This phototutorial from central Florida is actually called “Flamingos with frickin laser beams,” which was a pretty hard title to resist. However, it looks to me like there are, in fact, only LEDs involved here, and Make: Online readers are sensitive to such distinctions. [Thanks, Shawn!]
Propnomicon has an ongoing project to assemble a set of props from the fictional Miskatonic University expedition to Antarctica from Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness.
A plastic skull and ribcage, a stick, and some old curtains dunked in gray house paint. From Dave Lowe Design.
Cartographer’s Guild is a thriving online community for folks who are interested in making maps of places that do not exist. There are some really beautiful graphics to be found, particularly, in their Cartographer’s Choice forum. Shown at the top of the post is Sapiento’s Post Apocalyptic Amerika, and immediately above is töff’s Map of Ceres: 16th Millenium.
Reader JC just submitted this fantastic haunted house prop to our Make: Halloween Contest 2009. It’s a recreation of the always-lovely female lead from 1962’s sci-fi camp classic The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, immortalized in 1993 as Mystery Science Theater 3000’s experiment 513 (and, arguably, before that by Steve Martin’s The Man with Two Brains).
“She won’t be doing any heavy lifting for awhile…”
We recently had a question from a reader about this prop. “Connie” wrote in wanting to know how to replicate the mechanism that, in the movie, is used to unlock The Book’s cover. Never having seen The Mummy, I went into research mode and enqueued it from Netflix. Then I watched it. Big mistake.
But, you know, to each his or her own. And “The Book of the Dead,” with its ornate clasps and intricate star-shaped key, is admittedly an awesome prop. The scene Connie is referring to, I believe, occurs at almost exactly one hour into the “Deluxe Edition” cut of the film, and shows the intrepid but remarkably foolish archeologists inserting the aforementioned star-shaped key into a correspondingly star-shaped opening in the book’s cover, turning it, and thereby releasing the spring-loaded cover clasps and, with them, all manner of unpleasant whatnot.
So I started Googling around, looking for dweebs enthusiasts that might have already built such a thing. And while I did not find any working mechanical replicas of the prop, I did discover the remarkably beautiful static replica shown in the photo at the top of this post by Jeff Stelter of Stelter Creative Woodworks.
Don’t be afraid! It’s just expanding foam, a few bits of string, and some red paint.Gothic Nightmare’s page will show you how to make the severed legs twitch, too.
