Thread: Good props for a small haunt at a college

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I've been a member of the boards for little while now and love to check out all of the threads on here about prop building. Anyway, I did a haunted house/trail at the university that I work at last year and am looking for good ideas to expand it or even a good theme/room ideas. Our budget was about $2500 last year, and the nice thing is that I have a lot of props/masks and decorations from last year that can be re-used this year. So I'd love to get some ideas from you guys as to what I could do on a similar budget this year. Any and all ideas are welcome, and I have enough experience in prop making to do some larger scale builds if possible. Thanks so much!

Well with your budget you should be able to do fairly well. I really think maybe trying your hand at the pneumatic zombie prop, that thing is great. Do you already have a theme? Being in a haunted trail or woods, maybe you could do like a creepy swamp setting with an old shack with a witch in it. Kind of like the pumpkin head movie. You could have a graveyard around the witch's hut, you could have a swamp monster or a crazy back woods chain saw weilding maniac or some such thing. Maybe a large dropping spider.

We do not currently have a theme for the haunt, last year we just winged it, this year we'd like to have it more 'themed'. We did have a shack and graveyard last year, accompanied at the end with the infamous chainsaw wielder. I do however like the swamp idea, do you have a forum link to the pneumatic zombie prop? Is it similar to the TCT? I actually started working on a TCT prop last year but ended up scrapping it for an electric chair I was building, time just ran out and the TCT is sitting in the basement of my building.

Our main event is a room full of hanging sheets and strobes, we put a guy in there with a leaf blower so you had to push through the sheets. This year I am planning a funnel made of metal fencing, leading into a room. The scare will come from an actor running towards them scrapeing a wood pole along the metal and scaring them from behind. You could try several shacks along the path.

Hmmm I like that idea as well, we might be able to do the tunnel effect, I've been to a few local haunts that have similar tunnels that have the actors on the outside rustling the bars.

For prop building a great place of reference is Monster Page of Halloween Project Links

Good news, I found out our budget is going to be more around the 5,000 range. Also our group decided on a theme for this year, we're going for an asylum theme. Any ideas or suggestions on where to purchase items? (given the budget I can afford to buy a lot more things than build hopefully)

Asylum huh? Well, for one thing, you're going to need some patients, crazed patients. Spitir sells some guys in strait jackets for about a couple hundred, so you should be able to buy one. Also, the demented doctor seems like it'd be ideal for this theme.

that budgetm is awesome. You can do pretty well with it.
An asylem would be a cool haunt and lots of loose phsycos.

Yeah I'm looking forward to it, I think I'll lean toward doing a lot of movie 'psychos' like Hannibal, Myers, etc. I'm also wanting to do a mad scientist kind of lab and a crazy cafeteria. Oh yeah, also a few places with padded walls just to make things look authentic to the theme. I'd really like to get some pneumatic or animatronic props for this year but can't really seem to find anything that fits with the theme. I'll probably at least pick up the new gemmy Myers they released this year. I wouldn't mind having a pneumatic pop-up body on a stretcher at least, and instead of a monster in a box modify it to look like there's a patient locked inside trying to get out. Just have to figure out what all I need to buy and such to make those happen.