Q: How do you tell your neighbors that their Halloween decorations are too scary?
Be sure that it’s scariness you’re talking about and not taste. If your neighbors decorate with half-buried zombies and you dot-glitter pumpkins around the yard, this is an agree-to-disagree issue.
But if the giant rats and half-chewed limbs are seriously frightening your children, this is something you can talk about.
Face to face, ask if there’s any way they can tone it down for your little ones. Ask if the kids can visit in the daytime to see up close how fake everything is. Or suggest the scariest pieces be staged later in the month.
There are two things to remember. First, the most creepy Halloween displays are often created by people who work really hard, sometimes for months, putting together that eerie lighting and those red-eyed gremlins. It may not be your cup of tea, but think of those yards as having as much passion poured into them as happy holiday tableau.
Second, remember that Halloween is the one night we can wrap our arms around what frightens us, control it and, most of all, have fun with it.
— Lesley Bannatyne, author of “Halloween Nation: Behind the Scenes of America’s Fright Night”
There is such a thing as too scary: It’s gore. Seeing a prop hanging from trees is going too far with little kids trick-or-treating. The blood is what freaks kids out. Inflatable props are better, as are the basics like skeletons, witches and ghosts.
I would recommend never doing anything gory out front, at least not early. Kids have nightmares from that.
If you put out a corpse, put it out later for the older kids, after 9 o’clock; little kids are done trick-or-treating by 6 o’clock. Bury or cover gory stuff, and then uncover for the older crowds.
Your neighbors can still have it both ways, but they have to use judgment. You don’t want to scare little kids — that’s not the point of Halloween.
— Joe Persampiere, president of hauntedprops.com
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