Funworld May 2010

by Jeremy Schoolfield

In 2008 Knott’s Berry Farm set up an asylum-themed maze as part of its “Knott’s Scary Farm Halloween Haunt.” Inside was a room dedicated solely to vomit: Vomit on the walls, vomit on the floor, a person throwing up into a toilet … you get the idea.

They called it the “Karen Carpenter Bulimia Center.”

Whether you just laughed or cringed at that name perfectly demonstrates the line haunted attraction designers have to walk every year as they push the envelope on frightening fun. To stand out from the crowd in a segment of the attraction business that continues to grow more popular, haunters are under increasing pressure to create the year’s biggest, edgiest, sometimes grossest scare. But can Halloween attractions go too far? Is anything off limits? How do they know where to draw that line?

FUNWORLD discussed this complicated question with several different haunt designers from all segments of the business. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be one silver-bullet, stake-through- the-heart answer.

The Difference Between Scary and Offensive
It’s important to make one distinction at the outset: There’s a difference, haunted attraction experts say, between being too scary and outright offensive. In the Knott’s Berry Farm (www.knotts.com) example, the park’s manager of entertainment design, Todd Faux, says it wasn’t the vomit that drew complaints, just the reference to the pop singer who died in 1983 of heart failure resulting from an eating disorder.

“We weren’t trying to offend people; we were trying to be funny,” Faux says. “It’s a room full of barf—you can’t take it too seriously. It just crossed the line with enough people that we got complaints and we took the sign down. We’ve had other things like that happen.”

“There’s a line of good taste that is a mistake to cross, but I don’t think it’s possible to create something that is too scary,” says Leonard Pickel of D.O.A. Haunt Design and Consulting in Roseville, California (www.leonardpickel.com). “The thrill seekers that are looking for the biggest, best roller coaster are always looking to push the envelope.”

Attractions can get into trouble, Pickel says, when they try to play on hotbutton issues like religion or politics, rather than “focus on what is really fear.” He recalls one haunt in Boston during the height of the President Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal that involved chainsaw-wielding Lewinskys and bodily fluids other than blood; the public outcry was so loud, the attraction shuttered. Another asylum-themed haunt saw protests from mental health advocates, while a hanging scene at one facility drew criticism as being racially insensitive. None of that had anything to do with being too scary, Pickel notes.

“A person who wants to make money in a haunted house, their goal is to make it as absolutely scary as possible,” he says. “If that means blurring some lines between good taste and something that would be more family friendly, they’re going to do that.”

Knowing, Managing Audience Expectations Is Key
The core audience for a haunted house is ages 13 to 30 and “leans slightly female,” Pickel says. “It’s not a family attraction,” he notes, so there might be a different expectation from an amusement park or family entertainment center (FEC) that adds a special haunted event in the fall, compared with the standalone haunted houses that pop up every year.

Movie Park Germany (www.moviepark.de) employs more than 250 actors for its annual “Halloween Horror Fest,” and they are trained to draw a line when scaring guests. “The actors have to be very sensitive about what is going too far and when guests are at their limit,” says Antje Kurz-Möller, the park’s public relations manager. “The actors are instructed not to touch anybody, not to scare any children, and to slip out of their roles in case they recognize someone is really freaked out.”

EnterTRAINment Junction, an FEC in West Chester, Ohio (www.entertrainmentjunction.com), uses a couple key phrases marketing its “Nightmare Junction” event: “fun by day, fright by night” and “not recommended for people under 12—or those who are just plain chicken.” The FEC closes from 6 p.m.-7 p.m. and clears everyone out so there’s a distinction between daytime and nighttime fun, but there’s still no way to keep parents from bringing young children, says General Manager Ed Balfour, who designed haunts for nearby Kings Island, as well, for several years.

“When I was at [Kings Island] we spent a lot of money to explain to people we’re not recommending this for little kids, and [parents] still brought their little kids,” he says. “A theme park is for everybody. They ride the rides all day and then say, ‘Let’s do a maze while we’re still here.’ Some of [the kids] will like it, and some of them will be scared to death and just hug into their mom’s shoulder for the whole thing.”

While Balfour says he doesn’t think it’s possible to be too scary, either, he does take the family audience into consideration when designing the haunts at his FEC.

