How to create a haunted house

How do we make that Scary:

A Guide to Making an Effective Haunted House

Its Halloween night, and you’re walking down a dimly lit hallway, surrounded by ghosts creeping around you and monsters waiting for you around every corner. From somewhere in the building, you can hear the screams of the tortured and dying. At the end of the hallway, there’s a door. You go through it and…it’s over. With a sigh of relief, you exit the haunted house. Every Halloween, hundreds of people attend haunted houses, hoping and expecting to be scared out of their minds. As an active member of my local community theater, I have had the opportunity to participate in several haunted houses, and have always enjoyed playing one of the scary or creepy characters. But for the most recent haunted house, I was offered the opportunity to assistant direct, and I learned a thing or two about what it takes to make a good haunted house happen.

One very important thing to consider before beginning the process is that putting together a haunted house is not an easy task. Anyone wanting to create a haunted house will need to conceptualize, build, and organize volunteers and rehearsal time. It requires hard work and dedication, but I’ve organized the process into steps to make the process a little simpler for anyone wanting to take on the task.

The first step is to decide on an overall concept for your haunted house. It should be something that will attract people to the haunted house and provide a cohesive design theme. Haunted hospitals and prisons are good examples of effective concepts. It should also include some ideas about what characters will be appearing, and which characters will be the major scares. A good thing to keep in mind when brainstorming a concept is: less is more. Try to make your designs as simple as possible while still achieving the desired effect. This will make the overall process run more smoothly. Also, an effective “creep factor” is added to the final product when audiences are expecting something to happen and it does not.

Another part of the concept-building step is finding a venue for the haunted house. It is a good idea to have your concept at least partially prepared before you go to a venue. You will have a better chance of securing it if you have an idea you can explain clearly and enthusiastically. A good place to start would be your local community theater. Many theaters hold annual haunted houses, and are always