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With lights and status-symbol skeletons, these suburban Chicago Halloween decorations are all-in this year

Nanci Gonzalez wants you to drive by her house, gawk, gasp and gag. She wants you to slow your car and take a longer look. Even better, she wants you to park and get out and stand in front of her yard and simply notice. Take your time. She spent most of the spring and all of summer preparing her Halloween display. She lost her job at the Original Mr. Beef in April. The very next day, to stave off the sadness, to keep busy, she went into her garage and began building, and building, and building. Using polystyrene foam, she built a mausoleum. Over the arch, she carved “Talbot,” for Larry Talbot, the American who returned to his ancestral Wales only to be bitten by a wolf. He became the Wolf Man of the 1941 Universal classic. He emerges now snarling from a makeshift crypt on the 300 block of Edinburgh Drive in Lockport, a monster-size animatronic lycanthrope.

He was a splurge; he cost a couple of hundred dollars.

But most of everything else on her lawn, Gonzalez either had or made: The bars fitted over her windows, the ivy that slinks through those bars, the bubbling cauldron, the crumbling tomb stones. When it bugged her that her ordinary ranch home made for a mundane moors, she wrapped the front of the house in a gray plastic scrim. And when her husband wondered where they would store all this stuff she was building, she told him she’d find a place, then went back to building.

“There is so much involved to create just the impression of something scary,” she told me.

What’s there now, on her lawn, through Halloween, is a temporary art installation.

What’s there is personal expression, full of thought and craft, cryptic detailing and a hefty populist attitude towards subject. One of her ghouls even wears Gonzalez’s wedding dress. She tried to dye it black for the display; when it came out closer to an eerie light purple, she worked with it.

Walk your neighborhood.

This is the Golden Age of Halloween Lawns.

You would call it holiday decorating.

But really, it’s sculpture.

Thank your local hardware store, thank tutorials on YouTube, thank the popularity of crafting, thank the pandemic for freeing up our spare time and Halloween itself for offering a fresh channel of invention to anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of electronics. Thank DIY guilds like the Chicago Haunt Builders for sharing knowledge and encouraging their members (Gonzalez herself is one). What’s sitting on Chicago-area front lawns right now is a kind of middle-class folk art, one that makes the most of the only blank canvas that a lot of suburbanites already own: their lawns.

In Streamwood, Steve Coupal and his wife Chrystal Gordon are on their fifth Halloween lawn. Coupal, like many ambitious display designers, has a technical background — he’s an IT guy. Others I spoke with about their lawns were contractors, electricians, engineers. Amid the usual animatronic monsters, Coupal had a series of pixelated portraits, of a vampire, skeleton, demon and zombie, each made with LED lights, each made from dozens of small holes drilled into corrugated plastic. The lights are then synced to music heard through a low-watt radio signal. (As you drive up to their home on the 1000 block of Meadow Court, another LED sign gives the frequency.)

Yes, there’s a gargantuan tarantula that he bought at Home Depot, but the barrels of glowing toxic waste that the bug is feeding on, he and his wife created those, and the waste — in fact, they made the whole diorama, a kind of Field Museum display from an alternative universe. “Ingenuity is what brings you to this, not buying stuff,” he said. Home Depot also sells a large skeleton horse-drawn carriage, for instance, but Coupal made one instead, using tractor parts and patio furniture.

Again and again, the creators of some of the best lawns out there note an item or two they purchased from Home Depot or Menards, but always with a sheepish apology, as if they were letting you down somehow. An Oak Lawn man smoked in the street before his small home on the 5100 block of 101st Street, pleased with the neighborhood traffic, the ebb and flow in front of his wall of skulls. His giant spider? Oh, Home Depot, he said with a slight wince, and with reason: Behind him stood a full-scale recreation of a sewer that he made, for the murderous Pennywise of “It.”

Drive around, you’ll see: As with any medium, there is a redundancy to Halloween lawns.

A lot of that sameness is a byproduct of hardware stores and the ubiquity of shops like Spirit Halloween, each selling $100-plus animatronics. But then, like any medium, there are materials and there is what is made with those materials. Outside his home on the 4100 block of Williams Street in Downers Grove, James Schiffer has — he took a long, calculating look — around $60,000 in animatronics and other props on display, from a three-headed dog belching smoke to a knife-wielding tike on a bike. But what makes it more than just putting money on the screen, so to speak, is the circus tent he built to tie it together, blotting out his home and replacing it with a freak show.

The building block of most Halloween lawns, though, is simpler: The humble skeleton, variously posed and decomposed, straddling mailboxes and garages and lampposts. There are so many skeletons on Illinois lawns at the moment — as opposed to the ones inside our closets — my four-year-old chirped from the backseat the other day that she saw a woman sitting inside the trunk of her car. Another Halloween skeleton, I assumed — or rather, later, I hoped. Not far from Schiffer’s home, on the 4500 block of Fairview Avenue in Downers Grove, there’s a remarkable display titled “A Pirate’s Life For Me,” the work of the Wood family who lives there. Using planks of fencing, they made half of a pirate ship, and they manned it with more than two dozen pirate skeletons, who are stepping lively, avoiding the kraken tentacles that curl out of the lawn. The whole thing is then capped with a shimmery blue light to approximate the steady roll of waves.

Just as playful, though not residential, are the scores of skeletons of Highwood, on the North Shore. Instead of the town’s annual pumpkin festival (canceled because of the pandemic), its commercial strip was given over to dozens of skeletons, which are now dressed as Batman and Iron Man, repairing cars in an automotive shop, ironing each other at a dry cleaners; there’s even an insanely obsessive parody of “Wizard of Oz” that had a rainbow made from painted skeletons.

