Scare Us With Your Best Dallas Halloween Decorations, Score a Chance To Win Tickets to Screams

At the Observer, we love entrails, zombies, buckets o' blood, etc. as much as the next ghoul and/or teenager. That's why we were mighty disappointed last year when Dallas artist Steven Novak let us know he would not be filling up the yard of his M Streets home with dismembered bodies, barrels of entrails and rivers of fake blood as he had the previous two Halloweens.

Now we're jonesing for some gore, and we're hoping you — with a little incentive provided by the kind and scary folks at Screams Halloween Theme Park in Waxahachie — can help us out.

Got some Halloween decorations in your yard that would make Cthulhu himself raise his tentacles and say, "Whoa, man, y'all need to take that down notch"? Or maybe one of your neighbors does. We don't care, all we want are photos. So here's the deal: If you see some good, elaborate Halloween yard decorations in the Dallas area, snap a photo and send it to Music & Culture Editor Eva Raggio before midnight on Sunday, Oct. 15.

She'll go through them and pick her top three faves, and those senders will each receive a packet of four tickets to Screams, including fast passes to shorten your time in line. Please include the street address of where the decorations are located so we can verify.
Screams, by the way, isn't just any old haunted house attraction. It's five of them, along with food, pubs, stage shows and activities including ax-throwing (presumably not at one another or the actors) and Scary-Oke (as if karaoke isn't gruesome enough). It's open 7 p.m.–1 a.m. Friday and Saturday nights through Oct. 28, and is located at 2511 FM 66 in Waxahachie. It's also for people age 16 and up. So ... you know ... chop-chop, time's flying.

And we suppose we should say the decorations don't have to be demonic or bloody, just creative and interesting. So if you happened to go all in on something cute like a Barbie theme, go ahead and send us a photo (though to be honest, the addition of a little Carrie-like pigs blood couldn't hurt your chances.)