STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — For Staten Island filmmakers Jason and Michael Leavy, Halloween is a production unlike any other.
The brothers — co-founders of Fuzz on the Lens Productions, the Staten Island-based production company behind “Screamboat,” “STREAM” and the wildly popular “Terrifier” franchise — transform their parents’ house every October into a sprawling, movie-quality spectacle known as Nightmare at 25 Steele.
“It started when me and my brother were little kids. My mom was a huge fan of Halloween alongside my grandfather,” Jason told the Advance/SILive.com. “Each year, we’d build one life-sized horror icon with him, and it kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.”
When their grandfather died in 2005, the brothers decided to keep the tradition alive.
“We wanted to honor him,” he said. “He was really our entryway, along with my mom, into making horror films and doing everything horror.”
Over the last two decades, that small family project has grown into a full-scale horror installation that draws crowds from across the borough. The figures are built or customized by the brothers themselves, who “Frankenstein” mannequins together using masks, costumes and parts found online.
“We make them look really realistic,” Jason said. “That’s the way we always do it, like with our films, and we really want to put up that production value for people on Staten Island.”
Jason said the annual setup is also about rekindling that old Halloween spirit he remembers from childhood.
“Halloween used to be so big when we were kids,” he said. “We’ve seen a decline, which is kind of sad, because it’s a really great holiday if everyone partakes in it,” he said. “We wanted to give a new generation new memories to remember the holiday by — take that little spark from our childhood and give it to them.”
The planning starts early, but Jason says he never keeps things the same two years in a row. This season’s updates include a “Terrifier 2”-inspired Pale Girl figure and, of course, more references to Art the Clown.
Jason’s personal favorite, though, is the life-sized Annabelle doll from “The Conjuring,” made by the same team that built the movie version, The Scary Closet.
The basement of their parents’ home now doubles as a monster storage vault — “filled to the brim,” Jason said — but that’s not stopping them from thinking bigger. “We’re thinking about doing Christmas this year, too,” he teased.
The brothers are also keeping busy professionally: Fuzz on the Lens recently took home a Fangoria Chainsaw Award for Screamboat, and “Terrifier 4” and “STREAM 2” are already in development.
As for Nightmare at 25 Steele, Jason hinted that the display still has a few tricks up its sleeve. “Let’s just say it will be different on Halloween,” he said.
Nightmare at 25 Steele will run this Halloween season at 25 Steele Ave. in New Dorp on weeknights from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. and weekends from 6:30 to 10:30 p.m.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.silive.com ’
