Customer Reviews

Give Them a Real Scare This Halloween: A Guide to Scaring Trick-Or-Treaters and Haunting Your House, Yard or Party

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was looking for ideas for scary decorations, which is not really what this book is about, although it is well written and the cartoon drawings are great.
If you're looking for scary tricks to perform, this book has Halloween gags which would be good for a family or group to do together, to scare Trick Or Treaters or haunted house guests.
But if you're planning a Halloween party, and you want to socialize and actually be part of the party, this is probably not the book for you. Most of the ideas in this book must be repeated every time someone new arrives. They require you to play an active role in the scare, either in costume or behind the scenes, and many require two people.

This book outlines some yard ideas, but they apppear uncreative and need special equipment. If you're looking for halloween party ideas tho this may give you some ideas. Some pranks for trick-or-treaters are one time pranks. If you're looking for simple, practical ideas on creating dummies, haunts, and spooks this is probably not the one you want.

I ended up returning this book.

I was looking for a book that could show me the details on building some interesting non-professional haunted house effects for my yard this year. This book is not it. The low production values, clumbsy writing, and weak artwork could be endured if the content was good, but unfortunately, it was not.

Make no mistake - this is not a 'how-to' book. Much of the book looks like the author likes to draw scary pictures on half a page, and describe the drawing underneath. Only the simplest of illusions are detailed. Anything ambitious is glossed over - if you're lucky, you get text to the effect of "If you want to do this, find someone who knows how to do it." Not very helpful if you're trying to learn.

The text reads as if it were written by teenagers in one draft. It jumps from "don't blame us if you get someone hurt" to "don't blame us if your guests don't suffer heart attacks and die from fright!" (I'm paraphrasing.) The author even suggests mocking peoples' beliefs by making a "freak show" exhibit out of them - meant to be a joke, hopefully, but it just comes off as being insensitive and sad.

Finally, there is very little in the way of practical information. A few illusions have simple diagrams, but I would have liked more: how to actually build some of these illusions, how much I could expect them to cost, what I need to buy to make them, how long it might take to assemble them, how to stage and light them, and most importantly, how to ensure they are safe.

The sad part is that you can tell the author really loves this stuff, but just doesn't have the depth of knowledge to justify writing a book. It feels like he just brainstormed a bunch of spooky scenes, described the few illusions he could figure out, dropped in some trolled bits from the Halloween-L mailing list, and called it a book.

Overall, an amateurish and unhelpful work.

I loved this book! It had a lot of great ideas for haunted houses, scenes, decorations and costumes. I especially liked the step-by-step directions to building your own corpse! If you want to inject some real fun into your Halloween and jump-start your activities, then this is the book for you!

This Halloween guide had plenty of neat projects for making your house scary for Halloween. I found that the instructions were pretty thorough, but it wasn't quite what I was looking for.

I'm a busy working mom. There's no way that I would be able to invest the time or the money in many of these projects. If you are a person who's really into Halloween, this book is for you. However, if you're like me, a very busy person who needs to put together a party for her kids but only has limited time, I'd recommend something like "101 Spooktacular Party Ideas" by Linda Sadler.

what an awesome little book for halloween lovers everywhere.The illustrations are great and the book is very funny.I found an enourmous amount of great halloween ideas and useful information for everything halloween.the halloween supplier index in the back of the book is great.If you are really into halloween and need some great halloween ideas,you need to buy this book.You will never be sorry for the money spent.I have tons of new ideas now and am ready to put them into use this halloween season.This is a must have book for any halloween lovers!!

This book was well illustrated and written. The author has a clever (and sometimes mean spirited) sense of humor-which I thought was appropriate. The "themes" were well developed and gave me lots of ideas for a very successful Halloween party. The only downfall I found was that some of the suggestions required special (and expensive) equipment, but overall I was able happy with the book and recommend it to someone wishing to have an entertaining Halloween party.

I was hoping for complete details on how to build and create but it only had ideas and some basics. A little disappointed.

This book is hysterical! This author is so talented...not only does he write the book (and the ideas are tremendous), but he also illustrated the whole thing (and the pictures are little black and white cartoons that make you laugh out loud!). I would recommend this book to not only Halloween fans like myself (and such great ideas inside this book if you love to have fun with scaring the wits out of the older kids...no small ones, could be a father waiting in the wings), but to people who want a good laugh and some great ideas.
Wonderful book - A+!

I looked at several books on this subject and found this to be the one. Great price! It has everything that expensive books have. The book contains all the great Haunted House Tricks(Pepper's Ghost). Great illustrations! It explains how it is done and shows you how to do it. I found the book very easy to follow. In a land, where everyone from Knott's Berry Farm, Universal Studios, The Queen Mary, Non-Profit Organizations, back and front yard amateurs that have some kind of haunted house attraction; this is the book to help you compete.