Scare per dollar

A six-foot reaper scares one person at a time, and only the person walking past the exact spot it is standing in. Fog changes the whole yard. It hides the ground, it flattens the depth so nobody can tell how far away your porch is, and it makes every light on the street into a beam. It is doing work on ten people at once, from a box the size of a toaster.

This is the part the aisle is bad at communicating, because fog machines are stacked on the bottom shelf next to the extension cords and the animatronics are lit from below at eye height. The shelf is arranged by margin, not by effect.

The honest caveat: fog needs air that is not moving much. On a windy night it is gone in seconds and the reaper is still standing there. If your yard is exposed, the score above is flattering the fog.

Roughly, in order: the number of separate motors, whether it is licensed from a film, how tall it is when the box is on a pallet, and whether it survives being rained on. Everything else is trim.

Motor count is the one worth watching, because it is the one that correlates with the thing you remember. A prop with one motor does one gesture forever. A prop with three can do a sequence, and a sequence is what makes somebody jump the second time as well as the first.

Licensing is the one worth ignoring. A character you recognise costs more and scares less, because recognition is the opposite of a fright. Nobody has ever been startled by something they identified first.

Half price, often better, and the stores are motivated because the lease ends and the stock has to move. If you are buying to build a yard rather than to fix tonight, the day after is the day.

What that costs you is a year of storage for something shaped extremely badly for storage. A life-size prop is mostly air in a box that does not stack, and a garage is not a climate. Foam goes brittle, the fabric holds damp, and the motor that worked in November has spent a summer at forty degrees in a roof space.

The score above lets you say three years out loud. Be honest about whether you have somewhere to put it for two of them.

Not the motor, usually. The three failures that end a prop's life, in the order they happen:

Water. "Indoor use only" means the electronics are not sealed, and one wet night is enough. An indoor prop under a porch roof is still an indoor prop in fog, which is water.

Wind. Tall and light is a bad combination on a lawn. Anything over five feet needs stakes or sandbags, and it will go over on the one night you are not watching.

The sensor. Motion sensors fire at cars, cats and branches, so the prop performs all evening to nobody and is mid-cycle when somebody finally arrives. A step pad fires when a person is standing in front of it, which is the entire point. The score rates the sensor higher because it needs no supervision; the pad is the one that actually lands.

It cannot see the thing. Two props with identical answers to all six questions can be a genuinely unsettling object and a piece of moulded plastic with a light in it, and the difference is entirely in the face. Look at it in person, from the distance people will actually see it from, which is further away than the aisle allows.

It cannot see your yard. A prop that works in a hedge-lined front path is wasted on an open lawn, and a tall one is wasted under a porch roof.

It cannot see what you already own. The second fog machine is worth much less than the first, and the fourth skeleton is worth almost nothing. Every score here is for the prop on its own, in an empty yard.