Boo-Ray for Hollywood

When he made his first film, “Forced Landing on Planet Eggatron,” Hoyt Yeatman created characters out of blown-out eggs with pipe-cleaner limbs.

He was only 8. Now his work is mostly digital.

But the visual effects expert, who won an Oscar in 1989 for “The Abyss,” still jumps at any opportunity to tinker.

So he turns to Halloween for his hands-on fix, transforming the front of his Tudor home in Camarillo into the playfully eerie Wildwood Haunts.

His is not your average store-bought decorating affair.

Ghouls spring 16 feet into the air. Disembodied heads melt away into the mist. Flames lap at his windowpanes. Knock on the front door, and a Tyrannosaurus rex roars.

One of the perks of living in the land of movies and TV is seeing the pros bring their talents home for the holiday. Each year, the Halloween junkies can’t keep from outdoing themselves.

Yeatman dreams and designs all year long. By August, he’s wiring and welding.

In the sweltering last gasps of summer in Sherman Oaks, Rick Polizzi, animation producer for “The Simpsons,” is at work too, scaring up the essentials for his skeleton carnival, Boney Island.

And in Santa Monica, sound effects editor Adam Johnston, who goes for the screams, is recording new chain saw growls and blood-curdling shrieks, and he’s prowling junkyards for windshield wiper motors to make his monsters twitch and lurch.

It isn’t about hauling treasures home from prop shops. The joy is in the imagining and the making.

Yeatman uses nothing that isn’t readily available. He haunts the Home Depot for parts he can “hot rod.”

He and his wife, Giselle, got married underwater in a scuba ceremony. Their living room contains not just a shiny golden Oscar but also a large supermarket-style candy machine in the shape of a green monster.

“I guess I’ve always been a little kid. I’ve never really had to grow up,” said the still boyish-looking Yeatman, 49, who gets his 6-year-old son, “Little Hoyt,” to help dream up ideas.

For Wildwood Haunts, Yeatman commandeers the family laundry room, squeezing in a dozen amplifiers, a computer and piles of thick wire. He hauls a giant air compressor into the garage to pump life into his creations. The closet in the master bedroom becomes a makeshift recording studio.

“My hobby is my profession, and this is just kind of an extension thereof,” Yeatman said.

Polizzi said he would have been an animator if he had had a talent for drawing. On “The Simpsons,” his job is organizational -- to ensure that all the animation comes together for each episode.

On Halloween, he lives his dreams, scattering his lawn with his own imaginary scenes. Each has characters, dialogue and movement. They’re more funny than scary. He’s not out to frighten.

“They’re like single cartoon panels,” said the 46-year-old father of Hannah, 13, and Bryce, 8.

Drivers routinely slam on the brakes when they see skeletons scampering all around the Polizzis’ brightly lighted property on an otherwise very quiet suburban street.

To enter Boney Island, Polizzi’s skeleton take on Coney Island, people walk onto the lawn between columns of giant bones. They’re immediately welcomed by a skeleton barker, who sits in a booth, draped in tickets.

“Welcome to fabulous Boney Island, the eighth wonder of the world!” the skeleton says.

Before him is a frenetic and eye-bulging scene.

Skeletons perch in the trees, playing trumpets. They climb on one another’s shoulders to reach the roof. In the carnival’s batting cage, a skeleton swats at flying bats. Another bowls with his own skull.

By the front door, members of a bony band called The Skeletones play a bone xylophone, a scythe harp and an ax guitar as pumpkins with moving eyes and mouths sing along from the front window. Spiders bob up and down from a thick web in a tree, spouting corny one-liners, including “Help me kill the Orkin man.”

Above the roof, in Polizzi’s piece de resistance, a skeleton floats back and forth in a jack-o-lantern hot-air balloon.

Polizzi, like Yeatman, doesn’t rely on fancy props. His mainstay, the plastic skeleton, is an $8 buy.

He has about 100 of them, mostly identical. But after he’s hooked them up to motors and synced them to sound, each somehow seems distinct.

“Someone just told me how much he liked all their different expressions,” he said, “which was really great because they’re all the same.”

Last year, thousands went to see Polizzi’s work. This year, he’d like to see thousands more.

“It takes so long to do it all, I just want everybody on Earth to see it,” he said. (He lives at 4602 Morse Ave.)

Six years ago, Polizzi started out small. Each year he has expanded his creation. Last year, his family spent about $6,000 on materials, lights, food for those who come to help and other expenses. Their closets weren’t big enough to fit all their skeletons. So they rented a storage space that’s 10 feet square by 12 feet high.

“It’s packed. It’s just packed,” Polizzi said.

In Santa Monica, Johnston said he’s been there, and he had to scale back.

For years, he used to offer an elaborate, terrifying maze, with a combination of live actors, mechanized monsters and macabre sounds. Thousands of people went through it.

But props piled up. The loft in his garage overflowed. The shed he built for the overflow overflowed.

Now Johnston, 40, limits his grave diggers and body bags to the frontyard, where a heart beats under a freshly dug grave, a ghoul holds a head over a bucket to catch the blood and unseen creatures screech and groan endlessly from the bushes. Johnston saves the backyard, where he once had the maze, for a private Halloween party.

“I kept doing more and more and more. And I loved getting totally engaged in it. But where I got discouraged was the teardown. It was huge,” said Johnston. “It was too huge.”