Editors Frighten The Neighbors
Hallowe'en is year-round for sound effects editor Adam Johnston. Visions of rotting flesh
and severed limbs dance in his head for months - until October 30th and 31st when they dance in his backyard.
Adam Johnston with friend It's the third consecutive year that Adam has dedicated his Santa Monica home to "Poison Oak Street: Factory of Nightmares", an experience that has compelled hundreds of people to line up around the block of his normally quiet neighborhood.
"I love to build things, so I found a project like this easy and challenging at the same time," says Adam. "The fun part is figuring this all out piece-by-piece and how to put it together fairly cheaply."
Three months before Halloween, Adam starts scouring garage sales for mannequins he transforms into a swamp creature, a flying vampire and a mad scientist. Windshield wiper motors he scavenges from junkyards power his robotic monsters, fountain pumps spurt fake blood in several gory scenes and a control board connected to twenty-four separate stereos, including old boomboxes and PA systems, crank up the volume on the horror.
The idea for the haunted factory started in Adam's home recording studio in 1994 where he collected sounds of tearing flesh, growling monsters, wicked thunder and wind, rattling chains and blood-curdling screams. Eventually, he brought those sounds to life.
"It's like taking a movie and making it 3-D," according to Adam.
There are nine live actors and many dead ones performing gruesome scenes including a chainsaw-wielding maniac, a bride introducing her newly-dead husband, and a corpse who won't stay buried and beckons visitors with "Room for one more!"
Adam Johnston's sound effects editor credits include 'Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil' (a perfect project for him!) and 'Peacemaker.'
Over on Babcock Avenue in Studio City a more ethereal ghostly garden attracts visitors at Halloween with funeral chimes and gossamer apparitions. Through a window a skeletal harpist plays a haunting refrain and a marble bust speaks. Phantoms have appeared on Gary Corb's property for twenty-five years now, helped by Tim Doggett, sound editor Steve Mann and picture assistant Mark Phillips. One visitor was overheard to say, "This is better than Disneyland" as he gazed at the intricate, sad but not too scary effects.
