What do you use to carve your pumpkins? If you still use regular kitchen knives and a spoon, maybe you should try something a little different this year. You don't even need to buy fancy pumpkin carving tools -there's plenty of stuff around your home that you can use instead.

From power tools to spaghetti, you'll be surprised what you can use to decorate your Jack-O-Lantern. There's even a great way to make your pumpkin last longer so it doesn't become a mold-laden biohazard.

Check out all of the fun household items you can use to make your pumpkin look amazing over at Homes and Hues: Using 11 Common Household Objects to Decorate Your Pumpkin

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What’s the scariest monster you can think of? That’s right, online trolls! And to add to the horror, they now have their own Broadway-style musical number, courtesy of AVbytes. As you’d expect, they are fairly proud of the chaos, discord, and misery they leave across the web. The lyrics to this song are posted at the YouTube page. You can enjoy the song, but remember, don't feed the trolls! -via Laughing Squid

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Last year, Roy Hutain created an internet sensation when he created an LED Stickman Costume for his toddler daughter Zoey. This year, Zoey is a year older and the costume is more elaborate. Her “Glowy Zoey” LED costume changes color in response to sound, and has Minnie Mouse ears for her trip to Disneyland! This version is a prototype, but you can buy the basic Stickman Costume at Glowy Zoey. -via Tastefully Offensive

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The Key of Awesome brings us an update to the classic song “The Monster Mash,” with Frank lamenting the current state of monster movies. Too violent, too shocking, too gross! Modern horror characters show up at the party, including Hannibal Lecter, Freddy Krueger, and the Human Centipede. Concerning that last one, the video contains NSFW language and subject matter. -via Tastefully Offensive

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The helplessness of an infant is something most horror writers and directors wont even tread on. They know it is too much for some people to even try to fathom, so they don't touch it. For that reason, when someone does finally tread, it can be even more terrifying a thought because we so rarely "go there".

This leads us to Mockingbird. An amazing little horror short from the crew over at FEWDIO. It takes the idea of the helplessness of a child to new heights, all while never showing us a thing. Just using the simplicity of a haunting nursery rhyme and great sound design to drive the horror home. Don't worry, it's not gory. It's very disturbing, but not gory. When horror is this scary, it doesn't have to be gory.

I have said this about Fewdio's work before (seriously, go spend a few hours on their YouTube page after you spent a few hours here) and I will say it again: they do more with horror in two minutes than most full length, big budget, million dollar films. Hell, here they only needed a minute and a half.

This exquisitely carved jack-o'-lantern by Melissa, the Empress of Squee, shows the main control room of the TARDIS. The console is an orange with seeds for the controls. Very clever!

Hopefully someone expands on this idea and creates a jack-o'-lantern that shows all of the other rooms of the TARDIS, including the swimming pool, the bedrooms, the wardrobe, and the armory.

-via That's Nerdalicious!

Image Credit: L.A Times

The internet is filled with weird stuff. That is half of the draw. It is like a Christmas gift each time you go to it, as you never quite know what you are going to get. One thing that internet has made far more accessible to most is the bevy of strange and unexplained photos out there. The problem is, with the inception of Photoshop and many other image manipulation tools, it is getting harder and harder to differentiate between what is real and what is fake. But it can still be fun to lose yourself in that, regardless of whether it is based in fact.

I found a twisted little gallery of "The Most Eerie And Unexplained Photos To Ever Exist", and though it could be assumed a couple of them are fake, many of them predate the internet. Like the above photo of the news article in the L.A Times about the "Battle for Los Angeles" that is something that actually happened (way back in 1942), when L.A was pretty sure it was being invaded by aliens.

No, not the crappy movie of the same name from a few years back. Best we just never speak of that again. But check out the gallery. "Falling body" is really creepy, too.

We just wrapped up our Halloween Scream Time Pinterest Contest and I have to say, it was a huge success. You guys pinned hundreds of Halloween costumes, recipes, decorations and more to our This Is Halloween board and it was amazing to see all the wonderful things you shared. 

While it was easy enough to find out who had the most repins, picking an editor's choice winner from all those entries was hard, but we finally managed to slim it down to just one. That's why we thought it was only fair to not only share the two winning images with you, but also some of our the runenrs up. You can always visit the board to check out all of the amazing entries as well as new pins from our wonderful fans. 

On a side note, if you are one of our two winners, please check your Pinterest notifications or email me directly at jill@neatorama.com to claim your prize.

