For this year’s Haunt Forum prop challenge, when they announced that it had to be something to go in your Halloween graveyard but not a tombstone prop, I was stumped!

Then I thought, “Grave Flowers“! Then I thought, “That just wouldn’t be a spooky enough prop“! And Then I thought, “Yah but, what if the flowers were ferocious , carnivorous man eating plants“?

Hmmmm… Now the home haunt frontal lobes were kicking in! A little shop of horror plant with a purpose – to keep the buried skeleton undisturbed!

From those seminal prop building ideas my Grave Guardian Halloween prop was born!

Spooky Monster Bio

The Grave Guardian is an enchanted plant which powerful sorcerers’ use to protect the resting place of their bones.

Any Halloween witch or warlock knows that a little ground wizard cranium & teeth guarantees the success of a potion or hex and all the best amulets and talismans are carved from their rune covered bones.

Hence the need for the guardians so as to keep their earthly remains intact because resurrection spells will only work if the skeleton is complete.

Anyone straying too close to these nasty horrors of horticulture are likely to be eaten alive or at the very least succumb its venomous poison.

How we built this simple Halloween prop for our home haunt…

We started with empty pop bottles! We carefully cut a 2 litre into even rectangles so that there was wide ones on the top side and narrow ones on the bottom.

Measurements weren‘t really that important it was just to give the blank template of what would become the creepy petals of our monster flower prop.

Once the blank petals were cut out we drew a design onto the wide strips and then further cut out the designs.

With the petal cut out of the prop the next thing we did was carefully use an BBQ lighter to melt the petals into scary sinister shapes. Of course we wore gloves for this because sometimes we had to bend and help the prop take the shape we wanted.

After all it has to look right for Halloween haunting doesn’t it?!

Forget about the blue paint job – I changed my mind. Anyhow, after the outer petals were shaped into scary twisted fingers we then cut a hole in the middle of the bottom with tin snipes (because that plastic is super hard there)

Then making slits near the pour spout allowed us to slip the narrow strip through. Once they were through we bent the back and melted them again so that they would become tendrils.

Next, using a hack saw we carefully cut the bottom of a stubby pop bottle and then cut between the bumps again with the tin snips. (man it is scary how hard that plastic is!

With the bottom of the bottle open up this way we then used the lighter to melt and shape what would become the inner part of our Monster Flower prop.

If you look close you can see that we cut off another stubby bottom and shrank it a little with the heat and then placed that into the throat of the monster.

Next we took a 500ml bottle, cut it down the middle from the bottom and cut out pointy “leaves“ which we melted and shaped again with the heat. We left the neck of the bottle intact so we could just slip it over the stalk of our monster.

Add a left over piece of black plastic tubing melted into shape to support the plants scary head and to hold up with these new leaves and the prop was almost finished.

Paint the whole thing up with black, greys and whites while leaving the stinging tips of the petals red took care of the paint job for our horror plant.

The last touch, because we like our internal infernal glow look we popped and red LED light into the prop and the menacing monster glows a deadly red as warning to any would be grave robbers!

More Pictures

More Haunted Halloween Props by Screaming Scarecrow.

Thanks for Looking.
Hope you enjoy this prop how to.
Cheers Screaming Scarecrow.