Zombie Infested House (Using Only a Projector!)

Want to impress all your neighbours during Halloween? All you need is a projector, a Raspberry Pi and/or laptop, and fifteen minutes!

Halloween is getting more and more popular in the Netherlands. My son and his friends love it. Dressed up as devils, mummies and vampires they go to each other’s houses where the parents dispense candy.

Houses where candy is given out are decorated. It’s not a competition, but if it were, last year our house would have won. Using a projector, we made it look like zombies were walking around in our house.

All you need to turn your house into a zombie-infested mansion is this:

• Projector
• Raspberry Pi (or laptop)
• Curtains

• Speaker (optional)

White curtains work best, but they need to be at least quite light and not too thick so you can see the back-projected video from the front. Alternatively you could hang up white sheets.

I used a Raspberry Pi running mediaplayer OSMC.

The video that we back-projected on the white curtains I found on YouTube after a quick search. It's the one titled ‘Zombies Video Projection One Hour Loop’ :-)

The great thing about that video is that the zombies walk past, as if they really are passing by. It's quite funny (one zombie is pushing a shopping cart for instance) but also not too funny. Some of the other videos we found were deemed too scary by my son, others not scary enough.

I put the projector on a table in the room and put the video on a loop. For extra effect we put a Bluetooth-speaker with scary noises under a plant in the garden. The noises came from another YouTube-video (look for ‘scariest zombie sounds’) which I played from my laptop.

I only found out after writing this Instructable, that this idea is far from new (I like to think I was the first to think of it in this country ;-). More suggestions for videos and a different setup can be found in this Instructable.

It was really creepy! We got a lot of compliments from impressed kids and parents (some of whom kept watching in wonder, even when their kids had collected the candy and wanted to go on).

Some of the children asked how it worked and wanted to come in and look. I told them “I just invited a few friends” and “Don’t do it! They'll eat you!” :-)

This year my son wants to use the same projection trick, but then with monsters in Minecraft instead of the video.

So it was a big success, especially considering how little effort it took.