Halloween is the best holiday ever! My house has the potential to be very haunted...and I'm already getting excited for the big party! I know it's still early September, but while I've still got plenty of time to craft things, does anyone have any ghoulish ideas for decorating the house inside/out? How about a recipe for washable fake blood? Things to do with seeds and other pumpkin innards? Know some amaturish special effects tricks? I'm saving my money for a drum kit and a trip to Portugal, so I'm particularly interested in learning about stuff I can make from trash or cheap-trash-like-stuff. Please share!

"Things to do with seeds and other pumpkin innards?"

drunken pumpkins are always fun. you pile the innards across and out of the mouth to look like the 'kin threw up....the other theme for this project could be a pumpkin so queasy from your haunted house that it couldn't hold it together any longer.

also, roasted pumpkin seeds are awesome.
a*

Decorating the house: You can soak cheesecloth in tea to discolour it and then rip it and hang it as ratty haunted-house curtains.

amyt

If you've got a black light (and I don't think the bulbs are too expensive at all - just be careful, because they're hot) then you can piddle with some cool liquids that react under it.

There's a really good article about this on the Anatomical Chart Company site ( http://www.anatomical.com - though it isn't loading for me right now. )

They also have some great halloween decoration ideas there, and some cheap supplies, too - like bones and skulls, etc.

Or if you want cutesy skulls, just grab a bunch of large rocks and paint them white, and put facial features on as appropriate - there was an article on this in a recent Better Homes & Gardens. Here's luminaries from milk cartons: http://www.bhg.com/bhg/story.jhtml?storyid=/templatedata/bhg/story/data/eerieluminaries_07192001.xml&catref=SC1360

They also had a spread depicting a bowl of punch with the ice being a giant eyeball (Put blue koolaid in bottom of bowl, freeze, then put in lemonade or pineapple slices, freeze again, then fill with regular water with some of those red licorice strings for a bloodshot eye and freeze.

When I was a kid, at our Halloween party at school, one of the parents made a really dark jello, then made a spider web with white icing, a spider out of a grape and some black licorice, and then lots of little flies out of raisins stuck with almond flakes for wings.

I love Halloween, if I come up with more, I'll let you know.

~bubbles