Halloween goes digital with virtual decorating
Halloween is the gayest of holidays, in part because it’s all about drama and flamboyance, and who knows those traits better than the gays? What is a costume, after all, but a stylish bit of drag?
But at least as important as what you wear (or, in the cases of many twinks, what you take off) is how you decorate. Cauldrons of bubbling dry ice. Cobwebs strewn across doorways. Oversized plastic spiders wiggling overhead. Glowing jack-o-lanterns and fluorescently polyurethane skeletons rattling in the the corner. All good stuff.
But hey, it’s 2017. Practical effects are great. But we’re in the digital age, baby!
So we were pretty psyched to discover virtual dec-horror that can turn your home into a haunted mansion.
Indeed, Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride seems to be the inspiration for some of these effects, which we found from AtmosFX. Using a projector and some scrims that attach to windows, over doorways or hung between tree branches, the system permits you to download a variety of spooky astral projections from beyond the grave. We sampled several, including Unliving Portraits (ancestral paintings that morph into dessicated corpses), Ghostly Apparitions, Paranormal Passage and a few other terrors in terabytes. The set up can take a while — downloading the programs, setting up the projector, hanging the media — and there’s the question of designing your frights for maximum effect. That’s where working with your own home (and adding the practical effects like bloody stumps and dripping goo) can augment the effect. But time and attention to detail are what make decorating for Halloween so much fun. And your guests, trick-or-treaters and passersby will certainly enjoy being startled by the visuals.
Perhaps best of all, the system isn’t just for All Hallow’s Eve — programs are available for New Year’s, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, sporting events, even birthdays.
— Arnold Wayne Jones
Downloads available from Atmosfx.com.