The design of the typical haunt includes two senses, sight and sound. Seldom do I see an attempt to reach more senses. Taste is the one sense that I am unable to use in a commercial haunt. My LARP games use taste and my early home haunt during junior high used taste. I would bring the little costumed monsters into my living room and among sorted other goodies, in the dark, I would give them a peeled grape to eat, as they chewed I would say "…and that is Uncle Fred's good eye." The response more often than not required me to turn the lights on and show the shocked child a peeled grape. I could easily write many pages on each of the remaining four senses.
SIGHT The human eye has a contrast ratio of one million to one. Motion picture film has a contrast ratio of two hundred to one and television is twenty to one. Contrast ratio is the relationship of the brightest spot to the darkest spot. The human iris can adjust from the darkness of a closet to the brightness of the sun in a relative short period of time. It is during this transition time that you have complete control over your customer. The lack of proper sight increases the sensitivity of the other senses, especially sound. When a customer is semi blind and he detects a soft voice in very close proximity, prepare for a severe reaction. The mechanics are simple. Most haunts are so dark all the way through that they can never take advantage of this most basic principle. The usual way to compensate is with strobe lighting or the flashlight in the face. Instead paint your scenes with color. Red, blue, green and amber are my favorites. My lighting system is 12vac with bulbs of four, seven and eleven watts. The intensity of the light is controlled by the wattage of the bulb. Low cost floral wrap is used for colored gel and adjust color saturation by adding more layers of gel. Traditionally I use red and green together; amber and blue as stand-alone. Create more color variations by mixing different colored gels. In my haunt I use Red and Green to crisscross a subject. Blue is used on some dummies and amber is used to brightly illuminate some scenes. I try not to use white light, except in some instances with strobes. I do use more colors than listed. The key to color is the spectrum and color saturation. Darker colors force the iris to open. Lighter colors force the iris to close. When using light to set up a scare, it is important to have objects to reflect the light. A black room will not reflect any light. A room with some white, chrome or other highly reflective item(s) will reflect light into the customers' eyes and help to close the iris. A slow pulsing strobe is more effective at blinding than a fast pulsing strobe. Whenever possible, aim the strobe into the customers' face. Aim strobes 180 degrees apart if more than one strobe is used. Do not use dark colors on strobes, you defeat their purpose. TOUCH This area is constantly overlooked. Your customers want to touch things. Most of the time they are touching things that you do not want them to touch. Fill their craving for physical contact, give them things to touch. My tombstones are made with hydracal and burlap. I place two or more near the customer pathway for customers to touch. Hydracal is cold, smooth and hard. It has the feel of death. The lava pit uses burlap soaked in a mix of paint and Elmer's glue. The burlap is then applied to the wall, while the wall is still flat on the ground. Once dried the wall is set in place. This has a rough texture, coarse and unfriendly. In the dark these walls evoke feelings of being in a strange unfriendly place. We do not touch any of our customers. That does not mean that they are not touched. At every opportunity Something will touch my customers. The Tube room is 4" diameter flexible black drainpipe hanging from the walls and ceiling. Customers must touch, bump and bounce through the mess. The fun house effect is better for all behind the lead person as all the tubes he bumps become alive and bounce into those that follow. Roots uses sisal rope dipped in black latex. Customers must duck down to enter roots. The roots are dangling in the path. The latex rubber has a clinging quality that grabs at the customers. The roots feel gross. My spider web uses latex covered fabric with a wire center. I shape these with bends, twists and turns. Customers crawling through the web have these things bumping their face. When they move them aside with their hands they are disgusted and cannot wait to get out. The web is full of other items as well; dangling string, soft body parts and wet fabric. Verdun Manor has a tunnel of flesh. Customers must maneuver through the sixteen-foot tunnel. All manners of gross fleshy items are visible; Lance calls it the "Meat Locker." A living wall of flesh was part of a short-lived Dallas Haunt. Actual arms, legs and heads were thrust into the wall from the back and used to animate the constructs of the wall. To keep customers from touching or grabbing the flesh items, the wall was covered with glycerin and green slime. Customers exited with glycerin and green slime on their clothes anyway. I have coated items with glycerin, too. But, prefer to encourage customers to feel the natural item. Lighting, or lack of, plays an important part in touch. That is, what you feel and cannot see lets the imagination fill in the blanks. The guardroom offers a unique opportunity. Once in a while the actor will have a macho type challenge him in one way or the other. This actor may not talk. He can offer this customer a bite of the arm he is carving. Occasionally the macho customer will touch the arm, to take it, the arm is sprayed with glycerin. The macho customers' reaction is immediate, but amplified by his friends. The guardroom creature laughs, and then pretends to eat the arm. The customer group is totally grossed out and exits quickly. This is the least used variation of this scene, but it does use touch. SOUND The haunts that I have visited treat sound as, Oh yeah by the way, we need music. Sound is a stepchild to the haunt business. Sound in motion pictures is the second sense. Without it many motion pictures would fail to entertain the audience. Even with it many fail. Sound is so important that some movies do market tests with different musical scores. What is it that we are missing? The usual haunt uses a stereo system and four large speakers. The system is turned up to a deafening roar. Customers walking the path move closer to the source of the sound (deafening roar) and away from it (less deafening). It serves as a distraction, not an addition to the overall effect. Volume is the least of our worries. Sound Effects They are used to give a creation or scene depth/life. Background sounds of a lab create the atmosphere where the (mad) scientist works. Pieces of equipment come alive. A scene with creatures gnawing on the remains of previous customers gains depth with sounds of slurping and the gnashing of teeth. Sound Frequencies A single sound system does not allow us to play with frequencies. Sound waves. There are two types of sound waves, those we can hear and those we cannot hear, but can barely perceive. The sound that we hear I divide into three basic groups, High, Medium and Low. I use speakers designed to take advantage of these three groups; tweeters, mid-range and base. I create scene sound tracks to match the scene then select the speakers to match the sound. House Sound uses a mid-range speaker and the 70-volt distribution system. Scene sound uses 4-16 ohm speakers and stereo sound track with matching speakers. By changing the frequency from scene to scene I add another element to Pace and distraction. I paint part of my visual image with sound. The sound must not distract from the scene, but add aural color to it. Sound frequencies below our general range of hearing 20cps or less and those above 20,000cps can be used to evoke many emotions. 