In Evanston, Old Irving Park and Ravenswood Manor, trick-or-treaters will delight in these over-the-top creations designed to scare the bejeezus out of us.

Now this guy is COOL!

Some people look at a skeleton and think, well, death.

Graham Mabon looks at that same collection of bones and thinks: the life of the party.

Wander into Mabon’s Old Irving Park neighborhood at this time of year, and you’ll find plenty of plastic skeletons big and small. His five-foot-tall skeleton leans, grinning, from Mabon’s second-floor balcony — fingers working twin turntables, headphones clapped over its skull and a disco ball glittering above.

“I naturally thought the dang thing should do something,” said Mabon, 52, who works in cyber security.

Mabon is one of a number of homeowners in and around the Chicago area who aren’t satisfied with simply slinging a fake web and plastic spiders across the front yard or spending a small fortune buying ready-made jump-scare creations. They share another important trait: the need (or maybe the obsession) to create something that wouldn’t look out of place in a professional haunted house or on a downtown stage.

3630 N. Keeler Ave.

When the sun goes down, Mabon’s house is transformed into a Halloween-themed faux nightclub, complete with booming music, colored lights and even a velvet rope. Mabon and his wife, Dawn Armstrong, even plan to dress up in black “Security” t-shirts to escort the V.I.P. kiddos along a red carpet to the candy stash on the big day.

The skeletal hands on Mabon’s turntables actually move, creating the illusion that his “D.J.” is scratching and mixing the sounds blasting out of Mabon’s speakers. He said the display took him about a week to put together, working two to three hours a night, and cost about $500.

He said he wanted to put his skeleton “out of the way” on the second floor to accommodate the hordes of kids he’s expecting; they’ve herded through as many as 1,300 in years past, he said.

Then he thought, “If the skeleton was up there [on the balcony] and it was moving, what would it be doing?”

A few years ago, Mabon built a system of pulleys, bicycle wheels and fishing lines to create the illusion of witches and ghosts flying above his visitors’ heads.

“It worked for two years, but it was a labor of love — welding and putting together stuff to work, and I just wanted something that would be entertaining and easier to do and less risk of falling off from high heights,” he said.