2013

In August of 2010, aged 12, I was walking home from school when I passed an empty shop window. I had recently finished building a witch and a set of five groundbreakers, and was mourning the fact that Halloween was drawing near and I still had no way to set up a haunt. The front garden on our house was (and continues to be) small, awkward and packed with colourful flowers - not exactly yard haunt material. I had props, ideas and a whole lot of enthusiasm, but no location. Waiting at an intersection, I looked up at the empty shop window. There was no store attached to it - it was simply an empty space with two walls at the back and two huge glass panels at the front. And a sign taped to the glass "Window for Lease - display purposes only." followed by a phone number. I realized then that this was the perfect space for a haunt. Props could be set up inside, lights could be attached to the ceiling, candy could be handed out to trick-or-treaters outside... Over the next month, I obsessed over the window. I left messages on the owner's answerphone, measured the dimensions of the window, planned the whole thing out in my mind... When the owners finally called me up to let me know that the space was not available, it was only a few short days until Halloween.

I was desperate to find somewhere to set up a haunt. And furious at the shop-owners for taking so long to reply. Then my dad had an idea. My parents used to live next to a lovely lady called Jeanie. She runs a neat little florist/gift shop which is open from Thursday to Saturday every week. She also owns a small building next to it that she uses as a workshop and storeroom. A small building with three huge glass panels on it. We called her immediately and she (very) kindly offered to lend me the window for Halloween free of charge. Dad and I spent the next few days frantically setting up the display. We shifted boxes and tables. We hung black cloth from wires to make a background. We drove to and from our house and the window, the car loaded with groundbreakers and branches and bags of pine needles. On Halloween night, we turned on the string of coloured lightbulbs, turned up the dark ambient music and waited for the trick-or-treaters. I handed out candy, took mountains of photographs and video, and generally had a blast. On the afternoon on November 1st, as we were packing up the display, I was already planning for next year.

2011 was very different for me, mostly because I had an entire year to plan the display. I changed my mind a lot about the theme for the haunt, until in June I finally settled on the black-plague-mass-grave idea. While 2011's haunt admittedly followed the same formula as 2010's (faux forest + magical being + groundbreakers), I could focus on planning and creating a cohesive, themed display and I finally felt like I was building props for a purpose.

2012, however, was a huge step away from what I had done before. The abandoned-ghost-train idea came to me in December and stuck partially because I wanted to avoid changing it at the last minute again, and because it really struck a chord with me. I had always had an intense fascination with ghost trains ever since reading the book 'Come For A Ride On The Ghost Train' when I was 4 years old. It also meant that I could combine 'real' props (the witch and the dead twins) with intentionally tacky ghost-train-props. The build for 2012 was a pretty huge challenge, and I had an enormous amount of help from my dad. The cart was tricky - we built the main structure out of cheap MDF, and I constructed the giant skull from cardboard and paper-mache - it had to be cut in half just to get it out of my bedroom door. Making feet and legs for the twins was a bit of a nightmare, and something I had never done before. The ghost-train track had to be built from scratch. The walls that make up the background were made out of MDF as well. We set them up in my bedroom, where I painted, repainted and weathered them, ready to take apart and re-assemble in the shop window. While 2012's haunt was much more challenging, practically, than the previous year's, I spent an equal amount of time and effort focusing on the details of everything. I spent an insane amount of time obsessing over the spinebones on the twins, the shade of green on the cart, the faux water-damage on the walls, the rust on the tracks... I made little posters to tape up on the window to explain the backstory to trick-or-treaters and passersby. I carefully arranged ivy, tree branches and debris around the display.

Halloween night itself was far busier than the previous year's. A highly-toxic combination of photo-taking, small-talk, excitement and exhaustion was nearly the death of me. At one point I quietly snuck away and sat down for a while for fear of fainting. When the people died away, I took a few pathetic minutes of video footage... and then we tore down the display. Jeanie needed her workshop back in the morning, so we spent the early hours of November 1st packing up the props, taking down the walls, moving boxes back into place... When the sun rose that Thursday morning, the florist next door was open, Jeanie was trimming and arranging flowers in the workshop and there was no sign of any ghost trains, witches or rotting corpse twins. And as the universe would have it, Halloween shifts forward a day every year, meaning that October 31st, 2013 will fall on a Thursday, the florist's workshop on the corner will be in full swing, and there will be no Halloween display. Or the year after that. Or the year after that.

I'm still not sure what the future holds for my haunt. I'm not looking to do another window display. If I end up doing anything this Halloween, it'll probably be something more low-key. I haven't been working on any props, and I don't really have any intention to right now. What I can tell you is that I will be building a few new props for 'The Backs' this year. After three years of solid Halloween obsession, I feel like it's time to take a break. Blog posts will probably be spotty for a while. But who knows, maybe I'll have a change of heart and dive headfirst into fanatical prop-building in a couple of months. After all, I do love Halloween. And I do love sitting in my room and watching horror movies as I assemble ribcages out of newspaper. This is not the end of The House Of Marrow. And this 'break' of mine is not going to last forever. I guess old habits die hard.

I hope you all have a fantastic year.

The Graveyard of Failed Ideas

I recently re-discovered a plan of my haunt I made back in July 2011 - a scanned drawing that was then coloured and shaded in Photoshop. 

It's surprisingly similar to what the haunt ended up looking like, with the exception of a few minor changes.