No surprise then, the most sought Halloween lawn decor this year is a 12-foot skeleton that was sold by Home Depot, though now largely sold out from coast to coast, a prop so overused it reads in many home displays more like a status symbol. (It costs $299 and looks like it.) I came across only one house that knew how to make such as ostentatious prop work: That’s the Carol Stream house of Jim and Dawn Slanker, on the 300 block of Canyon Trail. They have two 12-footers, one lurking in the back, another draped with torn sheets and topped with a pumpkin head.

Their display, a masterpiece, totally worth the trip, is so clever, fun and rich in surprises like that, you barely notice the towering skeletons at first. Actually, you don’t even notice their house. It’s really two displays broken up by their driveway, held together by the sidewalk that runs through. There doesn’t seem to be a theme but rather a steady reminder of Halloween classics. A ghost with red possum eyes glides slowly inside a crypt. Skeletons rest half-buried in the lawn, their heads beside them. Pumpkin-headed children dance in a circle, and when a casket rattles violently, lean in close and there’s a clip from Monty Python: “I’m not dead yet!” A third huge skeleton sits heavily and unmovable, until it stands, rising to 12 feet itself. Their best effect is not even intentional: Nearly everything in the gruesome garden wiggles, jumps or lurches, often with the hiss of a piston or clank of metal, only to reset, sweetly reminiscent of the haunted rides in old amusement parks.

It’s charming, I told Jim.

“It’s supposed to be spooky,” he mumbled.

Slanker, another IT guy, began decorating 14 years ago. He started with painted wood and monsters made of leaf bags. These days he welds and his wife sews and sculpts many of the monsters. “It’s like a dark ride?” he asked. “OK, I get that. My wife and I are boomers. This is the Halloween we grew up on. For us, Halloween was a mood, a sense of spooky, not just … gore.”

Lawn-peep long enough and you’ll see: There’s a lot of gore out there. But the bloodier lawns also come across as some of the lazier lawns, and the most thoughtlessly crowded. I saw a house in Schaumburg with heads on pikes and a medical table strewn with severed body parts; I passed one in Oak Forest that, along with mannequins of Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers and other fictional killers, had a John Wayne Gacy headstone. I wondered if it gets the kind of ewww the homeowners intended. Not to mention, what is creepy or scary about a lawn so cluttered with zombies, axe murderers, body parts and buckets of entrails that the most frightening thing on display is the credit-card debt? Apparently there is no Marie Kondo of local Halloween displays.

As for Halloween inflatables: Kids love them, so let’s keep them, but homeowners buy too many of them, and they melt into your grass like the Blob, and like many things kids love, they’re horrible.

However, there are homes that compose their lawns and know what they want to say: There’s a lawn on a dead-end in west suburban Roselle (on Ardmore Avenue), bathed in a green glow, with a palpable understanding of simple composition, of upstage and downstage, a pumpkin scarecrow with a Micheal Jordan wingspan offers a backdrop to a headless horseman leading skeleton pallbearers in the front. There’s a Schaumburg home (on the 1000 block of Aegean Drive) with such affection for movie classics, its blood-drenched Carrie mannequin stands before a picture window and inside the home owners have cast a red light against a gently waving piece of fabric, to suggest flames.

Perhaps what was so jarring about that John Wayne Gacy headstone was that the horrors on our lawns right now tend to be classic and supernatural. You might think that a pandemic would offer inspiration to haunters, but after a couple of weeks of peeping, I saw only one COVID-cell monster on a Des Plaines lawn and another house in North Aurora with a sign reading “This Home Has Been Quarantined” (stamped with a CDC logo). There’s also a Wayne Avenue home in Andersonville with its own pirate ship featuring cameos from a cardboard Kamala Harris, Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Joe Biden (who wears an eyepatch). But generally, the scariest politics on lawns are campaign signage.

For the record, should you head out to admire what your neighbors have created, the best local Halloween lawn peeping this year — that is, the most decorated homes clustered within a short distance of each other — is around Schaumburg and Oak Lawn. (The Chicago Haunt Builders website is a good place to plan a trip.) Make no mistake, though a handful of Chicago neighborhoods are no slouches when it comes to decorating — Andersonville, Chatham, Edgebrook, Gold Coast — this is a suburban art, dictated by wide lawns and home ownership.

It’s also somewhat driven by taste, class and the personality of a place. In the working-class enclaves of the south suburbs, there’s a congenial, welcoming festival atmosphere in front of some homes; its owners clearly want anyone and everyone to stop and chat. On the North Shore, however, not only are full-blown displays rare, they’re modest. My favorite is in the otherwise sparsely decorated suburb of Winnetka. Drive along Sheridan Road into the ravines of Hubbard Woods and at 1000 Sheridan, you will pass a steep wooded incline where, dangling from trees, are sheeted white ghosts. It’s an elegant effect, delivering an unnerving shiver, particularly when headlights cross the tree line and you catch a glimpse of apparitions floating in their blueish glows.

Darkness serves a Halloween lawn.

Trees do, too. And a neighbor’s empty driveway. A dead end. A cul-de-sac. A stalk of long grass waving in an October wind. A pair of simple green eyes hung perfectly inside an attic window. There’s a home in La Grange Park with a single plastic pumpkin grinning on a large dark lawn, and I stopped here to admire it for far longer than I did at those homes dressed to resemble bloodbaths.

Again, it’s sculpture, or at least a kind of environmental performance art.

Either way, Halloween after Halloween, lawn after lawn, zombie after zombie, it’s a practice that’s getting increasingly interesting. “I don’t know if it’s actually an art yet but it is valuable. We all need an escape right now,” Gonzalez of Lockport said. “I don’t judge someone’s display. Even the most crowded ones, the ones that just throw everything on the front lawn — even those people are sharing a love of Halloween. Kudos to them. But have you seen the 12-foot skeletons?”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com