Project: Halloween Overhaul

We are back with another new prop walkthrough from this year’s Haunted Trail. You have heard the expression of lemonade out of lemons, well, today’s post is a Halloween take on that saying. Let’s start by revealing the final product out on trail.

By the way, we saw the results and decided to make two of them…well, that is technically a stretch of what really went down. I’ll explain after the jump.

This is one of the few props we didn’t design and make from scratch as the starting point for these witches are actually a purchased prop…and a free prop…and a refunded prop. Confused? I completely understand. It all started when Linda noticed Lowes put their Halloween props on sale the day after the 2021 Halloween season. This is when we make most of our acquisitions for the following year. A supposedly 7′ animated witch caught my eye. Can’t remember the exact prices, but it was in the $110 range slashed to around $65. We wanted more witches to add to our coven so eagerly hit the purchase button. Eventually it showed up and this is what it looked like.

Absolute crap! A hollow unpainted head, with a single pole frame that wouldn’t even stay together. Went to activate the animation and it simply consisted of two completely independent battery cells that rapidly blinked three tiny multicolor LEDs giving a weird strobe effect. One was placed in the head and the other in a plastic ball that was twist-tied to a finger on one of the 1/8″ thick hands. They literally got 7′ out of this thing by putting a 2.5′ hat on a 4.5′ foot figure. Say it with me, CRAPTASTIC.

The robe was not that bad. It consisted of three layers – a thin layer of black fabric, covered with a heavy cloth mesh and then a tulle cape. For some reason they put a stiff skeleton collar bone on it which you couldn’t even see. Now for the frame.

Absolutely ridiculous – they thought this was originally worth over a hundred dollars..yeah NO! Here is a shot of the hat. There was a metal wire inside of it that kept the heavy felt upright.

You might be asking yourself about now “But he has two..did he go buy ANOTHER one!?!”. Definitely not. I was so disappointed in the product I called Haunted Hill Forms support line directly and made my opinion known. What I wasn’t expecting was the response from the poor lady that was routed my call. She patiently waited for me to air my grievance and then politely agreed with my assessment. That took the hot wind out of my sails. Thinking she had sat through more than one complaint on this prop. She immediately said she would ship me out another on (as one of the lights was not working and she was thinking there must be missing parts in the frame that put the head at the 7′ height – she wasn’t buying the hat BS either. She then told me to issue a return at Lowes and keep the one I had adding maybe I could repurpose it. Have to say, probably one of the best customer service experiences I’ve had.

Eventually the replacement showed up – in the exact condition as the first. Not out any money, so no loss at this point beyond whatever lifespan the first tirade cost me. At this point they were not worthy of a spot on the trail. Perhaps there was a chance they could be “overhauled”.

It was game on from that point. First step was to address the head. As mentioned, it was just a hollowed out piece of plastic repurposed as a witch head. Ripped all of the fabric off to get a good look at the head. You don’t normally see witches without a face…dried out and wrinkly skinned for sure, but not a black boney skull. Note, one of the lights sits inside this head which produces the strobe effect coming out of the skull openings.

Grabbed a can of Loctite spray foam and gave it a good coating. Sacrificed the nose opening, but kept the eye and mouth holes to maintain the admittedly weak light effect. Always wanted to sculpt since I was a kid and finally getting a chance to try my hand at it. Long way to go for sure, but definitely a lot of fun. Look for this to be a component in future prop work. Looked at a few witch pictures on the web to get some nose ideas and went to work forming the foam into a face. Luckily, the wrinkled witch look played right into my skill level and the rough foam material.

Once the foam set, I painted it in solid black to give the deep crevices extra depth. Followed that up with a coat of gnarly flesh color as the dominant color. Then topped it off with some dry brush work of a green and cream color mixture for highlights. Greyed up some white to give the teeth a coating…in hindsight should have gone a lot darker or at least brushed in some more decay. Did this for both of the skull faces trying to make the second one noticeably different.

Needed a way to attach it to the latest Posey frame. Nothing complicated here. 3/4″ PVC cap with a screw threw the middle. Added a washer to hold the head to the PVC cap.

I probably could have just gone in through the mouth to hold the lock screw to tighten it. Since the clothes and hat covered up most of the head (why I didn’t need to cover the whole head with foam), I took the easy route and hacked in an opening in the back.

…and that finished up the head enhancements.

Time to overhaul the flimsy frame. That original abomination would never stand up to the stress of the trail. Our Posey frames have been covered in past tutorials (link here) and are always undergoing improvements. This one happens to have the new Posey moveable joints on it. Those will eventually get their own tutorial, but for now, just note they have the complete ability to move at their elbows, shoulders and at the waist. Since they are wearing dresses, no need to include individual legs.

Most of our trail scares take the male form. Since these were witches and not warlocks, broke out the female clothing mold to make some spray foam chest shells. Pretty much standard work here, punched in some twist-ties to hold it to the Posey frame.

So far, so good.

Replicated all the changes to the second witch.

Okay, time to put some clothes on these witches – it is cold out on the trail! Before I forget to mention, I put a layer of foam on those skinny hands as well. This thickened them up nicely and matched the texture up to the faces. Same paint approach was used with slightly more green in the highlights. The fact they added this bone structure underneath the dress turned out to my advantage as the two base layers of the dress were glued on to it making it easy to transfer to the new frame.

I was careful to match the size of the new frame to the dress length. The hands were screwed into the ends of the PVC pipe. Those pipes were not permanently fixed into the elbow couplers (yet), so they could be twisted into whatever pose I wanted.

I tried salvaging the original ridiculous hats by creating a tighter cone and sticking part of the tip back down into the hat. From there, glued the dress sleeves onto the arms and added the tulle cloak to round out the outfit.

Adjusted the arm joints to get the dueling poses I wanted and attached their magic orbs.

After staring at the final product for a while, decided I absolutely hated those hats. Gave in and went to Party City and bought two $5 witch hats that looked a lot more normal. Could have been a bit smaller in the hat size, but good enough for this year.

Well, what do you think…better than the starting version? I’ll probably do some tweaking for next year’s trail, but these ended up being a nice addition to our witch section. Here they are out conjuring spells on the trail.

Hope you enjoyed another of this year’s new haunted trail tutorials. Kudos to the support team at Haunted Hill Farms that managed to free me from grumpy Bri. With that said, there is probably a reason their support team is that good which makes me skeptical if I’ll bother purchasing more items from that outlet…I do like free however ha.

Stay calm, haunt on!