This ethereal, spooky corpse will chill your Halloween guests as they approach your haunted manor. Made with fairly inexpensive and easy-to-find supplies, you can whip up this rotting corpse scarecrow in one afternoon. Let’s get to work!
How To Make a Rotting Corpse Scarecrow
Supplies:
-Long PVC Pipe. I just went to my local Ace Hardware and got the longest one I could find (it ended up being about 10ft. long!
-PVC “T”-shaped joint that will fit on the end of your long PVC pipe.
-Tinfoil
-Masking Tape…LOTS of it.
-Branches (twisted willow branches work splendidly, though regular tree branches will do, as well)
-Foam Skull from Michael’s Crafts
-Gnarly Wig (Goodwill – optional)
-Old Sheets (2-3 of them from Goodwill)
-Caramel brown + dark brown spray paint (not pictured)
Other Items from Around the Craft Room & House:
-Scissors
-Plastic to cover your work surface for spray painting
Step 1
Pop the “T”-shaped PVC joint onto your mega-long PVC pole. No need to glue it – just slip it snugly onto the end. Wad up some tinfoil around the base of one of your tree branches and stick the tin foil end into one side of the PVC “T”. For my “arm branches”, I snapped of thin limbs that were about 4-5 feet long and had some spindly little twigs at the end.
Step 2
Seal the tinfoil-twig-wad into the PVC pipe with some generous layers of masking tape (as pictured, and then some!)
Step 3
Wrap masking tape all the way up your branches, and over the little twigs at the end. Do a crumply, messy job of it so that everything looks a bit skeletal and creepy. No smooth corpse arms – we want that rotten bone look! I was lucky enough to have 3 twigs at the end of this first “arm branch”, so I only had to attach two fingers. To attache fingers, I simply snapped off some curly willow branch pieces (regular little twigs would work, as well), and taped them onto the “hand” to finish the finger arrangement. I taped and tweaked each taped-twig finger until I had a ghastly, spindly hand. Perfect, mwahaha!
Repeat the arm + finger process for the other side.
Step 4
Now that you’ve got super creepy arms protruding from your PVC pipe on either side, it’s time to fashion a torso. To create the shape, rip off some tinfoil and begin wrapping + wadding it around the top of the pole, between the two arms. Add tinfoil wads and pack everything down until you get a satisfactory torso shape that tapers off at the waist (as if our corpse was cut in half, ew!)
Step 5
Once you like your tinfoil torso shape, wrap it all around with masking tape (as in the picture for Step 5). Can you see this all starting to take shape?
Step 6
Wrap your foam skull in – you guessed it – more masking tape! What’s creepier than a bony skull? A rotting flesh skull, of course! Tape the skull up as in the picture, leaving the teeth exposed, and move on to the next step.
Step 7
Forming the neck for our corpse is quite easy! Take a stick that’s about a foot long, and stab it deep into the base of the skull, from the bottom. Wrap the stick in tinfoil and cover it with masking tape. This is looking creepier by the minute!
Step 8
Attach the corpse neck to the corpse body using even more masking tape. Nothing fancy about it – I just wedged mine down into the top of the torso and taped it liberally.
Step 9
Time to start painting! Grab a dark spray paint (either black or a chocolate brown), and give the eye sockets a quick spray.
Step 10
Now take your rotting/charred flesh caramel color, and spray the rest of the corpse. Try not to cover the teeth entirely. You can give them a light little dusting with the spray to make the teeth look rotten, but you still want that nice definition between the teeth to be there.
Step 11
Time to dress our disgusting scarecrow corpse in tattered rags! With scissors and your Goodwill sheets, create some messy robes for your Frankenstein monster. I found the middle of the sheet, cut a hole for the corpse’s head to go through, and then used the scissors to snip and tear around the edges of the fabric.
Step 12
Lift this hauntingly terrifying corpse high into the air on its tall pole, and stick it into the ground or a large bucket full of rocks (or cement, if you want to go the extra mile). I just dug a narrow hole in my yard and sunk the base of the PVC pipe into it, and that worked splendidly (if you don’t mind a hole in your yard!)
Shine some ghoulish light on your creation, maybe throw a fog machine at the base, and you’re done! Ready to do some serious frightening of your Halloween guests.
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