# Help with atmosphere



## Dan The Welder (Jul 18, 2012)

I need help with a biohazardous area, just the atmosphere. I need small surrounding features that will cause major scares


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## goneferal (Sep 8, 2010)

Green lighting and warning sirens might be nice.


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## Lord Homicide (May 11, 2012)

... and yellow lighting. I've never really been a master at painting with light so I don't know how the two light colors would interact.

Smoke?

Grungy looking sign

neon green painted great stuff foam to look like toxic sludge


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## Lunatic (Oct 3, 2006)

I'm thinking yellow & black caution tape. Stickers for chemical hazards, Bio hazards, poison, flammable, toxic and so forth...there are many of them. Maybe you could make some with skull and crossbones. I'm sure you could google hazard signs and stickers to get ideas.

Also maybe a spinning hazard light. I have a couple for one of my lighting effects. You can buy them relatively cheap. I bought mine for like 12 bucks a piece on sale at Guitar Center but I've seen them at Spencer gifts/Spirit Halloween, too.


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## Dan The Welder (Jul 18, 2012)

I enjoy the creativity from you all


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## fontgeek (Jul 24, 2006)

Maybe some florescent/blacklight paint watered down a little, then mixed with sawdust and spread out as a spill or contamination. You would need a blacklight or two to illuminate the scene, but those can be placed discretely. If you can scrounge some rubber boots, maybe some waders, a yellow slicker/raincoat, and gas mask, and make up a dummy corpse who's collapsed and died at the scene. If you have or can make a fake walkie talkie to have near the "body" that keeps "receiving" messages or questions about the status of the now deceased. An MP3 player just going on repeat of the same set of messages every few minutes should do it. The messages can be varied to suit your needs.
The strobe lights would help, though sirens may cause problems with the neighbors and their dogs, not to mention you if you have to listen to them all night, or even for many nights (depending upon how long your haunt will go on).
Warning tape, barricades, A tipped and punctured drum with the appropriate warning labels on it, shovels, a dropped flashlight, plastic bags, and the rest of the stuff a hazmat team would typically have with them on site


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## Dan The Welder (Jul 18, 2012)

Fantastic, truly fantastic, i didnt understand the tipped and puncture drum part though


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## Haunted Spider (Sep 6, 2010)

The labels you are looking for are DOT shipping labels. If you want the ones with the skull and crossbones, you are looking for a poison label, usually poison 6 is listed. You could go out and buy them, or you may stop by a shipping location near you. In the next two years, all chemicals that are shipped are going to have new labels on them. The placard you see on trucks will be completely different with different pictures on each one to describe what it is. It is part of a Global Harmonization Program that the US just got approved. For that reason, some companies may be just tossing their old stock. Worth asking if you have a place like that around.

The barrels are part of any hazmat site. that is how they got rid of haz materials. Most would technically be in 55 gallon drums that are metal. Plastic barrels work out for haunts but are not indicative to a true haz mat site (yes I taught haz mat in a college internship) We had mock spill sites and clean up areas.

what you really need is a decon zone. That means an area you walk into that you would normally get clean, but make it contaminated. You need some hoses dangling down (flexible dryer hose works good), some quick dissipating fog (coming out the hoses for best effect), flashing lights, shower stations, bench with torn up clothes, and suits. Your typical hazmat suits you see in movies are normally called a level B suit. They are a glorified tyvek suit that should be chemical resistant. The level A suits, (rubber ones you get inside of) are out of any haunters price range unless you get one from a training center that is no longer suitable for training. You can get the suits you need from almost any safety store that provides to construction or general industry. Normally they come in a box of at least 10 though, not sure they would sell you just one.

Here is a link to the training center I worked at. You may find some pictures that would be helpful to you. http://seem.findlay.edu/programs/hazmat.html


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## Warrant2000 (Oct 8, 2008)

If you have a computer with MS Office Suite, you should have Powerpoint. With that simple graphics program, you can make all your own HAZMAT and DOT signs you need. I made some then used craft glue to attach them to some toxic barrels.

Cheap bio-hazard suits can be the painters suits from Home Depot. Use a marker to put name plates or logo's on them.

For a toxic waste drum that has "accidentilly" cracked and spilled, spray Great Stuff where you want the ooze, then when dry, spray neon green paint. They glow nicely under black light. If you have an open top barrel, spray Great Stuff on the top ledge, spray neon green, then place a green CLF (the twisty light) inside the barrel to illuminate it.

