Halloween car covers compete today

SEVEN CLASSIC sex-symbol cars will have their curvaceous bodies covered with bloody limbs and gaping jaws in today's Liberty Region Corvette Club Show at Katie O'Donnell's Irish Pub in Northeast Philadelphia.

The eerie entries in the EmpireCovers Halloween Car Cover Contest - try saying that with a mouthful of candy corn - will be scattered among the street rods and muscle cars in the pub's parking lot on Woodhaven Road near Franklin Mills Boulevard.

Among the dozens of local student-artists entering solo and group creations to win the $250 to $1,000 prizes, Holiday Campanella, 25, of South Philly, was shocked when she first saw the size of her blank canvas.

"A car cover is like 15 feet long!" said Campanella, who is pursuing a dual degree from the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

"It's huge! I had no idea! I have this tiny little car, a Ford Fiesta, so when I saw how big these car covers are, I said, 'Oh, my God! I can't cover this whole thing with paint!' "

So Campanella chose to populate the tan car cover with Halloween icons. "I did pumpkins and candy apples mixed with bloody knives and eyeballs," she said. "Halloween is about making fun of death to make it less scary."

Campanella, who has "lived around 6th and Oregon my whole life," couldn't drape her 15-foot cover on her Fiesta to sketch her designs, so she borrowed her grandfather, Lefty Campanella's big old Buick.

Then, she draped the cover over her grandparents' dining room table to paint the gore and goblins.

"On my last night, my grandfather stayed up watching me till I finished painting at 2 a.m., so I wouldn't be alone," Campanella said. "He is so sweet."

Anthony Fasano, a recent PAFA graduate who heard about the contest from Campanella, said, "I've entered tons of Halloween costume contests before, but I never thought I'd be doing a costume for a car."

Designing his 15-foot monster car cover did not faze Fasano because a couple of Halloweens ago, he wore "a 7-foot-tall diving suit that I made out of aluminum flashing - the kind you see on houses? You can imagine how fun it was to walk around in 35 pounds of aluminum sheets.

"One of my character's arms was this big rotating drill that he skewers his enemies with," Fasano said.

"I powered it with a cordless drill hidden inside the costume drill, which had a 2-foot long metal rod. It was really sharp and actually dangerous and I probably should not have made it."

Fasano wore a hidden battery-operated speaker system that played terrifying noises.

"Can you imagine a 7-foot-tall diver running toward you with a drill for an arm and these moaning noises coming out of him?" Fasano asked. "I didn't care if I was a sweating hot mess inside. It was great."

People can vote for their favorite Halloween car cover all week at empirecovers.com/halloween/2014.