6 Halloween Pranks for Sociopaths With Unlimited Budgets

Look closely -- that's not two dudes walking side-by-side -- it's one dude being stalked by his own shadow. What you're seeing is a Bristol, England, art installation that records a random pedestrian's movements from hidden streetlight cameras and then projects the recording on the ground by the next passerby. The result looks like someone trying to beat a high score in Mario Kart, only instead of the spirit of friendly competition, they're racing against an actual spirit who presumably has no interest in friendship and is concerned only with the competition between God and the Devil to capture the most terrestrial souls before the sun burns out and the Earth explodes. These mobile Peter Pan tributes are specifically installed in minimally traveled side streets, just to make sure that anyone who experiences a ghost shadow is utterly alone when they become paralyzed with panicked confusion.

FarrowsCreative
"Lights! Camera! Shit your pants!"

It's called the Personal Surveillance Identity Prosthetic, a 3D-printed mask designed in protest to Chicago's recent pledge to have cameras equipped with facial recognition software on every city block within the next two years. Along with tricking security cameras into believing the wearer is someone else, the prosthetic doubles as an effective tool in teaching kids to believe in Android Satan.

Leo Selvaggio
"01001001 00100000 01000001 01001101 00100000
01010100 01001000 01000101 00100000 01010110 01001111 01001001 01000100"

That's right -- the creator of the mask is encouraging people to casually wear this thing out on the street, instead of more traditional (read: less insane) identity-obscuring clothing like sunglasses or hooded sweatshirts, which means we might someday see a Chicago populated by a terror army of husky Jeremy Renners.

Leo Selvaggio
The only thing more disturbing than the masks is the fact that you're more than a little turned on by this.

Well, to be more precise, it's paper that's being illuminated by 360-degree projection-mapping on an 8-foot-high sculpture of a skull, which is still impressively minimalist considering the end result looks like something Guillermo del Toro hastily scribbled on a sandwich wrapper in the middle of a mescaline fantasy.

Joshua Harker
"I really like Andy Warhol ... and peyote."

Oh, and speaking of mescaline, did we mention that a 3-foot-tall version of this thing was constructed at Burning Man? Because it was. That's, like, two different pranks at once.

Sweet Headache Videos
Not Pictured: 10,000 people simultaneously quitting drugs forever.

Thanks to the folks over at Verity Studios, remote-controlled flying machines aren't just for douchers at the beach anymore; they're also for esoteric circus performers and wealthy eccentrics looking to make their friends believe in object possession. The temptation to call a fortune-teller over to your house for a seance and then chase her around the yard with one of these things is almost too great to resist.

Cirque du Soleil
You can re-create the effect by putting all the lamps in your living room
before passing out on the floor from the Halloween drinking.

See those dots on her face? Those are reference points for a motion-tracking system not unlike what they use to allow "virtual makeup artist" Andy Serkis to play lonely, sympathetic monsters, only this virtual makeup can be applied in real time. Now you can show up to the company Halloween party looking like a puzzle-craft geisha, which is a haunting we didn't even know existed until this very moment:

something wonderful
Just add a red palm print for "Sexy Wilson."

Alternately, you could spend the entire evening sitting quietly in a corner until someone comes up to talk to you, at which point you can make your face melt like the bespectacled Nazi at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. We predict you will make many new friends this way.

If your answer was "a goblin-faced stripper bot," you are absolutely correct, of course:

VernissageTV
Those that stay should be immediately added to some kind of watch list.

This hypnotizing boner ghoul currently haunts the premises of the David Zwirner Art Gallery. Created in conjunction with Spectral Motion by artist and future defendant Jordan Wolfson, this robotic miscarriage of art and science was designed specifically to maintain eye contact with its audience while air-humping to a cracked-out version of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines," which might actually make the robot the second-most-terrifying thing about the entire performance. Either way, switching this thing on is a guaranteed way to make everyone in the room desperate to leave.

The longer you look at it, the more it feels like some kind of visual riddle daring you to get an erection. Regardless, you can either store it in the attic for next Halloween, or leave it up as an elaborate burglar alarm designed to instantly inform any intruder that they've broken into the wrong house.

David is an editor and researcher for Cracked.com. Tweet Dave here.

For more maybe-not-so-good ideas for Halloween, check out 6 Halloween Pranks That Went Horribly Wrong and 8 Psychologically Traumatizing Kids Halloween Costumes.