Truly Scary Halloween Props for Fans of the Macabre

There is a delicate balance to maintain being scary on Halloween. Your scary Halloween props need to be imaginative, of course. Anything too predictable, and it's going to be ho-hum and not scary. Try something too imaginative an elaborate though, and people are going to be wondering more about how you could afford to spend all this time on it than about getting scared. So let's go with a few DIY scary Halloween props that take the middle ground and scare to the best effect.

For instance, how about a crazy clock? You remember that from your visit to the hilarious haunted mansion in Disney World, don't you? The clock is a 13-hour one – you know, to make you feel like you're in the twilight zone or something. It's a very effective prop. What happens in the 13th hour? You're forced to wonder when you look at it. Building such a clock can be completely simple. All you need to do is to go buy a cheap $5 clock at some dollar store, gently open it up, and insert a 13-hour clock face in there that you've made out of paper yourself. There is your fully functional 13 hour clock right there.

Know what can make for a deeply disturbing effect on Halloween? A bloodbath, of course. The expression may have its origins in the terrible ways in which people fought wars in the past. Today though, Bloodbath is an expression that people use all the time. Give them a literal bloodbath as one of your scary Halloween props, and you'll get them thinking. You need a few store-bought props for this. You need a couple of plastic skulls that you get for $5 each, a birdbath, and red food dye. You also need a little fish tank pump that you get for five dollars. Once you have all this, it's pretty much cut and dried. You just fill the birdbath with red-colored water, put the little pump in there, stack your skulls on top and have the pump wash red water all over the skulls. Dear Lordy!

Mostly, scary Halloween props tend not to be really scary at all. They are more interesting than scary. But sometimes, people just want to really go with the truly macabre. For instance, they want a real-looking bloody corpse. This kind of thing happens to be popular with the death metal music crowd. It's rather easy to make this if you'll spend the $50 or so it takes to buy a skeleton. The effect you are looking for with this project is something that looks like an almost fully eaten corpse – a skeleton with bits of flesh all over. Once you have your store-bought skeleton, you need a can of expanding foam to coat over it. A thin layer of uneven foam on all the bones can bring a flesh-like effect. Once it's nice and dry, you need to coat it with latex for a nice hard dried-blood effect. All you need to do is to paint it red and black now, and you have a truly macabre effect.