How To Make Spooky Haunted House Silhouettes

A few years ago, using a large roll of black paper, scissors and white chalk, paper artist Jeffery Rudell inexpensively and beautifully transformed his client’s house into a haunted one by using spooky paper silhouettes.

I tried to draw on many of the familiar visual tropes from horror films. It was obvious that children would be likely to see these images so I tried to be mindful of that. Admittedly, a few of the images are strong, but the cartoonish quality of them and the fact that they were paired with less threatening images helped convey to viewers that the whole project was done in the spirit of good (and creepy) fun.

In his new book, Spooky Halloween Silhouettes: Punch-Out Window Shadows for a Haunted Home, there are 25 pre-made punch-out silhouettes to haunt-up windows for Halloween.

In this creative, creepy, large-format book of black pages, crafters will find jack-o’-lanterns, black cats, ravens, skulls, and more. Just put these 25 punch-out apparitions (no cutting, no folding, no mess) in the window, and they’ll turn any home into a haunted house ready to welcome trick-or-treaters. Patterns on the inside back cover allow users to create life-size photocopied silhouettes of Frankenstein’s monster, a mummy, zombies, a witch, and other ghosties, ghoulies, and things that go bump in the night.