love the pre-renovation video: What better way to show the scope of their macabre makeover?

The couple wanted a house that would stop people dead. If the graveyard behind the house -- with nine cheeky plywood headstones and counting -- is any indication, Peacock Hill, a riff on Martha Stewart's Turkey Hill estate, is some success. Out of dark humor and daring decorating choices, the artists forged a living, live-in piece of art. Or rather, as Pruitt puts it, "a melding of art and home design." Truth is, neither of them goes in for interior decorating per se. "We're much more excited by facade, theater set, and cinematic skin-deep fakery rather than typically tasteful decor," Pruitt adds.

In Peacock Hill, they've made a set worthy of a Vincent Price movie, and they've done it for a relative pittance -- restoring and remaking the entire eight-gabled mansion (which cost a modest $143,000) and furnishing its 20 rooms all for less than $30,000. But a funny thing happened on the way to the haunted house. Brimming with visual jokes and affordable artistic tricks and treats, the couple's little shop of horrors became a home so surprisingly habitable, so chock-full of doable decorating ideas, it's frightening.

You wouldn't know it from looking at the ramshackle property on the video, but Pruitt and Horowitz were picky house hunters, checking out more than 100 homes before settling on their diamond in the rough. They bought it "not just because we're cheapskates," Pruitt says. "We both have a real affection for things that are broken. You develop an almost human relationship to a thing when you nurse it back to health." Luckily, under the vile veneer was architecture with terrific bones -- a beautiful hardwood staircase that had never been painted, a roof in great shape -- which allowed the couple to eschew structural alterations and do the work themselves.

Their first task was ripping up carpet and carting away the chintz. Then, rather than adding costly ornamental detailing, they used paint to create mock moldings and trompe l'oeil floors. It took them more than a year, but Pruitt and Horowitz finally produced a home that highlighted their respective talents -- paint and conceptual art. In May they unveiled it in a show titled Surreal Estate at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, a Manhattan gallery, which sent busloads of arty downtown types upstate to see the house.

Every visitor is immediately struck by Peacock Hill's exquisite noir exterior. The structure's classic Gothic lines and its owners' desire to treat it as a piece of art -- sculptor Louise Bourgeois was a particular influence -- inspired the all-black paint job, which in turn gave rise to the whole bewitching concept. "Once we established our pop interpretation of Gothic, it was really easy to furnish it," Horowitz says. "It's a good idea to pick a style that's not in vogue. We chose Victorian as our main theme: Nobody wants that stuff now."

Of course, Victoriana is no one style, and that suits the pair just fine. "We wanted the house to have a period feel but didn't want something frozen in time," Pruitt says. "We took pieces from each era, from when the house was built to today…1800s to Ikea." Interspersed throughout the house are Victorian prints, 1930s crystal chandeliers, '60s stained-glass ice-cream-parlor lamps, and contemporary art by painter friends like Elizabeth Peyton.

More than anything, though, the home reflects "the Victorian notion of the world traveler, the amateur scientist-collector who had a cabinet of wonder," Pruitt adds. "Every time we travel, even to North Dakota, we bring things back. This house really has the narrative of our lives." If so, it's a low-budget story. They combed Roberts', a dirt-cheap local auction house; they bartered (swapping a modern sofa for the pleather numbers in the living room) and bid like demons on eBay (landing the bold deck furniture fabric and a load of Charles Addams books and plates, among other steals). "We didn't have a lot of money at our disposal," Horowitz notes. "We had a rule not to spend more than $500 on any piece of furniture, and we really didn't come close to that."

They say the devil is in the details, which explains why every corner of Peacock Hill holds another witty touch of evil. The pool of "blood" spilling off the stairs? It's a 100-foot-long runner linking each hallway and staircase from the attic on down -- even getting it custom-cut and edged on-site, it cost $1,400. Referencing Victorian portrait galleries, Pruitt and Horowitz transformed the butler's pantry into a DJ nook adorned with album covers framed within stick-on borders. The covers slide in and out of 25-cent mirror clips "so you can be a visual as well as an audio DJ," Horowitz says. An array of '70s perfume "gun" decanters ($5 to $10 at tag sales) is fanned out atop a red Chinese table, and plastic cleavers from a post-Halloween sale at Wal-Mart hang in the kitchen.

Looming over the entry hall is a rhinoceros head. Do our artists hunt? Yeah, at flea markets, like the one in Brimfield, Massachusetts, where they found the fiberglass rhino. In fact, the ardent vegetarians continued the faux taxidermy throughout the house with trippy animal rugs, plastic mice ($2.50 for three), a polar bear head planter, and plaster owls and other birds of prey. Then, of course, there's the owners own work. Pruitt's acclaimed panda paintings adorn the entry hall and accent the animal rights theme, while every bedroom has Horowitz's pillowcases, silk-screened with the names of historically horrific pairings, like jekyll and hyde, morticia and gomez.

As creepy and kooky as it is -- the taxidermy, the blood, the weapons, the death -- it's all purely ironic. You couldn't ask for more gentle and easygoing neighbors than Pruitt and Horowitz. Almost daily, they welcome some curious soul who knocks and sheepishly asks to look around. In costume or not, each visitor comes away with plenty of eye candy at Peacock Hill. What else would you expect at a house where every day is Halloween?

Optical Illusion

"L'Amour de Pierrot" was created by an anonymous artist and appeared on French postcards in 1905.

More paper-mache madness

For my money, one of the finest prop builders around has to be Krough at GrimVisions. What he does with paper-mache is amazing! Check out the three trees that he has created for his yard haunt. You can see a tortured, writhing soul in the trunk of each one. Click here for complete instructions on how to build one of these props for your own display.

Haunted Lenticulars

I love lenticulars! My house is filled with them - vintage lenticulars, advertising lenticulars, light-up lenticulars, custom lenticulars, etc. That's why I was particularly thrilled to receive a haunted lenticular for Christmas. The one I got (shown on the left) is by the folks at The Ghoulish Gallery. They are one of at least 5 companies that have started producing these types of images in recent years. While I don't know anything about the quality of these other companies products, I can tell you that the lenticular I received looks wonderful. The image is crystal clear. I couldn't be happier.

You can check out more of The Ghoulish Gallery's products at --> http://www.theghoulishgallery.com

And if you've have any firsthand experience with other haunted lenticular companies, please let me know what you thought.