20,000cps and up sound is frequently used by crystal ball readers and such. It comes on at the moment of spiritual contact. The sound cannot be heard, but it can be perceived. I have used this effect in a totally dark room where customers waited before entering my haunt. The effect on one or more customers in a group was so startling that I had to discontinue use. 20cps or lower can be used with a sub-woofer to project sound waves down a hall into on coming customers. Again, the effect was so powerful that I discontinued use after one hour. These effects can be used in a controlled way. They should never be used in excess and experimentation on customers is not recommended. I discontinued their use not because they did not work, nor that the effect was so terrible, but because I trusted only myself to operate them and I had other things to do. As tempting as it may be, these two effects should never be automated. The power these two effects have must be controlled and not abused. Try it on your friends. House Sound Greatly overlooked and abused, the main sound system is for general mood setting and sound masking. A 4,000 square foot haunt can be filled evenly with sound from a 100-watt amplifier. I use a mixture of 5 and 10-watt speakers and a 70 volt distribution system. The 10-watt speakers are used to mask sound. A ten-watt speaker is placed above the entrance and exit doors to mask all house sounds. Two more are used in the haunt to mask selected areas. The 12 remaining speakers are all 5 watts and are placed to evenly distribute sound through out the haunt. The 70-volt system uses smaller wire to carry signal a greater distance and requires no impedance matching. Scene Sound Matching a scene to music for effect is not easy. Frequency, speaker placement and Pace must all be considered. Try each scene with different sound tracks. Watch the play of the scene and concentrate on the scene, not the music. If the music stands out, then you have the wrong music. Sound frequency and the beat are key things to be considered. Changing your sound track may also mean changing the frequency range of your speakers. Scene sound speakers are 20 watts. Note also, that not all scenes need special sound tracks. Most of my scenes use house sound, but I do adjust the frequency. Speaker Placement Book one shows my speaker cabinet design. They have two advantages, they focus sound into the customer path and they look so bad that no one would want to steal them. I label the back of each speaker for its type, wattage, frequency range and ohms or voltage. Sound effects must come from the area/item making the sound. Background music should fill the scene evenly and remain in the background. A scene could have three sound systems. A speaker outside of the entrance of the scene for house sound that masks the sounds from the scene. The second system would provide background music and the third would provide sound effects. I often combine the background music with the sound effects, placing one on channel "A" and one on channel "B" of a stereo amplifier. Some scenes require stereo background music and stereo sound effects. I use endless loop message cassettes; if you take care of them they last forever. I still use two tapes from 1990. House sound uses a three-minute tape. Tapes for scenes vary in length from 20 to 30 seconds. Sounds In The Dark Back when I first started in the haunt business, I used cassette tape players for sounds. We placed them between scenes in dark hallways. 1994 & 95 I used an 8 track Teac running at 15ips to distribute small quiet sounds to the darkest passages in my haunt. Digital storage chips have replaced this. Small 20-watt amplifiers and 20-watt speakers play the random sounds. Some of the speakers are placed between 5' and 6' high from the floor. This way the sounds are near ear level. Other speakers were aimed at the roof, so the sound would be blasted in all directions. For many years' customers would exit, saying, "I never saw the chainsaw." All I had was the sound and many others. SMELL And no I don't. OK. Haunts traditionally use fog machines. Every manufacturer I know says not to add things to their fog juice. Well, I'm hard of hearing and can barely read. Odor is a great distraction and offers additional depth to scenes. An autopsy room that reeks of death is more effective than one that smells like popcorn. My outdoor mineral oil based fog machines work great at providing a light mist for lights and a fantastic odor source. 20 to 30 lbs. of compressed air into a copper tube with 3 or 4 1/64" holes is all that you need. Sources of aroma are found in the food flavoring section of your grocery store. Read the label for oil-based flavors. Experiment with mixing flavors with the mineral oil to come up with something very disgusting. Glycol fogger's are water based. Look for water-based flavors. I use Vanilla in the cemetery; it gives the cemetery a cotton candy smell, a great distraction. Anise gives a nasty odor, great for coffins. Smell is as close as I can get to taste. An aroma will evoke those pesky taste buds. Of course you use all this at your own risk. I mix my own fog juice. I purchase in bulk the chemicals and for about $1,000 I make more than 500 gallons of fog juice. Any mathematicians out there? I prefer Roscoe fog machines (and no I am not getting a kick back, hmmm); my methods require me to replace heat exchangers and other parts. However, the complete cost in my operation is less than twenty five percent of purchasing off the shelf fog juice. A new fog technology uses only water. The system of which I am most familiar is the Mee Fog System. Zoos and amusement parks use it. The system atomizes water and creates true fog. I have seen this used in indoor haunts (dumb) but recommend outdoor use only. Water based flavors may be added to this system, but the addition of flavor to the water is tricky. SUMMARY The creative mind is always looking for unique ways to entertain (next article) your creative mind must not only think in three dimensions (yep, another article), but in the five senses of your customer. Sensory depravation is just as important as sensory excitation. Our world of illusion includes even the sixth sense, or the illusion there of…JB Corn
Copyright 1999, All Rights Reserved