When I was planning my 2011 haunt - 'The Second Great Plague' - I had a very strange and creepy design in mind for the Nachzehrer groundbreakers (what on earth does that mean? click here). The 'Nachzehrer' were believed to chew through their burial shrouds in an attempt to satisfy their hunger. When the plague hit Europe and the mass graves started filling up, the gravediggers found that they were running out of cloth for the burial shrouds, and they ended up only covering the faces of the dead. When they dug up old graves to fill them with more bodies (which happened a lot), the gravediggers would often come across corpses that had appeared to have chewed through their shrouds, which led them to believe that they were the Nachzehrer. It was later proven that the 'chewed shroud' was caused by the bacteria in the mouths of rotting corpses, which made the cloth around the mouth decay much more rapidly than the rest.

I decided to apply this nice little piece of history to my groundbreakers. I planned to cover the faces of my groundbreakers with torn gauze, leaving a gaping hole where the mouth was. I'd stain the cloth with brown and black paint, giving it a nasty dripping-with-corpse-juices look. It would have looked cool, but most people wouldn't understand what was going on, and I couldn't bear to cover up the faces that I had worked so hard on. I never went through with it.

But that wasn't all. I tore up Kutsuu and used his body and head to build a groundbreaker (his hands were donated to other groundbreakers). He always had an somewhat agonised pose, his arm bent back behind him, his mouth stretched open in pain... but in the end he got off easy. He was originally going to have a brick jammed down his throat - a reference to the 'Vampire of Venice'. It wasn't until the final stages of the build that I changed my mind. It looked quite odd and I figured I'd be forever explaining to people. 

Pictured below is Groundbreaker II, whom I had planned to make the 'fat groundbreaker'. Obesity lends itself well to zombies, I think, and I'd always wanted to make a nasty bloated groundbreaker. But I couldn't get it to look the way I wanted, and so I laid that idea to rest in the graveyard of failed ideas.

But let's face it, he still looks a little chubby.

Fear Has No Face

I went through a few different ideas for my 2011 haunt before finally setlling on one idea. Many of these I may go though with another year, so they shall remain secret. In early 2011 I had the idea that (I believed) I would go ahead with.

I would turn the small shop window into a faux child's bedroom, complete with a window, furniture, shelves... and a terrified child hiding under the covers of his bed. And boogeymen creeping out from under the bed, peering in through the window, crawling from the closet, leaning over the boy.
Truly nightmarish.

And I had a specific look in mind for these boogeymen. Skeletal, with spidery fingers and arms, thin long necks and just a smooth surface where the face should be. Fear has no face...

As weeks passed I realised how difficult it would be to build a realistic looking bedroom. Lying in bed one night, I decided to start afresh with a new theme. Within five minutes, I had 'Black Death + Necromancer' scrawled on a little piece of paper. I had everything - down to the plaguelings and lamp - planned in less than ten minutes. Here's a post I made the next day.

I already had one half-made boogeyman which was intended to be emerging from a box of dress-ups and masks. Harmless plastic faces of monsters with a real monster hiding among them. He was eventually turned into my Necromancer. Here he is in earlier days:

I was swept up in the details of the boogeyman themed display. Things like having 'Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark' placed on the bedside table - implying that the whole thing may be a Stephen-Gammell-inspired nightmare. Shelves of Goosebumps books. And drawings the kid had done pinned up on the walls: vampires, zombies, pirates... and recurring sketches of skeletal figures with long fingers and necks, and no faces. It'd be fun to see things from my youth placed around the bedroom - halloween decorations, books, toys, pictures... 

Could the boogeymen be a product of his horror-fueled 5-year-old imagination? Or had he been visited by them each night for weeks? Months? Perhaps tonight was the last time the boogeymen visited him... and the last night he was seen before his mysterious disappearance...

Motion Picture

I've finally finished off my haunt video. I upped the production quality this year: used a decent video camera and new video editing software. I'm really happy with how it turned out.

Marrow House 2011 - The Second Great Plague

Hundreds of corpses lay only a few feet under the ground. They were piled on top of each other, encased in decayed cloth and dirt. Row after row after row of dessicated corpses, piled up like matches in a matchbox. Among the many rotting bodies, there was movement. The ‘Nachzehrer’ - vampires of German legend. They lay nestled between the dead slowly chewing on their burial shrouds in an attempt to satisfy their unearthly hunger. Tiny shreds of bloody cloth stuck between their cracked teeth, their throats clogged with earth.  Their gaunt fingers twitched occasionally. Some of them, finding that they had ingested their entire burial cloth, slowly began to chew on their maggot-ridden lips and tongue, swallowing their own teeth and flesh out of nothing but hungry desperation.

Above ground, there was movement too. A man, centuries old, had seen the undead life as an opportunity. He was a man of evil and malice, the decades of wandering barren fields and dark swamps had twisted his mind into something dark and rotten. He was a Necromancer. His desire for destruction and domination had led him to a hidden mass grave – a grim reminder of the insidious plague that was sweeping Europe. He was not alone, over the years he had gathered a small clan of dedicated minions – mostly large, plague-ridden rats.  He had dressed them in tattered cloaks and beaked masks as a cruel parody of the ‘Plague Doctors’. They crouched around him, shrouded in shadows. A few of these strange creatures held flickering lanterns in their quivering hands, throwing shifting light over the forest floor. They were about to bear witness to the birth of a new plague. A plague more vile and virulent than the last. A plague capable of wiping the living right off the earth like dust on a windowsill.

The Necromancer’s plan was perfect. All was in place and the ritual was ready to begin...