The Keys to Haunting Room Design
Allen Hopps
What makes a great Haunted House? It could be the actors, with their high energy level and dedication to getting screams; perhaps it’s the backstage staff, ensuring everything runs smoothly and seamlessly; or maybe it’s the animatronics, providing show quality and a “wow” factor. These are certainly important in determining a Haunt’s success, but they are all dependent upon one thing: your Haunt design. A great design can provide a foundation that will make the other pieces, e.g. actors, props, etc., come together to create a successful Haunting environment. While designing a Haunted Attraction can be overwhelming, remembering a few of these basic design elements can help simplify the process.
Element 1: Fit
You have to ask, “What kind of Haunt am I trying to create?” If it is themed after an insane asylum, you don’t want to put in a gothic vampire crypt; it doesn’t fit with the theme or the flow of the Haunt. You should be able to rationalize the placement and presence of each room in your attraction; one room should logically lead into the next.
By using a storyline or “back story” for the attraction, you will be amazed at what you can make fit together. It doesn’t need to be a seamless plot; after all, this is horror fantasy. Take the previous example, an asylum, a hundred years ago during the dawn of the modern age of medicine. This institution was built to house the criminally insane, but instead of aggressively battling their ailments with lobotomies and shock therapy, the staff immersed the patients in their psychoses in hopes that they would emerge as sane, healthy individuals. Elaborate sets were built for each patient, and orderlies would change costumes to deal with different patients, e.g. a man stricken with lycanthropy was given a cow to slaughter with his bare hands every full moon; a completely insane Bavarian nobleman who thought he was a vampire was imprisoned in a gothic crypt, and the one who thought all this up…well, he was so insane he thought he was a doctor.
With that example, the vampire crypt does fit in with the asylum theme. Using a good back story as a guide, you can make just about any situation fit any theme!
Element 2: Look
The look of the room is the audience’s first impression; whatever that room is supposed to be, it has to look right. If it is supposed to be an interrogation room, then it better have a table and chairs, a bright light that shoots down on the chair, and what looks like a one-way mirror on one wall. While that may not be what interrogation rooms actually look like, it is the way they are expected to look by the audience. You have to consider that the bulk of your audience has never seen an interrogation room (hopefully), so they expect what they have seen in television and movies. It is important to play into these preconceptions of what rooms and items are supposed to look like; they have to look real to lull your patrons into another world.
Color is one of the key factors that will tell your guests what kind of room they’re in; a lab should be mostly white, a dungeon very dark with gray stone, and a kitchen should have dingy yellow walls. When designing a room’s look, remember that all detail is achieved through layers. For example, a kitchen wall could be painted pastel yellow, and if that wall isn’t where the action is, i.e. the monster jumps out from the other side of the room, it could be complete. But if you painted the wall yellow, then mixed green paint with water and splattered it all over the wall, added a chair rail and a painting of fruit that you’ve dusted with black spray paint to make it look moldy, attached a mocked-up set of kitchen cabinets to the wall, and a flickering lamp, it would be a much more convincing set. Lighting is another key factor in achieving the proper look. The fixtures should fit in the type of room you’re creating, and originate in the proper time period. Your beautiful crypt set lit with fluorescent lights from above will ruin the effect; use an electric candelabrum in a corner instead.
Element 3: Feel
The feel of a room is hard to define. It is the combination of everything that appeals to the senses and contributes to the atmosphere. The sounds, smells, and textures of a room all help to create its feel. Sound is key to the feel of a space, and should also be used in layers. The typical layers are background sound, like a soundtrack to a movie, noises from the things in the room, and the triggered sounds. If there is a body on a table and a pipe organ against the wall, don’t have the noise all come from the same speaker. Make the body moan and the pipe organ play from the pipe organ; it will greatly increase the reality of the scene as well as force your audience to look around when the sounds change, which can misdirect the audience and set them up for a scare.
Smell is also important to the feel of the room. A wide variety of aromas are on the market to help you create a more convincing environment, including scents that evoke earthy musks, familiar foods, and bodily functions. They add a lot to a Haunt, and involve a sense that is normally ignored in attractions.
