Father and son spend months planning Halloween decorations on front lawn in Queens
NEW YORK -- At the corner of 63rd Avenue and 252nd Street in Little Neck, Queens a father-son tradition takes months of planning.
Steven and Cameron Gutmann began decorating their front lawn for Halloween about 10 years ago.
"It started with one or two things," Steven said. "It kept adding on, adding on, adding on."
It has since evolved into an elaborate collection of spooky statues and otherworldly animatronics, some of which are poised to pop out at passersby with the push of a remote control button.
Twelve-foot-tall skeletons tower over a cackling clown with a severed torso and a hyperrealistic witch.
In October, the display draws crowds day and night. But some keep their distance.
"We get hundreds if not a thousand people come by," Steven said.
"People actually try to avoid us we're so scary," Cameron said. "They actually go on the opposite side of the street."
Haunting the neighborhood takes commitment. Every year, the Gutmanns are often first in line for hard-to-get items.
"The minute they have it in stock, we're there the next morning to get it," Steven said.
The animatronics don't come cheap.
"Your average price now is at least $300," Cameron said.
The Gutmanns aren't the only ones willing to invest on Halloween.
According to the National Retail Federation's annual Halloween consumer survey, Americans plan spend a record $108.24 per person this year on costumes, candy, and decorations. Total Halloween spending is expected to climb to a record $12.2 billion.
Halloween wasn't always so commercial. Historians say it began as a night when the boundary was said to be blurred between the living and the dead.
"The holiday actually goes back about 2,000 years to an old Irish Celtic celebration called Samhain," horror writer and Halloween expert Lisa Morton said. "There was a veil between this world and an other world they believed in that was thinnest on Samhain night, and terrible things could cross over that night."
For Morton, it's no surprise that the ancient tradition has only expanded.
"It's interesting that it is a holiday that prods us to explore our fears," she said. "And it does that by asking us to explore our creativity as well."
It's creativity the Gutmanns share with their neighbors, to the undead to life.
"My favorite part about Halloween is just seeing people's reactions," Cameron said.
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