Got your candy in hand and your jack-o-lantern carved? Now all you need is a costume! William Warby / Flickr
Halloween is almost here. And if your ambitions go beyond throwing a sheet over your head and calling it a day, we have some good news. With a couple bucks, a smartphone, and maybe a circuit board or two, you can easily ratchet up the creepy quotient of any costume or decoration.
We’ve rounded up seven ideas that generally don’t require more than one trip to the craft, hardware, or Halloween store and an hour or two of labor. Some are family friendly, like silhouetted Halloween character cutouts. Others verge on the grotesque, like using a smartphone to animate a portion of a zombie mask.
So if you’re still scrambling for a costume idea, or just looking at some ways to further spookify your haunted house, here are some Gadget Lab-worthy options to consider.
Smartphone-Animated Halloween Costumes
With a strategically placed pocket, you can use your iPhone as a creepy animated eye, muscle, or even writhing maggots.
Make your smartphone part of your costume with an option from Digital Dudz. You can slip your phone into a slot in its selection of shirts and masks so your costume includes an incredible (and incredibly creepy) animated eye, animated heart, or other options. If you’re short on time or money, you could definitely DIY by securing your phone in a mask or existing costume.
Hack-O-Lantern
Surprise unsuspecting trick or treaters with a motion-sensitive, LED-illuminated Hack-O-Lantern.
Littlebits has another project it calls the Hack-O-Lantern. It’s an interactive jack-o-lantern that lights up when it detects sound. The company recommends using a medium sized pumpkin (so the kit’s LEDs won’t get lost inside a cavernous gourd) and spraying the inside with bleach to prevent mold growth. A 9-volt battery should keep this guy going for 10 to 12 hours.
Bendgate Bent iPhone 6 Plus
If you’re more into overblown tech scandals than LEDs, we suggest taking inspiration from this fall’s biggest iPhone drama: Bendgate.
If you’re more about the laughs, you can sport a Bendgate costume. Halloweencostumes.com created a sample of the look, but it’s not actually for sale. You could easily create your own version, though, either with hand-painted homescreen details or individual app icons. Tip: If you have access to a large format printer, you can actually print out the entire front of your iPhone from Apple’s stock photos or a Photoshop rendering. Fold it around where the volume buttons would be. Don all black (if you’re brave, a black unitard) and hang it from your neck, or cut out a hole for your face and strap it to your body. Alternatively, you could style your bent iPhone so it’s sitting in a fake pants pocket.
Glow in the Dark Stick Figure
With black apparel and electroluminescent wire, you can light up the night as a two dimensional stick figure.
Littlebits has the tools and instructions for you to turn yourself into a glow-in-the-dark stick figure. It’s pretty simple, just bend the EL wire into the shape you want, sew it to what you want to wear (black or camo, if you want to blend into the night), and hook up the basic circuit. Now you can dance around in the night as a mysteriously illuminated two-dimensional humanoid.
Smoking Pumpkin
Take your jack-o-lantern to the next level with a hack that sets it smoking using an e-cigarette.
Using an e-cigarette filled with standard fog juice, you can make a different kind of hack-o-lantern: a smoking pumpkin. To pump air into the e-cig attach it to an aquarium pump. Popsci has the details on how to create this creepy, smoky gourd.
Silhouette Monsters
Silhouette monsters are a quick, unique, and family-friendly way to festively light up your home, inside or out.
Appropriate as both an indoor and outdoor decoration, you can use jointed paper cutouts, wood strips, and Christmas lights to make silhouette monsters. By stapling the lights to the back of the cutout (available at craft and Halloween stores), the shape is illuminated, creating a unique lighting element around your home.
Magnetically Moving Table Props
Shock hungry party guests with a table prop that moves of its own accord thanks to stealthy, embedded magnets.
Creep out party guests by setting up table props that seemingly move of their own accord (in actuality, they use magnets). Slip a strong, preferably neodymium magnet inside a prop like a severed hand, then attach magnets to a linear motor you’ll affix to the underside of a table. Hook this up to motion sensors and a microcontroller so the hand starts moving when someone gets nearby to creep out friends who just wanted to grab a snack from the table.
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