According to their site: We were the kids that lived down the street that at the age of 8 were putting on haunted houses for our friends. We were the ones that started setting up stuff in our yards in August for Halloween, and the ones that spent more time thinking up how to make realistic eyeballs in the candy bowl than doing our home work (by the way, peeled grapes work really well). We were also the ones who were so sad we could almost cry when November 1st rolled around and all of the pumpkins came down, and we had to put everything away until next year.
Well, it’s 20 years later, and we are still doing the same thing. On just a slightly different scale.
The original name of the group was “The Brotherhood of the Forbidden Grape.” That was before we were of legal age, and the single largest goals we had were acquiring booze and meeting girls. Usually the beer was much easier to find than the girls, thus we pursued the attainable goal instead of what we figured was a quest that would bear no fruit.
Sometime around 1990, the first ever Brotherhood party took place. We decided that costume parties were where it’s at, and our likelihood of getting girls to show up was much greater if we did something really cool. So we built Dante’s Inferno Room, the whorehouse from Beetlejuice. Much to our surprise we really did get some girls to show up, and we even have some photographic proof somewhere.
It took about 4 weeks of arguing, 5 cases of beer, and one long-ass night to put it all up. We messed with it for another week or so, but the bulk of it went up in someone’s backyard in one night. It was by far the biggest pain the ass thing I have ever built. Its a miracle that it didn’t fall down on top of everyone, and kill them all in a single blow.
However it was bad-ass looking and managed to stay up for the 7 hours of the event. Plus, it was the coolest thing we had ever done. From there, every year, it has gotten bigger, harder, more fun, and much more cool. As we got older, our disposable income grew, and our imagination grew with it. Every year since 1990 we have started the planning earlier and thrown a larger shindig. Sometimes in the past we would take a year off and do something mellow since we were burned out from all the work of the year before, but for the post part we would do some type of large shindig every year. Recently we started moving to more than one event a year even though it drastically cuts into our drinking time on the weekends. (via freaksnightout.com)
