Halloween was always a big holiday in my home growing up.  My father and his buddies were essentially “home haunters” before the term “home haunt” came to be.  My dad was an electrical engineer.  We had a 5 foot Jacob’s Ladder that he had constructed.  Growing up I totally took it for granted.  I liked it and always thought it was really cool, but because I saw it all of the time, I didn’t think much of it.  Knowing what I do now, that thing was REALLY cool!!  All of his friends were quite gifted in all that they did.  Making sets, props, etc.  I learned early on that the hardware store was all you needed to make great stuff.  You couldn’t go to a store and buy props and forget about the idea of having a computer connected to other computers and being able to order things.

Flashforward a few years… thanks to my computer connected to other computers (the internets) I learned about Home Haunters.  There are other people all over the country who grew up doing this stuff with their dads and who are still doing this now.  People like me!  Awesome.

Some of them have taken it a step further and have been nice enough to share their tips and techniques on YouTube.  It may be a little late in the game now to get started on some of these (there is always next year, right?).

 Plastic Corpsing
“Corpsing” is basically taking materials such as latex, plastic, paint, pantyhose, wood stain, and other stuff and putting it onto a form (usually a skeleton) to make it into a corpse…or rotten or whatever.   Most techniques aren’t necessarily hard, but they do take time since you have to let the latex and paint dry.. especially the latex.  Allen Hopps shows a quick way to corpse a cheap, plastic skeleton.

I feel like I should also encourage you to view the other Stiltbeast Studio tutorials.  Even if you do not plan on building anything, they are quite funny.

Pumpkin Corpsing
This is the more traditional corpsing technique.  Reason I have it here is because it isn’t showing you how to corpse a plastic skeleton or animal.  It shows the technique on the foam craft pumpkins.  It doesn’t really make the pumpkins look rotten and old.  It gives them a very sinister look.  It is the look of the jack-o-lanterns you see in movies and on tv.  Awesome.

This tutorial is from Chris Baker at HauntCast.  HauntCast is an incredible podcast that comes out once a month that is dedicated to the home haunter.  How incredible?  Let me put it to you like this… Chris was feeling a financial pinch from putting his show together and decided to start charging $1 a show.  Without question, I threw in $12 for a year subscription.  I have NEVER paid for a podcast directly before (indirectly through buying through advertisers) and this show was so great, I was willing to shell out the money for it.  The good thing is that he changed his model and went back to having it freely available to all (smarter move if you ask me as I think it would be harder to grow an audience the other way).  Visit hauntcast.net for the site and it is available in iTunes.

As the holiday nears, I’ll probably post a few more tutorials on here.  Fun stuff.