Period Graphics

Friday October 30th, 1936
A Halloween Party is being hosted at a wealthy household, and many rich and well known people have been invited to party the night away.
Sebastian Fayte, a charismatic but mediocre actor has attended the party dressed as a Pierrot.
A little tipsy off the expensive champagne provided at the party, Sebastian wanders into the bathroom strewn with ratty streamers and champagne flutes.
He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a cardboard Halloween themed party horn. Pondering the object for a moment, he holds it up to his lips, and points it towards his face in the mirror. He never even notices the figure creep into the room behind him.
As Sebastian blows into the horn… he’s stabbed between the shoulder blades! Blood comes spurting out of the horn, splattering over the mirror. The horn falls from his lips, and Sebastian falls to the floor dead as the figure slips back out to the party, just as quiet as before.
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For our first project of the year, we were asked to create a period accurate prop, complete with a story and setting. I decided to create a 1930s Halloween noise maker found in a crime scene.

When given the brief, I knew I wanted to make something Halloween related, but was unsure of the time period I wanted to work from. I started looking vintage Halloween party favors and candy on Ebay for inspiration. I found a few examples of 1930s party horns, and found halloweencollector.com which had a tag full of good Halloween horn references.

I had a lot of fun researching period accurate interiors, as well as Halloween and magic graphics at the time. The original party horns were made with lithography printing, and unfortunately I didn't have the time to recreate this. I did try to find a paper with a similar texture to the examples I found though. I do like how my final prop turned out, but would have preferred to hand print the graphics, and should have made the streamers out of a different material.