14 DAY TRIAL // Halloween is one of the best holidays of the year, when we think about its creative potential. Every year, a group of college students join efforts to build their own spooky place in which they invite all the community members to spend a frightening Halloween.
For five years, the participants contributed to create a haunted maze located in Long Beach, California, but this year the entire event reflected an eco-friendly attitude.
Instead of using virgin materials or whatever they could get to create and decorate the maze, this year the students chose to exploit the potential of items which otherwise would have ended up in landfills.
Recycling apparently goes hand in hand with the Halloween spirit, since they managed to rely their project on up to 90% recycled materials, which helped design the 2,500-square-foot maze.
According to the young people involved in this strategy, even trash can mean and worth something, from an artist's point of view.
The participants put their imagination to work and managed to surprise a significant numbers of guests with 10 amazing rooms which were given the appearance of a graveyard, a spooky barn and a slaughterhouse, populated by horrifying creatures such as vampires, zombies and clowns.
Going through the garbage seems to stimulate the students' creativity. They managed to reuse an abandoned creepy-looking dentists' chair and dozens of other reused wrappers and tarps to manufacture decorations.
The maze had walls made out of shipping pallets which were thrown out.
“If you see something on the side of the road and want to be creative, pick it up and do something with it. You can turn trash into anything, honestly. You clean it up and you can turn it into an experience like a massive haunted house if you want,” declared Katie Transue, a Long Beach City College biology student, for the LA Times.
The students managed to show the public opinion that Halloween isn't only about creating tonnes of trash. It's also an exciting opportunity of exploiting its creative potential.