Halloween 2024 Preparations
As strange as it may sound, we’re often working on future haunts in parallel to the current year’s haunt. One of the things that we try to do is make the haunt lighting appropriate to the theme, but also slightly different each time out. Regardless of the haunt theme, we don’t want the following year’s lighting to look identical to the prior year. So for the 2023 “Haunted Bayou” haunt theme we’re using purple, green, blue C9 bulbs on the house stringers. Prior, we had used purple, green, orange for the 2022 “Classic Horror Movie Monsters” theme, red and orange for the 2021 “Devils & Demons” theme, red, blue, and yellow for the 2020 “Creepy Carnival” theme, and just blue accent and ambient lighting for the 2019 “Ghosts” theme. We will be revisiting the “Ghost” theme in 2024, but the big question was “What lighting color palette should we use that works, but’s also different and interesting?” We poured over hundreds of pictures posted on Pinterest looking for a common color palette from vintage pulp horror art and things related to The Haunted Mansion and came up with our 2024 lighting color palette: Teal, Blue, Purple, Pink LED C9 bulbs. We like using the light stringers on the house because first off they provide a nice ambient lighting effect for the haunt, but they also advertise “We’re here!” on Halloween night in our neighborhood. We’ve seen more participation in regards to decorating and lighting for Halloween in our neighborhood over the years, but there are still a lot that don’t decorate or put out any jack-o-lanterns. We have a few homes that like to turn out the lights and pretend they’re not home on Halloween. And because of how our house is shaped and situated near the top of a hill, the side of our house’s garage obscures the haunt approaching from the east. So by wrapping the colorful light stringers all the way around to the eastern side of our garage, we’re letting people know there’s something of interest to make it worth while to continue on down the street on Halloween night.
