The Child - A Halloween Horror Trick Idea

The idea was inspired by this email from MC.

[Y]our return to the polaroid printer (which I loved at the original time you posted it and still love) reminded me of something which occurred to me after you suggested getting a photo of a child in a timeless outfit, creepy stare and prediction laid out. I don't recall that you've wrote about this before but there's a slight extra option which would also be available for some people who are in a similar position as me - I have a nephew who looks uncannily like I did at that young age so with some expired film or a smartphone filter, I can have a bespoke childhood photograph of me and 'this weird picture I just kept drawing over and over until we moved house' (or whatever). 

As a potentially much bigger project, I've also been looking at my own actual childhood photos and thinking about whether there is room to start photoshopping something into the background at select points at different years - "so you'll see in the photo there's a framed picture above my brother with an abstract design, almost like a pentagram right? Well my parents keep saying that they don't know what must have happened to it and can't remember who even gave it to them, but I've spotted it here on that library book cover in this school shot as well as on this guy's t-shirt when we were on holiday". With some planning, it could be begun to be included in real photos over a period of time so that those photos find their way onto the spectator's own camera roll. It'd be overkill to try and force it into countless photos but a sense of "isn't that weird, such a unique design which keeps cropping up?" could be an interesting positioning. —MC

Those ideas (which I think are great) got me thinking about photos and predictions and led to the idea for this performance piece that I’ll simply call…

The Child

You need something like Promystic’s Color Match or the Picasso Pro app. (That’s this trick, if you’re unaware.)

You’d offer to show your friend a trick. Have her color in the picture. When she’s done she has a kid wearing a blue hat, a red-striped shirt, green shorts, yellow sneakers, orange socks. You haven’t seen her picture yet. You pull out your prediction… and it couldn’t be more wrong. You didn’t get anything right. You ask, “How’d I do?” and she’s like, “Eh, not great.”

She turns the picture around and you’re like, “Damn, what the hell was I thinking. Wait that’s—” And you pull away, with fear in your eyes.

She’s uncertain what’s going on. You’re speechless for a moment. “Sorry,” you say. “It’s nothing. Uhm… never mind. Do you want to watch that movie or…?”

Maybe you try to move past whatever just happened. But after a few minutes you realize you can’t.

“Okay… I guess I should just show you.”

You bring your friend over to a picture of you with your family on the boardwalk in New Jersey when you were 8. Maybe the photo is hanging on the wall, or framed on an end-table. In the photograph, off to the side, there is a kid. He’s wearing a blue hat, a red-striped shirt, green shorts, yellow sneakers, orange socks.

“Okay, weird, right? But who cares? It’s probably just a coincidence, right? But check this out….”

You grab a photo album from your bookshelf and open it and flip a few pages, until you get to a photo of your graduation party. There, in the back… it’s a bit of a blur…is a kid running. It’s hard to make out any details but the blue hat, red-striped shirt, green shorts and yellow shoes are fairly clear. “This was 10 years after the last photograph. You’re probably thinking it’s a different kid in a similar outfit. I would have thought that too.”

You flip to another picture. It’s a group photo from your company picnic, taken last year. There’s the kid, same outfit, hand raised as if waving hello, a creepy smile on his face.

“This is the most recent one. But it was actually the first picture where I really noticed the kid. He felt familiar to me but I didn’t know why. I asked around the office and no one knew whose kid it was. Then, a few months ago, I noticed the kid in the boardwalk photo. I didn’t think too much of it originally. I just thought it was similar kids in similar outfits. But then I found that graduation party picture. And flipping through other photos at my parent’s place, I saw other pictures with that kid in it. Not as clear as these pictures, but maybe a flash of a red-striped shirt or the yellow sneakers. And then you color in the exact same kid here? It’s really starting to freak me out. When I showed my mom the photographs she said there was a neighbor boy who died in weird circumstances on the day I was born and that-”

<BAM BAM BAM>

A violent rattling shakes the sliding-glass door leading to the backyard. You and your friend look over… and there’s the kid pounding on the glass!

How dope would that be? And it doesn’t matter if your spectator knows immediately that you’re setting them up for something. In fact, I’d prefer they did. I’m not trying to pull a practical joke, I’m trying to create an immersive fiction. That’s what I go for in most of my “big” effects. The spectator knows it’s not real, but the story of the effect itself still captures them.

Ultimately, it’s just a prediction trick with the prediction removed. It’s wouldn’t be that complicated to set up. You would need to have access to a younger kid who would play along with this. And you’d need someone who’s good a photoshop and can put the kid into a few old pictures of yours. (If you don’t know anyone, you could probably find someone online who would do it for $20.)

If I had Promystic’s Color Match, I would definitely do this. (As I said, you could do it with Picasso Pro as well, which is much more cost effective. But I’d prefer to do it with physical markers and paper.)

If you end up doing any creepy photo stuff this Halloween season, send along the pics and let me know.