I spent an hour yesterday afternoon dismantling the Halloween diorama. This is the first one I’ve been pretty surgical about, not too many emotions. Leading up to it there was a two week burst of work, then the Halloween Haunted Arcade, and then done. Pretty much all I was thinking about while taking it down was reclaiming the diorama space back to start scaling the next one. I hope Trento takes this coming one in the holiday spirit it’s meant 🙂
Above you can see the back of Halloween diorama preparing to get deconstructed. You can even see the mannequin head from the Creepshow “Something to Tide Me Over” diorama, so this tradition runs deep.
I used screws and a glue-gun to keep Michael Myers attached to the remote controlled curtain rod.
The remote controlled curtain rod made the movement of Michael from behind the bush possible, and it was pretty awesome.
The hedge came out easily. I didn’t have to affix this anywhere, it just sat in there perfectly.
The tree is interesting because it came out cleanly and now I kind like it as a piece of furniture in the office, it looks pretty cool. At the moment it’s not totally stable, so I have to come up with something to plant it in.
I used some pieces of scrap wood to keep the tree solid in the hole we cut out, might need to think through how I can use something similar so it can rest firmly in the office area without assistance.
Right now I have some boxes and transformer boxes keeping it upright.
But I’m not going to lie, the tree still looks good to me.
With all that out, I just had to clean up the leaves, remove the base, take down the painting backgrounds, and detach the spotlight.
I swept the leaves towards the front of the space so I could get the base out cleanly. The base was built out of 3/4″ OSB board, so it was pretty hefty.
You can see where I cut into the base to insert the automatic curtain rod as a way to hide it as much as possible. That worked out pretty well, and all cut with an oversized circular saw.
The base came out with minimal damage and after that I had to sweep the leaves as winter is coming.
Then came time to dismantle the makeshift spotlight attached to the ceiling of the diorama I was so proud of getting in place at the last minute.
It came out easy enough given I had it wired into a junction piece that allowed me to just unscrew and go. After that I unscrewed the painted backgrounds and lined them up against some of the ones I still had hanging around from The Shining diorama.
I also have the base leaned up against the “sandbox” built for the Creepshow diorama. So it is becoming apparent I’m going to need a storage space for all the old dioramas, the pieces are beginning to add up.
But the diorama space is now empty and I need to spec out the Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) scaled-up VHS tape. Hopefully that one will be far less overhead, but just writing that is the kiss of death.
So we can officially close the curtains on the Halloween interactive diorama of 2025. It broke new ground of the possibilities of the diorama, but as Tommy reminds me, as an artist I must always look forward 🙂