“I’m not this big theme park that people expect to be edgy, so I can’t be edgy,” he says. “We’ll go after high startle, high scare, but we’re not going after high gore. Why would I do something that’s R-rated for an audience that isn’t R-rated? That may be why, as a family entertainment center, we’ve never gotten any complaints.”

Startle vs. Gore
Striking a balance between startles and gore is another line each facility has to draw for itself.

Knott’s Berry Farm’s Faux says “with what people are exposed to today—the movies and the Internet— it’s almost like you can’t have too much [gore].” Faux has 13 mazes to work with, though, so he has an advantage not many other haunts can match: “Because we have so many mazes and themes, we try to do a few mazes that aren’t gory at all. And then we have ‘The Slaughterhouse’ that’s just over the top: more blood, more gore … meat grinder, guts, everything.” The rest, he says, fall somewhere in between.

Ross Karpelman, co-owner of the House of Shock in New Orleans (www.houseofshock.com), isn’t worried about offending people—that’s the facility’s stock in trade (see sidebar). He’s more concerned with traffic flow; a scene where visitors have to stop and watch someone’s head get cut off or the like takes too long to deliver and bogs down the line.

“I’m not against gore. I think it’s great, but in moderation,” Karpelman says. “What makes a haunted house scary is putting you in an environment where you don’t have control, where you’re outnumbered, and it’s believable.”

Movie Park Germany doesn’t push the gore too far, Kurz- Möller says: “We mostly scare our guests with psychological tools like darkness, narrowness, disorientation, loud and scary noises, and unexpected appearances of actors.”

“We call our show ‘high-startle, low-gore,’” adds Brett Bertolino, assistant program director for Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, which hosts “Terror Behind the Walls,” a haunted attraction that serves as an annual fundraiser for the prison museum (www.easternstate.org/halloween). “We’ve never found gore particularly scary. We prefer a show where there are scenes, stories, arcs, and characters. That’s entertaining.”

A Good Story Can Cover a Multitude of Sins
Like Bertolino, these haunt experts believe in the power of a story—in its ability to scare people and inoculate a facility from controversy.

“A haunted house is a movie where you walk from scene to scene,” Pickel says. “The first thing you decide when designing a haunted house is, what story are you trying to tell? Why are there monsters in this building? Why are people going into the building? If you can develop and stick to a story line, even if it has some of those questionable situations in it, you really can’t say ‘you shouldn’t have gone there’ if it fits the story.”

Take it from someone who knows: Karpelman’s House of Shock, which plays off the traditional good vs. evil/God vs. Satan archetype, was almost shut down by the New Orleans City Council soon after the haunt opened in 1993 due to complaints about its content. The veteran haunter says it’s the quality of production that helped save his endeavor, which will put on its 17th show in 2010 and now does pyrotechnic and other stage work for the New Orleans Saints and Hornets professional sports teams.

“Anybody can get out there and say, ‘Hail Satan!’ and be as vicious as they want to be, but if they don’t have the goods to back it up then you’re just saying stuff to shock people,” he says. “We have a stage show that’s amazing, our sets are top notch, and it’s a quality experience.”

“Terror Behind the Walls” is finely scripted, as well, Bertolino says, where emotions ebb and flow and laughter is just as important as screams. “We intentionally build this arc where you have some intense scares and then a funny scene,” he says. “People then let their guards down, and then you pop out and get them.”

Rest in Peace of Mind
“Maybe the answer is there isn’t any one line you can draw,” Pickel says. He’s inclined to think whatever doesn’t get you shut down is good publicity, whether people are a little offended or not. That certainly held true for House of Shock, though that facility had to go through hell and back to stay open.

“If it works for you, then it works. Let everyone else be the judge of whether it’s for them or not,” Karpelman says. “You have to be true to yourself and be true to what you want to do. What we’re doing is not for everybody. Your haunted house is going to be an expression of you, your portrayal of what you think is scary.”

“We will push the envelope really far to scare somebody; you just don’t want to hurt their feelings,” Faux says. “We’re trying to scare people, but not upset them.”

“You go with your gut, you have to know your audience, and you have to establish an expectation,” says EnterTRAINment’s Balfour. “That’s always the case.”

Contact Senior Editor Jeremy Schoolfield at jschoolfield@IAAPA.org.