Everyone celebrates Halloween a little bit differently. There are those who prefer the campy, not genuinely scary shocks of fuzzy spider decorations or bad Disney Channel Original Movies. There are those who just eat a ton of candy and get drunk. And then there are those who go all-in on the horror and delight of Halloween, who fully lean into blood, gore, scary movies, the macabre, and scaring children, etc. One local East Dallas artist named Steven Novak clearly falls under the straight-up scary umbrella and decorated the front of his house to wit. The theme? Lots of dead “bodies,” lots of “blood,” and a handful of weaponry like chainsaws and some butcher knives.
And because of the bloody decorations — there looks like there’s a near half-gallon of fake blood on the sidewalk leading up to the house — Novak says that the cops have come by a couple of times a day since he put up the spooky sight. Apparently, over-the-top holiday decorations are Novak’s thing, and Halloween was not going to be an exception, he told the Dallas Observer.
“I’ve always been up to hijinks like flying ghosts or 7-foot-tall snow sculptures of myself, so if I was gonna do Halloween, it was obvious that it should be hyperreal,” he says, not realizing that it’s very not obvious at all. “No lights, fog machine, or camp … something that would really freak people out by walking in the dark.” So, he says, he “whipped up some dummies and slung 20 gallons of blood all over.”
Ah. Okay. Sure! What follows is a totally scary sight. One dummy is on the roof with a knife through his head, covered in blood. Body parts are in a wheelbarrow filled with trash bags covered in blood. A few bodies litter the yard and a plastic tub full of skulls sit in a gallon of fake blood. A gaggle of zombies are pressed against his window. The bodies get watered daily during a bout of rain in Dallas.
The display is obviously fake — but that hasn’t stopped the cops from coming by to check it out from time to time, apparently. “Neighbors told me cop cars were in front of my house a lot during the day. I was only home twice to receive them… They were in formation at the door and when I opened it they asked if it was all mine. I asked, ‘You mean the blood and the bodies? Yeah, that’s me.’”
There you have it: Halloween really isn’t dead. Or, it’s super dead, and it’s dead on Steven Novak’s front lawn.
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This article was originally published on Oct. 28, 2020
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