Halloween draws near and you may be thinking about setting up different decorations in and out of your house, on your front porch, the lawn, the garage, and so on. And hey, the frightful season also applies to apartments if you feel like having decorations in your windows for all to enjoy and be wary of. Traditional adornments work as always, for example witch legs, jack o lantern balloons, and ghostly windsocks. These are just a few ideas. There’s always monsters, various gigantic spiders, mock zombies (or maybe real ones if available!), and the ever-reliable sheet or curtain ghosts.

However, now more than ever, digital decorations that make people laugh and enjoy this time of year are within reach and easy to set up. We’ll be providing a few pointers on how to use technology like projectors to make Halloween more interesting and fun. And think about it, projectors are really made for Halloween, as they…project things out of thin air! That’s spooky. 

On top of the very spectral and thus appropriate nature of digital projections and other digital decorations, an important aspect of them is that they’re versatile and far less messy than physical decorations. Therefore, digital decorations are easier to set up and don’t require as many materials or as much preparation. And they’re safer, with no paper cuts, glue accidents, or paint spills.

Best of all, digital Halloween scares are way more convincing than their physical counterparts. A semi-transparent ghost moving around your windows looks much scarier than a sheet with glued on googly eyes that’s just standing there. With digital, you have the element of surprise and doubt, and are far more likely to put the scare in your neighbors or anyone that passes by. Project a horde of zombies and you’ll definitely gain favor with trick or treaters. Everyone loves a convincing illusion, and those are much easier to achieve with digital projection than with hot glue and cardboard. 

We recommend a portable projector to generate illusions in different locations around the house or your apartment. Granted, any projector will work (we make those, by the way), but for the sake of convenience and mobility, a good portable is best. Battery life is essential here. Worthy portables offer at least two hours unplugged, meaning your zombies, ghouls, apparitions, and other horrors won’t just vanish with shame in thirty minutes. So make sure to charge up and don’t go for cheap portable projectors with batteries smaller than a gremlin.

For content delivery, or the source of all evil as we like to think of it, a USB stick serves the purpose just fine. Ghost animations or image files can be delivered to the projector via the handy USB port. Alternatively, because good portable projectors are smart portable projectors with Android TV, just use stuff from YouTube or any other website or app.

You’ll need something to project onto, because without that your goblins may end up shining into someone else’s house, and that’s a no-no. Light colored curtains and sheets are fine, or any semi-translucent material you can hang up in the window or the yard. We like curtains because their wavy surface provides free depth to projections, but if not available for some reason, any cheap shower curtain will do as long as it’s not too thick, dense, or dark. Any surface that’s very dark or thick will block or absorb the projection, taking away from its visibility and impact on unsuspecting audiences.

Extra trimmings add character to your sinister endeavors. LED lights, or maybe massive webbing if you go for the mutant spider angle. 

Put up the curtain or sheet or whatever you’re projecting onto in the window, hallway, or other site of nefarious activity. Make sure this location allows the projector a clear line of sight.

Also make sure the projected image covers as much of the surface as you need for your illusion.

Turn off as many of your house or apartment lights as possible. There are horrors that work even in the light, but they’re not for Halloween, fortunately. So, you need your projector and illusion to be in a very dim setting. They’ll typically only appear after it’s dark out, anyway. But you’ll need to make sure it’s also DARK WITHIN. 

Halloween is one big celebration of life as it shows we can overcome our fears and even make fun of them to some extent. And for Halloween 2021, you now know a lot more about enlisting the help of digital technology to your cause of making your friends, family, and neighbors shriek with terror, err we mean joy. A portable projector takes your scare-mongering to another, much higher level, and with the GV31 you’re on the fast track to crypt keeper status. Have a great Halloween everyone!