What is Fear?
People like to get scared. We really do not know the reason why, but the fact seems to be obvious. Scary movies, scary books, amusement park rides and Haunted Houses all exist because people like to get scared. If you are reading this, we assume that you want to help these people get what they want, and deserve. To give the customer a good scare, we must really understand the things that create fear and use them to our advantage.

Fear is a self-defense mechanism placed in our minds to protect us from potential harm. When we are born we have only two natural fears; the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. All other fears are learned through personal experience. For purposes of our Haunted Attraction discussion, FEAR stands for:

False
Experience
Appearing
Real

The list of things people are afraid of is (fortunately for us) as extensive as the number of people you ask. Fear of public speaking and rejection often top the list; others may include fear of death, fear of the dark (i.e. the unknown), spiders, rats, snakes, old people, wild animals, monsters, witches, fire, sharp objects, heights, tight spaces, clowns, getting lost, being alone, failure, illness, blood, and the list goes on and on. People are afraid of what they do not understand, or what they believe may cause them harm. When we are confronted by something that our subconscious mind believes will hurt us (real or imagined), it sends a trigger to the chemical center in our brain and creates a “fight or flight” response. Our job as Haunters is to put people in an environment full of things that will cause this response. To do this, we must build up the paranoia, anticipation, and overload the senses.

What are the Laws of Fear?
To be more precise, they are actually only theories and guidelines of fear, or maybe just good ideas to work with. Regardless, the following are a set of principles that we have found to help make the scare better.

Remove the Comfort Zone
Prey on Multiple Senses
Escalate the Tension
Distinguish Between Gory and Scary
Create Synergy Between Your Effects

For this article we will cover the details of Law #1: Remove the Comfort Zone.

Law #1: Remove the Comfort Zone
Feeling safe is bad. When creating a scare, there needs to be a feeling of insecurity that forces the victims into a state of vulnerability. We need to remove as much of their comfort zone as possible to take full advantage of their fears. We will address three areas related to comfort zones:

What is a comfort zone?
Using a 360º (panoramic) environment.
Minimize friends and protective barriers.

What is a comfort zone?
The most important aspect of making a person feel uncomfortable is invading their personal space, which people keep as an invisible circle around them. This space can generally be divided in three distances: Public, Personal, and Intimate, as shown in the diagram.

Public Distance: 12 to 4 feet
This is the zone where we recognize others. In the outside world strangers normally stay out of this circle if at all possible. This is more noticeable at places like parks, community events, and public forums. Unless your monster or effect gets into this zone, then there is no need for your victim to worry about them. This is most often ignored in the large warehouse-style Haunts, where they have so much space to fill that they allow themselves to be spread too thin.

Warning: Every time your victims can see more than 12 feet in any direction without the fear of something happening in that space, they have the opportunity to regain their composure and feel safe. Remember, Feeling SAFE is BAD!

Personal Distance- 4 feet to 18 inches
This is the distance another person will always be noticed, and the person being approached will always react with either acknowledgment or intentional ignoring. This is the space reserved for friends and family. It is the distance most surprises need to occur within if you want any reaction at all. Again, in the outside world a person will usually get verbal or nonverbal permission before entering this space. This is, of course, not required if your goal is to make your victim uncomfortable. This distance is important to use and can cause some level of discomfort if it is done properly.

Intimate Distance - Less than 18 inches
This is the space reserved for close friends and loved ones. People will not tolerate strangers in this space, especially in face-to-face contact; therefore they will want to take immediate steps to create some distance. If you have done your job right, they will not have anywhere to run. If they do, they will be confronted by a second effect in the close quarters.

Other factors that can affect these distances are things such as available space, indirect facing, muscle stiffness, posture, and the culture with which you are familiar. Elevators are one place in which people are required to stand within each others’ personal space. Watch the body language people use; how they attempt to space themselves as far from the others as possible, avoid eye contact, and avoid facing anyone else.

Brainseeds
If you were in a haunted castle and got stuck in the elevator (it’s a modern haunted castle):
What would make you uncomfortable?
What would make you squirm?
What would make you hysterical?

Using a 360º environment
What is the main difference between being in a Haunted House and watching a movie about a Haunted House? When you watch a movie, you are watching a two-dimensional screen. You know that if you are going to be scared, it will be by something that is in front of you. In a Haunted House there is the advantage of using a 360º environment that doesn’t allow the victims the luxury of letting down their guard in any direction.

To really keep your victims on their toes you need to be thinking about ways to create an expectation and anticipation from each direction. In front and back, to the left and right, above and below; close and far. Whether you are actually going to scare them or not, make them believe the scare will come from one direction and then bring it from another.

Minimize friends and protective barriers.
One of the last comforts people take with them into a Haunt is their friends. Something that we have always tried to do is send people through The Halloween Theatre one at a time. Why do we do this? To eliminate anyone that our victims can use to protect themselves.

If you can’t put them in individually, what can you do to separate them inside? Can you reduce the group size or mix strangers together? What inevitably happens is the people will do whatever they can to wait for their friends. People want security! If you are in the scare business you need to take that security from them. (You big meany!) Another variation of security we need to eliminate is the tour guide. If this is the method you choose to run your Haunt, please reconsider. Think about the last time you were really scared walking through a dark forest, letting your mind get the best of you. If you had a tour guide taking you through, pointing out the scary trees and hooting owls, we don’t think it would have quite the same effect. Our general guideline is: “If you have to tell someone it’s scary, it probably isn’t.”

