Boo! Not very scary, huh? It just goes to show that the traditional trappings of Halloween aren’t too frightening in and of themselves. Skeletons? Mummies? Broomstick-straddling witches? Pumpkins? Please. A teenager with a roll of toilet paper and a carton of rotten eggs will inspire more Halloween shivers.
Every October, “haunted houses” across the country try to turn these seasonal staples into bloodcurdling entertainment. The results have historically been more silly than chilling. Most come off like slightly twisted mall Christmas displays, with the toymaking elves and candy canes replaced by cobwebs and neck-munching vampires.
Yet a new era of professionalism is dawning in the hair-raising industry. Haunted houses have become big business, selling as much as $100 million worth of tickets each fall at anywhere from $1 to $15 a pop.
“Haunted houses are exploding all over the place,” says David Bertolino, self-proclaimed “haunt-repreneur” and founder of Spooky World, a Boston area “horror theme park.” “Three or four years ago, there were less than 500 big haunted houses in the country. Now there are about 2,000.”
“There are people all across the country who are making a living just (producing) haunted houses,” says Joe Jensen, artistic director for Hades Haunted House, a suburban Halloween tradition for almost 20 years. “That wasn’t true five years ago.”
Jensen estimates that more than 70,000 people will go to Hades this year, and that the number of people visiting haunted houses nationwide will be in the millions. And they won’t all be thrill-seeking teens, either.
“We get people from 11 to 61,” Jensen says. “I’m not sure why, but we’ve been seeing a lot of older folks going through in the last few years.”
“It’s an entertainment idea that’s really hot right now,” agrees Mark Passis, an account executive at Northfield’s Transworld Exhibits Inc.
For 13 years, Transworld has held its annual National Halloween, Costume & Party Show in Chicago. The event has always been a big draw for retailers and sales reps eager to check out the latest in Dracula capes and black rubber spiders. But two years ago, Passis started to notice a shift in conventiongoers’ interests.
“Haunted houses had always been a small part of the show, but a couple of years ago it really started to heat up,” he says. “It just skyrocketed in terms of the number of haunted house (operators) and the number of companies (marketing to them).”
Halloween gets a new look
So why are American adults suddenly interested in having their pants scared off? Dan Hornbeck has a theory. The manager of Mayhem Manor, a haunted house in Myrtle Beach, S.C., Hornbeck says Halloween was practically dead and buried in the ’80s because of tainted candy scares and pressure from conservative religious groups. But in appropriately ghoulish fashion, the holiday has risen from the grave in the ’90s, sporting a new look and a new attitude.
“Halloween has shifted away from trick-or-treating and moved toward haunted houses and costume parties,” he says. “It turned into more of an adult holiday.”
The National Retail Federation backs up Hornbeck’s hypothesis, reporting that Halloween spending has reached all-time highs. The holiday has become a $2.5 billion industry, and recently replaced Easter as the second-most popular holiday for home decorating.
Rich Koz has followed Halloween’s rebirth with great interest. He has had to: As WCIU-Ch. 26’s spooky movie host “Svengoolie,” he has been one of Chicagoland’s leading experts on the grim and ghastly for years. “Halloween has definitely become more of an adult event in the last 10 years. It’s almost moving into Christmas territory now,” he says. “Everyone is so caught up in the workaday world, they need this kind of release from their inhibitions. It’s a chance for people to goof around and do things they don’t normally do.”
But what’s the appeal of “goofing around” in a haunted house? Stumbling through dark passageways, being menaced by rubber-masked actors, and looking at elaborate dioramas of disembowelings doesn’t exactly sound like a stress-busting way to spend an evening.
“People are looking for a sense of control and mastery. They want to go to the brink (of danger) but know that they’re safe at the same time,” says Dr. Bennett Leventhal, chairman of the University of Chicago’s department of psychiatry. “It’s the same reason adults use bungee cords or ski down mountains.”
