High-Tech Halloween: 7 Ways to Spook Up Your Holiday
(Thinkstock)
You can keep Christmas, Passover, Ramadan, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July. I’ll take All Hallows’ Eve, thank you very much.
In recent years, my favorite holiday has gotten a high-tech makeover. Smartphones and other digital gear have changed everything about Halloween — from how you decorate your house and your body to how you figure out which homes in your hood are handing out the best candy. Here are seven of the best ideas.
1. Treats on the streets.
Is that witch next door giving out candy or lame boxes of raisins? You can find out by signing up for Nextdoor’s Treat Map. This social networking app for neighborhoods lets you see which homes in your neighborhood are giving out candy, have turned into a haunted house for the evening, or are just aching to get tricked. You may also be able to view a heat map of the Treat Map, to suss out neighborhoods where the trick or treatin’ is the hottest. Heat maps will be available in 20 major metro areas, from Atlanta to D.C.
(Nextdoor)
Joining Nextdoor is easy: Just supply your home and email addresses, and then link to your Facebook account. According to the company, one in four neighborhoods in the U.S. is on Nextdoor. If yours isn’t, you can add it, but you’ll need to persuade at least nine more neighbors to participate before it’s officially recognized.
2. Hack your pumpkin.
Why settle for a candle-powered pumpkin when you can go digital? LittleBits, a seller of DIY electronics assembly kits for kids age 8 and up, offers a simple $29 kit for creating a “hack-o-lantern,” a pumpkin that lights up when it hears a noise.
(littleBits)
3. Minecraft maniacs.
Is your child obsessed with Minecraft? ThinkGeek has the perfect costume accessories for your minor miner: a cube-shaped cardboard Creeper mask ($19), rectangular light-up torch ($25), foam diamond sword ($19), or sword and pickax combo ($39). You’ll probably have to order before midday Wednesday and ask for expedited shipping to get them in time for the big day.
(ThinkGeek)
Read: A Parent’s Guide to Minecraft: 5 Reasons to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Cubes
4. The face of fear.
If your kids really want to scare someone this Friday, tell them to go out dressed up as you — complete with a 3D mask of your mug. Upload profile and front-facing photos to ThatsMyFace along with $25; they’ll email back a PDF file with a 3D origami version of your mug and instructions on how to cut and glue it into a mask.
ThatsMyFace can also turn your face into a 3D rubber plaster mask (starting at $300), but that will take more time; treat yourself to that trick next Halloween.
5. Ghost with the most.
Haven’t got the time or energy to drape your house in cobwebs and papier-mâché witches? Digital decorations from AtmosFEARfx can spook the place up in a hurry with life-sized images of beckoning beauties, ghoulish girls, headless horsemen, and wrathful wraiths.
(AtmosFEARfx)
If you’ve got a video projector handy, you can display these ghostly apparitions on a window or a wall; otherwise, plug your laptop or other video source into a flat-screen TV. Each image offers a handful of special effects that run in a continuous loop, along with appropriately eerie sound effects. You can download high-definition versions of each apparition for $10 apiece and load them in a media player on your Windows or Mac PC; or order a DVD with all four spooks for $39.
6. Scary smartphones.
Stop Instagramming selfies and put that smartphone to better use this Halloween. Download the free Digital Dudz app to put animations of a beating heart, a pulsing brain, or crazy eyes on your phone, which you can incorporate into your costume. If you’re not the DIY type, Morph Costumes sells a series of T-shirts ($25+) and rubber masks ($45+) with Velcro pockets to hold your phone and appropriately shaped cutouts for the screens. (Warning: These get pretty gruesome.)
Digital Dudz recommends putting your phone in Airplane mode before heading out; there’s nothing like getting a text from Mom to totally kill the terror in your zombie outfit.
Read: Top 10 Halloween Costumes for Kids
7. Drac’s all, folks.
Nothing says “Happy Halloween” quite like a personalized video message from Count Dracula. At Dracula Mail, the royal vamp will greet you by name and show you a personalized Halloween greeting, with the help of Sylvana the fortune-teller and Alfred the Dwarf.
(Real Transylvania)
For $5, you can send video greetings to five fiends — er, friends. The service was created by Real Transylvania, a Romanian marketing firm allegedly located in Nosferatu’s old haunts. The effect is more goofy than ghoulish, making it safe for younger kids whose knowledge of vampires hasn’t been polluted by the Twilight series (yet).
Questions, complaints, kudos? Email Dan Tynan at ModFamily1@yahoo.com.
