Setting the Scene: Decorations for 5 Haunted Halloween Scenarios

The following are some of the suggestions we give anyone setting up a Halloween Party or Haunted House. Props we can provide are linked. All Halloween props are available for sale or rental. Email BJ at BJ@Dapppercadaver.com for a quote or more Haunt scenarios and suggestions. Note the importance of actors, timing, drama, and atmosphere as well as props and effects. Be sure to add eerie lighting and sounds!

Scene 1: The Dinning Room:
A long table is set with piles of bloody body parts and partial human corpses. Gothic tabletop candelabras sit on the table and 5 foot tall floor candelabras are around the sides. On the walls are hung changing portraits, grotesque taxidermy and bloody curtains. A vulture perches on one chair, a decomposed skeleton in another. Platters are covered in small bits, eyes, fingers, tongues. Other plates are piled with intestines, hearts and livers. Two actors sit at the table in costume feasting on edible brains, hands, hearts, and faces, instead of silverware they use dissection instruments. Another actor or animatronic is on the table moving and screaming.

Scene 2: Butcher shop
The butcher is an actor in a long white butchers coat with a black butchers apron over top. His apron is strung with a variety of wicked looking steel autopsy instruments. In his hands he has a real chainsaw which still works, but the chain has been removed so it cannot cut. Hanging in chains from the ceiling are several hooks, skinned animals, a half pig, a skinned goat, a half person, a skinned person, a full corpse, and several human limbs. The walls are hung with blood splattered plastic curtains. On a chopping block is a meat grinder with a human hand sticking out the top and ground beef coming out the front. He menaces the crowd as actors behind the plastic curtains reach bloody hands out through slits and beg for help. A row of axes hangs on the wall. Animated heads rotate in torture boxes.


Scene 3: Old Hospital/ Asylum
A Mad Doctor experimenting on patients. The doctor is an actor in a long white lab coat. He holds a steel pistol syringe with a retractable fake needle and has a reflector on his head. Another actor is bound in chains and cuffs to a vintage insane asylum bed. An equally vintage autopsy pump sits beside the patient. Shelves around the scene hold several specimen jars which glow under blacklight. Also on the shelves are plasma balls flickering with lightning effects, human skulls, and the mounted skeletons and mummies of strange creatures. A full size 2 headed skeleton stands beside them. An IV bag filled with blacklight responsive fluid hangs from an IV stand. An large x ray light box covered in x rays glows in the background.

Scene 4: Tribal Headhunters
Scene is a jungle with hut. Head hunter is an actor with a headdress made of lightweight skulls and feathers. His necklace is a variety of small skulls and bones. He holds a large plastic machete and a spiked club. Shrunken heads, severed heads, chickens and skulls hang everywhere. Heads on stakes dot the background. Bright Indonesian devils sit on pedestals. In the foreground a charred body rotates on a spit.

Scene 5: Graveyard
Scene is a graveyard, a few dozen tombstones rise from the ground, amid them a large angel, and 3 large obelisks stand. On the ground is an old wooden coffin, and a pile of dirt and a shovel. In the dirt several bones and body parts can be seen sticking out. A grave digger stands, with a steel bonesaw in his hands. His belt is strung with human hands, rotted hands, and skeletal hands all wearing gawdy jewelry. He opens the casket and inside is the mummy-like corpse of an old woman, decked out in pearls, gold and rings. This would be a good scene to work in an animatronic coffin popper. Grave digger can also interact with the crowd by trying to sell rings with the fingers still inside. Crows and vultures perch on the stones and in the trees. Rats are on the ground. Low lying fog creeps over everything. Moss hangs from everything.