I came down stairs last night, and playing over a set of speakers was this wonderfully scary soundtrack. David had come up with the idea of placing the portable outdoor speakers my Mom gave me (excellent gift, Mom!) by the door. Shira suggested we find a clip on YouTube to play. David quickly found this one. It's perfect, right? The problem: the clip runs for 4 minutes and then ends.
That's where I could pitch in and help. I installed the Download YouTube Video firefox plugin and grabbed the .mp4 file from YouTube. (Incidentally, the plugin works so well, it adds a button to the UI to download the files that took me some time to notice. I wasn't expecting the plugin to blend into the UI so seamlessly.). I then double clicked on the .mp4 file and it opened up in QuickTime player. Under the View menu, I selected Loop and we were good to go.
David had a strobe light which we put in the front window of the house, and we finished the whole thing off by taping up an old Cabbage Patch doll (Shira announced: "Shoshanah! What did you do to Shoshanah?!" -- it was so cute.) in front of the window to give the strobe light something to highlight.
The whole affair took about 15 minutes to put together, but was scary enough that some of the kids refused to come all the way up the the steps to get candy. A number of the parents commented on the use of the Cabbage Patch doll. David even wondered if we had gone too scary.
Nahhh, one of the important lessons of Halloween is that what often looks scary, isn't.
How did you make your house scary for the occasion?
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