Make a Head in a Jar

Everybody's seen severed hands, rubber spiders, and legions of undead roaming around on Halloween. But how many people have a severed head collection ready to greet ghoulish guests? Enter the Head in a Jar! We'll show you a few ways to give the dead a window seat to the festivities.

Steps

Pickled People

  1. Find a suitable jar. It should be about head sized—about 5 gallons (or 5 liters). Jars that size are often used for storage containers or water-cooler bottles. You can find them new in most retail stores that have kitchen supplies, or try Goodwill or Salvation Army.
    • Aside from not being leaky, quality is not important: the cheaper it looks, the better! The imperfections in the glass or plastic will distort features and be extra creepy looking.
  2. Find a head. You could try grave robbing, for that perfectly rotten look. However, that's generally frowned upon in civilized society, and it smells pretty bad, too.
    • Look for a picture of a corpse head. Do a search on Google for "face texture" or "zombie texture" and take your pick. If you start with a regular face texture, you can use a photo editor such as Photoshop to make it truly horrific. Give the skin and lips a bluish tint, add gashes and rot, and other signs of decay. Be creative!
  3. Or, scan your own face. First determine the direction your scanner scans. Most go from right to left. If so, place your right ear on the scanner bed, and start the scan. As the scan light moves across the bed, rotate your head so that it stays illuminated.
    • Here's a tip: if you scan at a higher resolution, the scan will be much slower, making it easier to track the scanner as it moves.
  4. Print it out. Once you've got your face texture ready, edited, and prepped for pickling, scale the face to a realistic size and then print it out.
    • Measure your eye-to-eye distance, then scale the drawing to the same approximate size. Eyes are somewhere between one and two inches apart, for most people.
  5. Slash your face. With deadly sharp scissors, cut your face out. You may laminate the paper to make it a little more rigid, or simply print it out on cardstock or a heavy paper.
    • For extra creepiness, get some fake eyeballs, and put them into the eye sockets...or let them float freely.
  6. Bottle your head. Roll the face up and drop it into the jar. Stuff the jar with paper so that the picture is flattened against the inner surfaces of the glass.
  7. Not gross enough yet? Add the hair. You can use theatrical hair like the kind you'll find in a Halloween store, but it may look too fake. You can also use real hair that you can probably get for free, right from the floor of your local barber shop or beauty salon.
    • Stuff the hair into the jar so that it looks messy and rotten. Work it around with a screwdriver to get the desired amount of grossness.
  8. Seal the jar. You do not what that head getting out, terrorizing you and your family in the middle of the night.
  9. Display your dead head proudly. For a final touch place it somewhere visible so that it will creep people out.

Formaldehyde Blues

  1. Find a suitable jar. For this method, you'll want one with a wider mouth. As with the paper mask version, it should be about 5 liters.
  2. Find a suitable mask. Visit your local Halloween or costume shop. Get a rubber zombie mask—the more realistic, the better.
    • Politician masks are good to use, too, but they can be more frightening than zombies: use with caution.
  3. Stuff the mask into the jar. Backfill the mask with a balloon by putting it mostly into the jar, behind the mask, then inflating it until the mask is pressed up against the glass.
  4. Add accessories. Drop in a couple fake eyes, and some human hair, and fill the whole thing with water. You can add a drop or two of yellow and green food coloring to get that lovely formaldehyde hue. Add a little garden-variety dirt and shredded brown recycled paper towel to simulate decomposition.
  5. Display where it's most likely to gross people out.

There's an App For That

  1. Go to the Apple App Store. Search for "Futurama Head-in-a-Jar Creator," and click on the thumbnail.
  2. Download the app. It's free—all you need is an iPhone.
  3. Make heads. Make them in four species, all in spill-proof jars. Enjoy!

Things You'll Need

  • Jar
  • Printer
  • Laminate/laminator
  • Hair
  • Scissors
  • iPhone (optional)

Warnings

  • If you place this near your front porch, keep a hose handy to clean up after weak-stomached trick-or-treaters.

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Sources and Citations

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