When it comes to scaring the snot out of their neighbors, the Martins — Erik, Carla, Rocky and Neo — are a united front.

Oak Lawn Patch correspondent Erik Martin has been reviewing his favorite local Halloween yard haunts all week, ignoring his own yard of ghouls that is a popular stop on the annual trick-or-treat trail. 

"Erik just loves Halloween," Carla said.

His yard looks like an old backlot from the movie Plan 9 from Outer Space. Every inch of his lawn is covered with classic movie monsters.  Three weeks ago I tooled by for opening night of his Spirits on Sproat on the 9000 block of South Sproat Avenue in Oak Lawn. Of course I used my Google nav app on my Blackberry, because I still feel like I'm in a parallel universe in Southland. (Can somebody please tell me the difference between a place and a street?)

Erik's son, Rocky, an eighth-grader at Oak Lawn-Hometown Middle School and his pals were in full costume, dropping out of trees and lunging from behind the monsters, scaring some girls. When I went back on Friday night, the boys were still scaring the same three girls, who emitted blood curdling screams. Must be a middle school thing. 

Erik was making repairs on a couple of casualties from Tuesday's wind. Some of the free haunts he reviewed fared worse.  A movie freak since a kid, much of his yard of the damned pays homage to WGN's old Saturday night Creature Features, that replayed the original Wolf Man, Frankenstein and Dracula movies fueling a generation of baby-boomers' nightmares. 

The seventh season of Spirits on Sproat, Erik made most of his monsters out wood, PVC, screws, duct tape and old clothes. He started out with a couple monsters and a few lights.

"I just buy the masks," he said. "It's the most popular house in the neighborhood. Hundreds show up on Halloween."

He considers his yard display modest in comparison to other Oak Lawn haunts like Nightmare Village, The Bone Yard and The Devil's Playground.

"My sons keep begging me to do a haunted house," he said.

Rocky, a talented, young musician, entertains the steady stream of passersby playing Bach's Toccata and Fugue on a keyboard, as his friends leap out and scare two of their teachers from Oak Lawn-Hometown Middle School.

Little brother Neo, 5, stands around looking like a demented Mini-Me in a lab coat playing with a prop dagger covered in fake blood. This is Neo's first year of haunting; in past years, his dad says, Neo was too scared of the front lawn to come outside.

Spirits on Sproat is a little more kid-friendly than some of the others Erik reviewed this week. There's just something wonderfully whacky about it, like Abbott and Costello are going to come barreling out any moment to meet the Wolf Man.

Elaborately decorated yards for Halloween is a fairly recent phenomenon.  

"I'd say in the past 20 years it has become popular," Erik said, who doesn't decorate the yard for Christmas.

Asked where he stores his props during the rest of the year, he replied: "They go back to Hades at the end of the season."

For the official 2010 Spirits on Sproat video, visit YouTube.

Spirits on Sproat on the 9000 block of South Sproat Avenue will be in full swing on Halloween, which is Sunday. So stop by. The Martins have plenty of candy.