I've found it really interesting to watch how decorating has changed in my lifetime. My brother and I started decorating our house for Halloween in the late 70s. We would make a scarecrow each year (stuffed with used computer paper - the really wide stuff where each sheet was connected to the next and folded z-style - that my father brought home from work), and would arrange some fake spiders, bugs and one rubber snake inside the front door near where we kept the candy bowl. One of the rubber spiders had a suction cup for attaching to a wall, so I would tape a thread to its back that ran up to the middle of the doorway and then lightly use the suction cup to attach to the the door frame. After a few minutes, the suction cup would let go and the spider would swing on the thread. It was very fun when this would happen when their were trick-or-treaters picking out their candy, and the sudden movement from the spider would make them really jump! At that point, at least in our town, in seemed the only houses that had somewhat scary decorations, were being done by kids and with homemade decorations, such as cob webs made of polyfill. I remember one house having a cassette player outside with scary noises playing, obviously made by children.
As the 80s and 90s progressed, there started to be commercially available decorations - I remember when the webs for decorating bushes became popular. I get still get I kick out of the homemade decorations. When my daughter was little, I made a "
Mr. Bottle Bones" skeleton from milk jugs. She loved that skeleton and would drag him all over the house for weeks. We still hang him in the trees to flutter in the late October breezes.
There used to be a house in town that decorated for every holiday, but Halloween was the biggest display. They added something new every year. I was very impressed with a vertical coffin that had a skeleton head and chest rise up to come into view of the open portion of the coffin, and then sink back down. My family was very sad when we saw that house was for sale, as that was the end of fabulous displays there.