People really do like to get scared, or there would be no such thing as horror movies, books, amusement park rides or Haunted Attractions. As a Haunter, you are the one who creates the attractions that provide the fright that the public wants. Understanding what creates fear and using it to our advantage will make your attraction the best it can be!

Sean and Adam Murray are Halloween enthusiasts have been designing and operating their home Haunt, The Halloween Theatre, with their family for nearly 20 years. Their book So, You Want to Scare the Neighborhood? Halloween Theatre Effects and Illusions explains many of their best ideas and is a must-have for anyone who wants to improve their Haunted Attraction. They can be reached at utvid@yahoo.com. Be sure to visit their website at www.angelfire.com/ut/halloween.

A Rose by any other name...still has thorns!

After reading the last issue of Haunted Attraction Magazine, you have finally come up with a great name for your Haunted Event. Now how do you keep someone else from opening up an attraction with the same name right down the street from you and scabbing off your good name and reputation? A patent, copyright, or what?

A patent is the legal protection from use by another of an “idea,” e.g. a new product or invention, and is a lengthy and costly endeavor. A copyright is used to protect the written word, music, photos, artwork or even a costume from unauthorized reproduction, and can be done easily for about $200 per copyright. But neither of these protects a name from use by others! For that you need a trademark. Once a name is trademarked, it becomes the property of the trademark owner. This “intellectual property” cannot legally be used without permission of the mark owner, and it is up to that owner to keep other people from using it.

If you are just a small non-profit Haunt and not looking at nationwide domination, you may just want to get a DBA (Doing Business As) for the name, or perhaps a statewide trademark. All you have to do is go to the city courthouse and fill out the required paperwork; there may be a minimal fee. However, if you have dreams of being a nationally known Haunt and do not want anyone in another state using your name, possibly confusing out of state people looking for your show, you may want to register your name with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (http://www.uspto.gov/).

Trademarks have been around for as long as there have been company or product names, and many names we might like to use are already taken. It is a good chance that there were people haunting before you were even born (me, for one), and many of the “good” names are already trademarked. (Sorry, but age does have some privileges.) All that means is that you will have to be a bit more creative!

The only legal reason to protect the name you have come up with is to “stop confusion in the market place.” However, to qualify for a trademark you have to be using the name in “interstate commerce,” i.e. across state lines. This is easy if you have a web site, or are close enough to a state line to put a small ad in newspapers in both states.

Hopefully you have already gone to the library and looked in the newspaper at the last Friday in October for the last few years. This is a good way to collect names for all the Haunts in your area. Make sure that your name is not even similar to any of these.

Safe terms to use as part of your attraction name are Terror, Nightmare (both of which are overused in my opinion), Haunted House, Haunted Trail, and Haunted Attraction, (Haunted Mansion and Haunted Hayride may be protected, although I do not see how).

Your best bet is to combine these “safe” words with something that no one else would want to use or ever thought of using before, like “Billy Joe Bob’s Haunted Car Wash.” Or, you could make up a word that is not in the dictionary, like “Demjibfg, City of the Dead” or “Likufik House of Horrors.” On the trademark and patent web site there is a search function for you to use to see if the name you are trying to protect is already being protected against your usage!

If you want to call your Haunt “Susan’s Asylum,” and there happens to be a trademark for that name, but it is for a real mental hospital, you can still trademark the name for a Haunted Attraction. However, you are not (or at least they say you are not) allowed to trademark the name “Car Wash” if what you are using it for is a Car Wash, because the name describes what the business is. “Bob’s Car Wash” is trademarkable, as is “Bob’s Haunted House,” but “Haunted House” alone is not!

If you find that your name idea is already being used, or has been used in the past, don’t use it. You will not have original use and someone can take it away from you someday. But if your search reveals that “Billy Bob’s Haunted Car Wash” has never been trademarked, there is a form to fill out to register (protect) the name. There is a fee of $335, plus service fees that vary with the situation.

You can hire an attorney for all of this, but if you do it yourself, the worst that can happen is you lose the registration fee. A trademark attorney will cost you a bit more!

You are still not out of the woods, because the trademark office will now do their own search, and if they find a similar trademark that did not show up in your search, or if your name is too generic, they will kick out the application and keep your money. If they accept your registration, you can then start using “TM” after “Billy Bob’s Haunted Car Wash” to show people that you are planning to register the name. For some time even after you are awarded a registered trademark and allowed to use the “R” in the little circle, if someone contests the usage and can prove that they used the name first on an actual business, they can still take the name.

After all of that, once you do get the name registered, it is your intellectual property and your responsibility to keep anyone else from using the name! If you find out that someone is using the name and you do not tell them to stop, you are in violation of trademark laws and could lose the trademark.

Wait; you’re still not done! Every few years you will have to renew the trademark or it will be considered abandoned, and you’ll have to start the process all over. They do not warn you either; one day you are looking on www.uspto.gov and you find out that the trademark you are still using is no longer yours!

So in all the commotion of obtaining insurance and security for your event, do not overlook protecting the one thing that just might have the most value; your name!