Vancouver Halloween display uses dark humour to mock politics, events

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Laryssa Gervan likes to do Halloween displays inspired by current events.

One year, she had an American election theme, another revolved around COVID.

This year’s theme is closer to home: “Vancouver City Hell.”

It features a pumpkin named “Ken Sin” chopping off the head of a plush doll of Eeyore, the donkey in Winnie-the-Pooh. Eeyore is wearing a t-shirt with a Vancouver park board logo, which Vancouver’s mayor Ken Sim wants to eliminate.

A second vignette refers to a controversy during the recent provincial election, when Lululemon founder Chip Wilson put up a sign outside his Point Grey Road mansion attacking the NDP as communist.

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A pumpkin head wearing an upside down Lululemon logo holds a sign that reads “Trick or Treaters seem to forget when people ‘give’ their candy, they are participating in the evils of ‘Communism.’”

Wilson’s sign was mocked for its odd use of quotes around “Communist,” which was written in red on his sign, as was NDP.

Gervan took to social media to seek a similar message with a Halloween theme.

“It was a fun question to bring to Reddit to see what people came up with,” she said. “There were some really fun suggestions. I can’t take full credit for the quote, it was mostly someone else’s idea, I (just) twisted it to get the tone.”

She used the same typeface, red lettering and unusual placement of quotations to make it look like the real deal.

“I was trying to mirror his bad grammar,” she said.

Her display can be seen outside of 715 Victoria Dr., an old-school East Vancouver house that is broken up into rental suites.

The house has a small front yard, which Gervan has packed with all sorts of Halloween treats, including a graveyard of dead Vancouver nightclubs and restaurants.

“Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret, 1952-92,” reads one, alongside memorials for Luvafair, Graceland, the Sugar Refinery, the Lotus Sound Room, and Cafe du Soleil, among others.

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The gravestones look real, but are actually made of styrofoam.

“I painted them with Drylock concrete paint,” she explains. “Everything else made it look like I just painted some styrofoam.”

There are some subtle features that only Vancouverites would get. A cheap spinning mini-chandelier is a reference to Rodney Graham’s artwork Spinning Chandelier under the Granville Bridge, which some people love but others criticize because it cost a lot of money.

“It was just so controversial, that we’re spending like $5 million on this spinning chandelier, when we have so many other things to address,” she said.

A faux park board sign for Ghoul Chilling Park is a sly take on Dude Chilling Park in Mount Pleasant, complete with a skeleton as the ghoul.

The biggest headstone is for Canuck the Crow, a beloved local bird who disappeared in 2019.

“The Beaumont (studios) does these interactive theatre things every year,” said Gervan.

“Last year, they did a Stephen King-themed one, and they had a Pet Cemetery-themed set. I was commissioned to make a few tombstones for that, and I thought, ‘Man, if I’m making a pet cemetery, here’s a good one to go with.”

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Most of the stuff in the display is found objects. Ken Sin’s guillotine about to cut off the park board’s head is an old paper cutter. A collapsed building crane is made from scrap metal she painted white.

The Vancouver City Hell sign, meanwhile, came from “a jenky piece of furniture that I found dumped in the alley.”

“It was like event carpet left over from a sporting event I was working,” said Gervan, who is in the film industry.

“They were going to throw it all in the dumpster, but (I thought) this is good material for something. So I stretched it over and kind of copied the windows (on her house) and cut out the clock (numbers) to make that.”

The clock numbers are painted reddish pink. Lit up in red and purple-light hues at night. They’re a reasonable facsimile of the neon clockface at the real Vancouver city hall.

jmackie@postmedia.com

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