Haunted House Costumes

Planning a Haunted House

Haunted houses are a lot of fun, whether you're designing one in your garage or a huge one in a warehouse or for a church or shopping center. The bigger the haunted house you're working on, the more planning you will need and the more haunted house costumes as well.

The whole point of a haunted house is to scare people, so make a list of all the different scary characters you can think of, such as:

• Ghosts
• Vampires
• Zombies
• Characters from horror movies
• Mummies
• Witches
• Monsters
• Grim reaper
• Headless horseman
• Skeletons
• Accident victims or people who look like they've been experimented on

Once you've decided what characters you want, it's time to divide up your space into different scenes or scary situations. Even in a small space you can use room dividers or hang sheets to make separate "rooms" or make a path that involves turning corners to get away from one ghoul before encountering the next.

Shopping for Haunted House Costumes

After you have a good idea of what the haunted house is going to look like and who is going to participate, it's time to go shopping. You can buy haunted house costumes anywhere you can buy other Halloween costumes, but here are a few online shops to check out:

• Nightmare Factory
• The Horror Dome
• Gore Galore
• Halloween Town
• Costumezee

Depending on your budget, you can use some of the professional resources for haunted houses, or just look at these sites for ideas and then go to your local costume shop, rental store or favorite online shop to get a better deal. Or take the basic idea and make a costume yourself.

Haunted House Props

Of course costumes are not the only thing that makes a haunted house scary. You've got to have mood music, decorations and props that make sense with your theme and add to the scare factor.

Here are some ideas for additions to your haunted house:

• Put a tombstone (or a graveyard) in front, complete with a fresh mound of dirt and a shovel. Have fake body parts coming out of the dirt if you like.
• Use dry ice to make a potion coming out of your witch's cauldron, or just trailing along the floor to give the impression of fog.
• Try black light or very dim lighting to create a scary mood. Give kids glow sticks or tiny flashlights to use when they go in so they won't trip over anything and cause liability issues for you.
• Use sound effects such as a whirring chainsaw and people screaming in the background instead of or in addition to music to set the mood.
• Think about the props that make sense for the particular scary creatures in your haunted house. Remember, for instance, that Michael Myers prefers a knife to a gun, and your Grim reaper needs a scythe to pull of his performance.
• Set the mood in each "room" of your haunted house with scenery and other props. While people aren't likely to be paying much attention to the surroundings, if you can paint the "walls" to look like an operating room and have jars of "organs" on a shelf, it will add to the horror aspect.
• Spread your actors out so there is a person in every room or section of the haunted house. This will keep people moving through as well as keeping things scary.

Planning and executing a haunted house is a lot of fun, and the right costumes for your characters can take the event from fun to scary and spooky in no time.