About the only way to appeal to the audience’s sense of touch is with texture in your sets. Your actors can’t touch them, but the patrons will touch the things that you put into a room, so make those things count. If they have to walk through curtains, make the curtains out of rough burlap instead of soft cotton or satin. Jute mesh, a loosely woven burlap, is a great fabric for Haunt sets and has a great look and texture; just be sure to soak it in fire retardant before putting it up.
Element 4: Flow
There are two kinds of flow in a Haunt set; guest flow and actor flow. Guest flow is your primary concern, as there will be several thousand guests traveling through the set, most of them for the first time. This path needs to be well defined. The actor, however, will be there for quite some time and will be able to adapt and adjust to the room.
Keep the number of guests you’re going to have per night in mind when you design your rooms; if you need to do 600 people per hour, don’t put in a room that takes 30 seconds to reset after each group. The group’s destination should be obvious to them, both to increase throughput and to maintain patron control (you must have control of the group to be able to scare them). Use lights to help the group navigate; an eye-level electric candle at each new doorway will really keep their pace going. They get used to the light as a guide and start to head for it when they see it. If it’s dark, they will walk toward where there is more light. Instruct your actors to scare with the flow of traffic, not against it; they should speed the groups up, not slow them down. On less busy nights it’s fine to trap a few people and get them really good, but on busier nights stopping a group could cause a real traffic jam and make a bad show for all the groups that got backed up.
Actor flow is also important. The actor needs a hiding spot in order to scare the patrons, and a place to retreat to after he has scared them. He also needs to be able to see the group before he jumps out to make sure that the group is in the right spot, and a spot out of guest sight (backstage) to keep his water bottle, radio and any other personal effects he may need (like an asthma inhaler).
Element 5: Misdirection
Now it’s time to get to the fun stuff; the scare. A good actor can always make the room work; he knows just when to jump out and scare people, and he knows just how far to go. But how many really good actors do you have? You can help make the average ones good and the good ones great by using misdirection to distract the audience and give the actor a prime opportunity for a scare. Here are a few examples of misdirection, but the possibilities are endless!
Example 1: The actor is completely out of sight behind a drop portrait; the group has to walk between the actor’s wall and a large coffin. Naturally the group will think someone is coming out of the coffin, so when their attention is focused on it, the actor slams down his drop portrait and scares the group from behind. This scare can be made even better by having the actor trigger a sound effect from inside the coffin; it could electronically activated or as simple as pulling on a rope that makes the lid bang.
Example 2: The group walks through a child’s bedroom and there is a closet door ajar. It’s very dark inside, and they can plainly see that isn’t their exit, as there is a doorway in front of them that has no door, just an open frame with a faint light coming through it from the other side. On their way through the room as they pass by the closet door a motion sensor triggers a wall knocker in the closet, or pneumatic drawers slam on the child’s chest of drawers. Then on the opposite side of the path, the bed slams up against the wall and a monster leaps out from a trap door in the mattress.
Example 3: The group is walking through a long L-shaped hallway with a curtain every two feet on either side At the 90° turn in the hallway, facing the patrons, there is another curtain with a dim spotlight directed on it. The group can see the toes of a pair of men’s boots sticking out from under the curtain, as if someone is standing behind it. As they warily approach the booted curtain, an actor scares them from one of the side curtains in the first hallway.
Example 4: The room is a cemetery set. To the group’s left is a fenced-off area where there are a few tombstones and a body standing in a coffin (it’s a pop-out corpse); to the right is an ivy-covered cemetery fence. The group is headed for the way out when the pop-out corpse goes off, and they jump back against the ivied fence. That’s when the zombie actor (who triggered the corpse) reaches through the gate and gives a good zombie hiss. That will send them running for the exit.
Many basic elements go together to create a successful Haunting environment. Actors, backstage staff, and animatronics are all important parts to consider; however, the design of the attraction is the foundation that will make the other pieces come together. If every room in your Haunt is designed with fit, look, feel, flow, and misdirection in mind, these basic design elements will help you to create awesome Haunted House sets and scares.
Allen Hopps has been continuously involved in Haunted Houses since 1986, including 10 years working at year-round Haunts including Terror on Church St., Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights Orlando, Spooky World, and Skull Kingdom. Allen is also partial owner of Creature Crates; 2004 marks their second season of bringing innovative props and costumes to the Haunted Attraction industry. You can contact Allen at Stiltbeast@aol.com.