Be sure to have a good sound track in the background. I used "Toxic" (CD 097) from poisonprops.com. It has warning claxons, a calm female voice saying things like _"Warning, 30 seconds until self destruct."_

I did just about all the things here in my haunt, you can find the links to the videos in my sig.


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## Dan The Welder (Jul 18, 2012)

I love these ideas guys


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## Lord Homicide (May 11, 2012)

Piggybacking off Warant's comment... have some toxic sludge oozing out of some MicroSoft Windows OS boxes


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## Dan The Welder (Jul 18, 2012)

Thats an interesting idea lord homicide


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## k-angel (Jul 31, 2012)

Playing on the idea of barrels, you could use a water pump and create a toxic waterfall.


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## fontgeek (Jul 24, 2006)

The tipped and punctured drums are the hazardous waste that's contaminated the area, you could use some rusted out barrels, though they are truly more hazardous for you to physically handle when setting up your scene. Rusted out areas tend to be thinner, have sharp, rough edges.
The drums give the viewers a point of reference or foundation for your storyline. Showing hazardous waste drums kind of hammers it into their heads as to what they are seeing. If the drum is pointing away from the guests, you can mount the blacklight in the open drum itself. That will focus it's light onto the spill and scene without lighting up the guests themselves.


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## Lord Homicide (May 11, 2012)

happyfeets said:


> Thats an interesting idea lord homicide


Heh, was being totally sarcastic  because I hate MS windows


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## DrUnK3n_PaNdA (Sep 17, 2009)

I don't know about toxic sludge for biohazard stuff, but if you want it to be a somewhat generic NBC threat you could play off the idea of the corpse with the radio a bit further and give him a Geiger-Counter as well making that wonderful trademarked clicky-noise.

For specifically a bio-hazard I would leave the scene devoid of any sort of music, the more quiet the better, except for a loop playing on a TV or radio about some quarantine in effect. Just have a pile of bodies that look to have all died in the same, gruesome manner (The X-Files episode Firewalker comes to mind.) Light the scene with a rotating police-style light.

Another idea might be to have a stack of charred corpses with some faux flame effects, have some characters in those baggy white suits disposing of the infected corpses by burning them to stem the spread of infection.


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## Dave Leppo (May 16, 2012)

DrUnK3n_PaNdA said:


> Another idea might be to have a stack of charred corpses with some faux flame effects, have some characters in those baggy white suits disposing of the infected corpses by burning them to stem the spread of infection.


add the smell of bacon cooking?


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## Dan The Welder (Jul 18, 2012)

I love bacon


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## kauldron (Oct 17, 2011)

A good place to look for props, since you live in VA, would be military surplus stores. I used to live in Hampton when I was in the Air Force and there were a ton of stores in the area. You can find gas masks and chem suits there and some may be in poor condition that you can get cheap. They should have lots of chem gloves and boots there as well. Also, you can paint up old ammo boxes to look like decon kits.


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## Dan The Welder (Jul 18, 2012)

I have a hazmat suit made out of tyvex and 2 gas masks, a few mess kits, 3 ammo boxes, 2 ammo crates theyre small though and i have a bunch of bdu's and a few of steel pot helmets so thats a decent amount of detail isn't it ?


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## Warrant2000 (Oct 8, 2008)

Happyfeets, thats good stuff for the military side of it, now get a few things to connect it to the biohazard you are looking for.


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## BioHazardCustoms (Aug 5, 2009)

Tyvek suits run about $10-25 at Home depot. Look in the paint section. Black rubber boots from Wal-Mart are about 15-25 bucks a pair, back where the shoes are located. You also might want to see if you can find a soundbyte of a klaxon horn for the warning system.


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## kauldron (Oct 17, 2011)

That's real good, maybe get a hold of 2 or 3 plastic drums and paint them yellow and add biohazard labels. Someone made a fog chiller look like a biohazard drum, here is a link 
http://www.halloweenforum.com/members/demon-dog-albums-miscellaneous-picture31778-fog-chiller-b.html
Keep us posted on how you are doing.


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## Dan The Welder (Jul 18, 2012)

I really like all the help guys, i got a biohazard trash bag and a specimen container at the doctor that i liked


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## Dan The Welder (Jul 18, 2012)

I dont know about a fog machine though, there is no power where im setting up


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