The Secrets Inside One of America's Scariest Haunted Houses
Last year, pretty much everyone said the “Scarecrow, The Reaping” house was the best house. Wait times often stretched as long as 75 minutes. On one evening, a bald man walked the line with his two teenage children, gawking at the immaculate details-the galvanized metal wind pump, the cornstalks, a squat Quonset hut, a dilapidated wooden barn-as they appeared out of the mist. Even the clicking noises of the insects had been noticeably augmented from the normal cacophony of an autumn Orlando evening.
By the time the family neared the entrance, the ruse was complete: The kids and their father were on a Depression-era farm at which the scarecrows had decided maybe they’d rather stuff people with straw than the other way around. The kids insisted that they were not scared-were in fact not even possible to scare-but everyone, this small family included, drew together in preparation for what was coming.
Which was: about five minutes of gleefully executed terror, built to movie-set standards in less than seven weeks. “Scarecrow, The Reaping” was one of nine haunted mazes featured at last year’s annual Halloween Horror Nights event at Universal Studios Orlando, which is not your cut-rate mall haunted house. Every year, the team of 1,300 to 1,400 that creates the roughly monthlong event includes showrunners, scenic managers, casting directors, architects, carpenters, audio specialists, video technicians, lighting designers, special-effects experts, and even lawyers to secure the rights to horror movies Universal doesn’t own. All told, each event takes more than a year to put together. It is the biggest haunted-amusement-park event in the country.
In its first year, 1991, the haunting was called Fright Nights, and it featured a single haunted house. It has since expanded annually, until there were three houses, then six or seven, then (in 2018) ten, plus stage shows and themed eateries and interactive “scare zones.” In 2017 alone, the carpentry folks built a half-sunk Louisiana steamboat complete with canted, woozy hallways for a house called “Dead Waters,” then mounted speakers so that an auditory alligator could chase folks through a swamp on their way in.
And then there was the elevator.
Highlights of the 2018 attraction, which is 1980s-themed, include a maze based on Netflix’s Stranger Things and a Poltergeist house that repurposes car-wash technology to create intense wind and rain.
“Ughhh,” says the creative team (in unison) of the blood elevator they re-created for one of 2017’s other haunted houses, based on the 1980 Stanley Kubrick film The Shining.
“In the movie, the model they used was one-third scale. We have to do it almost full scale if we’re gonna do it here,” says John Hamaric, vice president of technical entertainment, whose job it is to coordinate the ten technical trades required to get Halloween Horror Nights up and running.
“They also have the ability, in film, to slow the frame rate down. We don’t have that ability,” says Patrick Braillard, the show director.
“More importantly,” says Hamaric, “they only had to do it once.”
Though the houses stay open for only a little over a month, the team builds them to the same standards as the amusement park’s perennial attractions, beginning with a full layout in a program called Sketchup, which guides a team of CAD designers when they start planning the Americans with Disabilities Act–compliant architecture. Nooks for human characters (which the Universal Studios staff unfortunately calls “scare-actors”) are strategized so that the guests are not just scared, but scared forward, toward the exits. Roughly 2,000 people an hour have to move through the attractions without slowing down, so the houses have to be as sturdy, and up to fire code, as anything else in the park.
Once the structures are built, by a construction vendor on a rolling seven-day-per-house schedule, a scenic vendor comes in to add the textures that make a heap of plywood look like a riverboat or a cornfield. The design team adds pizazz, down to candles and individual voodoo dolls. A rigging team can string up logs bought from lumber companies for trees. At the end of the process are technical walk-throughs, using software such as Ovation, Medialon, and QSys on iPads to adjust sound levels and special-effects coordination.
There are even smells, provided by a scent vendor. “She always starts off with the sweet smells, like We’re working on this evergreen smell, what do you think?” says Braillard. “And then the tray below that is axle grease. And then below that is a hermetically sealed bag that is the worst of the worst vomit-inducing smells.” One time, a team member got liquid from a vial marked “rotting flesh” on his moustache and his wife wouldn’t kiss him for ten days.
In the end, The Shining’s elevator effect consisted of four 80-psi water cannons, which together gushed 120 gallons of fake blood out of a nearly full-scale replica of the Overlook Hotel’s elevator into a glass vestibule with a slanted floor. When the blood reached the bottom, it flowed down a ramp to a set of tanks outside the maze, where pool pumps recirculated it back into the cannons. “The install only took about three days,” says Hamaric. “But when you have a week at each house, three days is a lot of time to spend on one room.”
Thankfully, it is not always the most high-tech scares that are the most beloved. “We always say, don’t be afraid of going for the cheap scare,” says scenic director David Hughes. “One year, we had a person in a chair costume. It looked like an arm chair. When a guest walked by, all he had to do was stand up and people would lose their mind.”
This appears in the October 2018 issue of Popular Mechanics.
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