This was our first Halloween in the house we moved into 5 months earlier. We have almost no front yard and a 3 car concrete driveway, which makes it difficult to set up anything for Halloween. Everything needs to be free-standing. So we decided to build a mad science lab that used our garage as the backdrop for the display.

I framed out a 3-wall structure that we covered in faux stone paper and hung bracketed shelves to hold various mechancial props/lights, and beakers and glassware acquired at the local Good Will, that were filled with different colors of day-glo water.

A creature prop was placed on a table in front of the lab scene that could be brought to life using an electrical "life-giving machine" set up in front.

As well as being the first Halloween in the new house, this was our first interactive display: visitors were invited to come up the driveway and pull the knife switch on the machine to activate the display. A computer mouse was mounted underneath the knife switch and connected to a laptop that played the electrical sound effects through an amplified speaker. A nice side effect of the setup is the speaker inside the machine would cause the machine to vibrate when the switch was thrown.

Shown above is an "electrode" that was made from an old cylindrical CD rack and half of a curtain rod.

This is a shot of the driveway setup at night. A cheap articulated skeleton was covered in a ragged Halloween costume, laid on a table (built from a mausoleum Halloween display), and connected with fishing line to a slow turning motor above. A strobe light was also mounted above, that was triggered by the knife switch.