It's Haunting Time Again!

The summer is here and it's time again to start getting ready for the Fright Town haunted house. Saturday we did a corpse making workshop to get started. Tom Johnson from Fright FX had us

all over to create corpses for the house. You start with a medical grade skeleton, which by the way is pretty damn heavy. After reinforcing the bits that want to fall off you hang it up and start covering it with spray adhesive, saran wrap, and latex. You would think it would be easy, but we spent at least five hours working on these things, and they still need more latex, paint, batting, hair, etc. The drying time is pretty long because the latex has the consistency of mayonaise and takes forever, especially if you've put it on thick which you kind of have to do to get the right texture.

The trickiest part was learning that you need to put the plastic on in multiple layers, before adding the latex. You would think that's just logical, but we didn't realize how much saran and adhesive you have to use to get the correct shape. It's not as easy as it sounds, being as the saran is sticky, and you are sticky with all the spraying and stuff. We used a ton of latex as well, so you end up sticky and smelling like a rubber band. It's cool though.

Sunday we went over to Glowing Greens, a black light indoor putt putt place that will be opening soon downtown over by Pioneer Courthouse Square. Raymond the owner formerly of 13th Door Haunted House is making the coolest place in Portland that's open to kids and adults. The course is full of 3D props, and will also include some animatronic characters. The most awesome part of the whole thing it that everything is set up to be viewed by black light. We went over to help paint, and construct some of the set pieces. I helped paint a shack by the graveyard. Painting for black light is interesting because you pretty much are painting in the dark under black light. Once you apply the paint it pops out at you. The color of the paint under normal light is completely different under the black light. It's a bit of a challenge but the results are awesome. I'm going back next week to help do some more painting. They have a good crew but a lot of work ahead of them. Their website is http://www.glowinggreens.com/ if you want to see what they're doing. This will be the perfect place to have those hard tween birthday parties. You'll be able to rent the entire course, and have pizza with your golf.

Back to the haunted house, once we get done with these corpses we have a bunch of other props to build, and we also have to figure out the rooms, and the makeup/costumes and props we need for each one. I think this year is going to kick butt. I'm not going to give away any secrets, otherwise I will be drawn and quartered, but we're working on some interesting ideas right now, and these guys really know what they're doing. Tom's one of the original crew from Scream at the Beach, our evil nemisis. Last year we gave them a run for their money, and these year we're bringing in secret weapons. If you can't tell, haunting is a little competitive.

Here's what the end results will potentially look like on the bodies. The finished texture is really gross and sticky. It looks like dried human skin. Yummm.