Thread: Samara from "The Ring" / Head Popper

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I love the movie "the Ring" & the image of Samara crawling out of that Well I've always though was memorable & perfect for my yard haunt. I loosely followed Lother's Lair's version but did a lot of tweaking & upgrading along the way.

Well, this took 3 years to finally get right & completed. I ran into a lot of issues like binding of the crank arms, not enough or too much lift, etc... I'm proud to show the *almost* finished product (still need a white night gown which is actually quite hard to find).



Here's some video of the mechanics in action.

Halloween 2011 :: 10-24-11001.mp4 video by ND4SPD27 - Photobucket

Started off chopping down a trashcan & making styrofoam bricks gluing them on Locktite Powergrab construction adhesive. I then filled the gaps with DAP expandable foam to look like moarter between the bricks. It also helped to fill behind the bricks where the round trash can doesn't meet the outer edges of the bricks.



I built a basic tombstone head popper & thought that design would work good for this prop too. I was never really satisfied & tried to follow other's designs for isolating the side to side movement into up & down movements. Still I was not happy & was having issues with the crank arm & rod arm binding up. Now I'm this is the 3rd revision of the mechanics which I decided to use a $7 center mount kitchen drawer slider (16 or 18 long, I don't remember which). I used a vent motor & a 3" crank arm (gives 6" of total upward movement). Then an 8" rod arm which connects to pre-exhisting holes in the slider. I had to get a little more creative with how I mounted it all together for two reasons. #1). I didn't want to make another trip to Lowes so I used hardware I already had then #2). I was working with the base which I'd built to work with a little differently mounted set-up. Ultimately I'd build this in a much simpler fashion knowing what I've learned now.



Here's a video of it in action.


*** SEE PAGE 2 FOR THE REST OF THE HOW-TO ****

Awesome I have been thinking of a prop like this for years, I need to tackle this head on soon, one of my favorite characters in recent memory

very nicely done!

Nice job! What did you use to move the head?

Nice you need to do a how to of your own.

wow I wanted to make this same idea for a few years now. awesome job.

Looks great . The slow movement works well.

I have a ton more pics & can easily do a how to but I can't figure out why my pics aren't posting correctly on these forums. I'll play with it more tonight & see if I can't figure it out. I'll also gomover how I made the head popper portion.

Looks excellent!

Love it! I love how slow she creeps up! Awesome!!