Thread: Scary or Friendly

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This is the every year argument with my family on my side is me, I like spooky not scary almost funny like Disney Haunted Mansion or Mad Monster Party look. on the other side is my son and wife who want it to be a bloody chainsaw weilding body part splattered mess. and all the props to be the stuff of nightmares.

Now my stuff still scares kids to come to the door so I've been sticking to the creepy and spooky but not nightmare level.

What do you guys think? Should displays be rated G with some chills or rated R with some blood spills?

I think it all depends on who is doing it. On the other hand, we do a lot of scares, some gore (depending on the theme of that year) BUT we do not scare the very little ones and they tend not to notice the gore as much anyways. We have a pneumatic jumping spider and a trash can trauma that can scare them and they are on a wireless remote so I can pick who gets it.

I am somewhere in the middle, I like creepy over gory thought some of my corpsed skeletons and zombies are kinda nasty looking. I don't do much in the way of splatter stuff.

Yep....it depends. I'd hate to think I caused some small children to hate Halloween for the rest of their lives because I traumatized them. Now if I traumatize teenagers and adults...then I've been successful! Chose your battle depending on your audience!

I want my niece and nephew to come to my door and not be frightened. I don't get too scary.

I always find it hilarious how whenever a thread like this comes up everyone says they prefer scary and not gory, yet there's dozens of threads for fake blood, rotting corpses, body parts, crows eating eyeballs, etc.

I like gory, but creepy gory, not "I think someone just blew up a cow in the front yard" gory. Try to compromise, maybe? Get a list of ideas from them and see which ones might fit "creepy" and not "I'm gonna throw up!"

Gory is not what scares so much as creepy scary realistic props that could always be possible to occur in real life. Mixing scary with funny or child appealing props can sometimes tone down the scary for kids. A lot of times the kid will only look at the fun and not notice the scary. Gory should be limited but not necessarily eleminated. Unless it is Adults only. Too much gore and the kids will not come to or be allowed at the house anyway.

Like they say Xane, beauty is in the eye of the beholder! My sister and her daughter gross out at same stuff most kids would run up to and say, "COOL!!!".

I say decorate to your liking because YOU are the artist. Yes, be considerate to your audience but again, it's the art that should move you.

I don't do gory or bloody scares in my yard haunt. It is spooky and creepy, and the scariest things would probably be the giant skully we hang over our garage peak and the skeletons used in the yard. We have a few battery-op motion activated props (a spooky ghost that moves and lights up - but is hung at a height that the little ones won't activate it) and a skeleton grave grabber, but we keep it PG and even come down to the bottom of the driveway if there are some really little TOTs too scared to come up to get their candy.

I don't want to scare a kid so bad that they have nightmares... and end up hating Halloween.

I don't mind gore or bloody stuff, I just don't put that stuff out for general TOT time. The gross and odd and gory stuff is inside for the party...

(oh, and the excessively gory stuff doesn't do it for me. I like the idea of a pop of gross or scary or a scene setup where they have to think about what happened there...and let the person's imagination fill in the rest, so we don't have excessively gory stuff inside either - more like implied gory scary stuff; that's my style - but I'd never tell someone else how to decorate! That is dependent on THEIR style! )

I've never been fond of super gory stuff. You can certainly be scary without chainsaws. (Chainsaws are so overdone, anyway.) I definitely prefer the subtle spookiness over general shock value. Great atmosphere is what does it for me, not just random bloody characters jumping out at you.

I have to say that the one thing I hate, hate, HATE in any haunt is spiders. But that's my own personal phobia. So I don't do any spiders myself.

So I guess my choice would be more leaning towards the "friendly" side, if you want to call it that. I mean, the subtle stuff isn't ALWAYS kid-friendly, but it's certainly not OMG-IN-YOUR-FACE.