This precious Despicable Me pumpkin won Angela Ramage first place for the most repins.

And this creepy, zombie Snow White won Keno Sproule first place in our editor's choice category. (For more awesome pics from this photo series don't miss this great Fashionably Geek post.)

Have you already put together an amazing costume you're pumped to show the world? Do you have pictures of your best costume ever from previous years? If so, head over to Instagram and join in on the NeatoShop Halloween Costume Contest. All you have to do is add your image to your account and tag it with @NeatoShop so we can find it. We'll pick one winner based on costume quality, cleverness and your number of comments/likes, and that person will win four NeatoShop tees of their choice. 

Contest ends Halloween night, 11:59 PM PST. So get going!

A few years ago, astronaut and science educator Don Pettit joined the crew of the International Space Station. All astronauts are allowed to bring a few personal items with them. Pettit chose to bring candy corn. He used that candy corn to build a sphere in zero gravity.

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Why? Because Pettit wanted to teach certain principles of chemistry and physics to people back on Earth. He began his experiment by coating the wide ends of the candy corn with oil and inserting them into a drop of water. The oil-coated ends tended to move toward the edge of the sphere, away from the water. This is a demonstration of how soap works.

-via First We Feast

Tony Dighera of Cinagro Farms devoted four years to perfecting his crop of Frankenstein pumpkins. They’re not cobbled together from different individuals like Frankenstein’s monster, but pumpkins grown in molds that have the shape of the monster’s head. Now that’s a fancy jack-o-lantern right there! This year, Dighera brought in a crop of 5500 pumpkins, and sold every one of them at $75 each. Next year, there will be a bigger crop, plus white pumpkins shaped like skulls. Yeah, you’ve seen molded fruit before, but I can tell you from experience, it’s not easy to get them to come out consistently right. See more pictures at Geekologie.

Redditor MoobyTheGoldenCalf is a generous and crafty parent. S/he writes, “So last year my kid wanted to be a mailbox for Halloween. This year, he wanted to be a vending machine. Here are the results.” They are impressive costumes--possibly enough to fool the inattentive.

The vending machine has a plastic sheet in the front “so that kids don’t run up to him and steal the chips.” Smart thinking, that. The candy deposit slot is on the right. There’s a light on the inside and a mirror film that lets the boy see out, but other people won’t be able to see in.

The mailbox is made of cardboard and foam. There are stated collection times on the front: trick-or-treating takes place between 5-7 PM.

-via Technabob

Image Credit: Chaojoker

When most people think about haunted houses and haunted attractions around Halloween, they imagine a school cheaply converted into a haunted house, where you walk through laughing while strangers in cheap costumes jump out at you an scream. While that may be an accurate description for most haunted attractions, there are a handful that are considered extreme. You need to sign wavers before you go through them, they can take hours, and the things you can see (and have happen to you) are troubling, to say the least.

For the few of you curious or brave enough to experience one of these traumatizing places, here is a list of The Five Most Extreme Haunted Houses in America, and I will warn you now, even the description of a few of these places is too extreme for me to put here.

Put it this way, if you do not like bodily fluids or being touched by strangers, these just aren't for you. For the rest of you, have fun and good luck.

There is something deviously enjoyable about watching adults get scared. When those adults are getting scared silly by a video game, it is even better. A medium initially created to entertain kids is now terrifying adults. Most mediums don't evolve like that, and it makes me drool with anticipation at where it might go.

Buzzfeed put together this video of people playing the point-and-click horror game, Five Nights At Freddy's, but they also throw in a twist around the 1:18 mark. I don't like to spoil things, so I wont say much, but it involves a grown man dressed in "furry" costume.

Now you KNOW you wanna watch it.

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By the way, to play the game yourself, click here. Just beware, it is like being stuck at a Chuck-E-Cheese after hours while on LSD. It is genuinely creepy.

There’s a fun new apartment complex being built in Osaka, Japan that will be the ultimate place to go trick-or-treating when construction is done, a complex the builders should just go ahead and call Halloween Town. 

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The complex is supposed to bring a sense of fairy tale wonder to the town of Hamamatsu, and so there's no mistaking that it's being built with Halloween in mind there are jack-o-lanterns and black cats on many of the roofs.

These whimsical buildings look like a fun and magical place to live, and a total nightmare to upkeep and repair, but it should attract plenty of Halloweenie tenants when construction finishes up just in time for Halloween next year.

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-Via Nerd Approved