“To some extent, all of us are anxious to be in great danger and survive,” says Barrington-based novelist Gene Wolfe, who was named Deathrealm Magazine’s best horror writer of the year in 1994. “We all face great danger every day. I could die today, you could die today. All this scary, dangerous stuff is out there.
“When you read a horror story (or go to a haunted house) and at the end you’re still alive, you’ve triumphed over the danger. The monster might have eaten Patricia Pattycake or whoever, but it didn’t eat you.”
“People like the thrill and release, the feeling of being scared then the feeling that everything’s all right,” says Yvonne Navarro, a local horror writer. “It’s the same with a horror book or a roller coaster. It goes up and down and up and down and then there’s the relief that it’s all over.”
Raising the bar
With the cultural zeitgeist tuned to poltergeists, haunted house operators like Jensen and Bertolino can expect steady business as long as they can deliver a good jolt. But as more and more frightmeisters get into the house-haunting racket, the horror ante gets raised higher and higher. Or as Koz puts it: “The mummy-guy wrapped up in toilet paper jumping out from behind an old refrigerator box just doesn’t cut it anymore.”
Hades is an example of how much haunted houses have had to change to stay fresh. With partner Sharon Marzano, Jensen produced the first Hades Haunted House in a tent on a $3,000 budget. That was in 1978. This year’s version–housed in the huge Odeum Sports and Expo Center in Villa Park–features high-tech lighting, sound effects and puppetry; more than 80 cast members in ghoulish getups both homemade simple and Hollywood sophisticated; and almost 45,000 square feet of corridors and sets. Its budget: more than $750,000.
Is Jensen worried that he–and the newly flourishing haunted house industry–will run out of inspiration one day?
“Whatever you can think up, you can eventually figure out how to do,” he says. “We’re only limited by our imaginations–and the fact that we can’t kill anybody.”
WORKERS SEARCH FOR INNER-GHOUL
`It’s a unique kind of improvisational theater,” says actress Janette Harrison-Benton. “There’s no traditional fourth wall because you’re right in there with the audience. From an actor’s standpoint it’s great training because you learn to think on your feet and read people.”
What’s Harrison-Benton referring to? Mime? Standup comedy? Waiting tables?
None of the above. Harrison-Benton is one of more than 80 actors and actresses who are helping to bring this year’s Hades Haunted House to hellish life.
A seven-year Hades veteran who plays a “hemp monster” in this year’s production, Harrison-Benton says she has developed a full repertoire of scare routines. During the course of her Hades career, she has employed the “gross-out scare” (eating Karo syrup-soaked liver while playing a flesh-chomping zombie), the “psychological scare” (whispering people’s names in the dark or flirting with young men while dressed as a killer clown), and the “flat-out scare” (jumping out at people in the dark).
“It’s not about makeup or costumes, though that helps,” says Karen Kalliel, who is returning for her second year at Hades. “The whole secret is getting into people’s heads and figuring out what scares them.”
First-timer Rusty Nails–who describes his original terror technique as “running around screaming, jumping off the walls, slapping at people’s feet, and general drooling”–says he’s learned a lot about the art of spookery.
“At first, (some of the actors) were trying to be scary by just walking around screaming `Blah! Gah! Blah!’ (Artistic director Joe Jensen) showed us how you shouldn’t emote everything with your voice. A constant physical performance will burn you out. He taught us the scariness of whispers,” says Nails. The lead singer for local punk band Popemobile, he credits Jensen with showing the actors “the hidden Boris Karloff within us all.”
Yet the actors have to be ready for those moments when their Boris Karloffs work too well.
“You’ve got to be really careful,” says Kalliel. “I’ve freaked people out so much they started throwing punches. One time I got my mask knocked off.”
“I saw one (actress) come up in front of this guy in the dark,” says returning castmember Kloe Brady, a standup comic. “When the light flashed on and he saw her there, he threw up all over her. I’ve never scared anybody so much they threw up, darn it.”
