Haunted house fans might be forgiven for thinking the key aspects of planning and design are the makeup, special effects, and performances that most obviously contribute to the scare. How pustular are the zombies? How red is the blood? Do the cannibals really seem hungry, or can you tell they ate on their break? According to Dwayne Sanburn, proprietor of the wildly successful 13th Gate haunted house in Baton Rouge for over twenty years, gore is of course important—but it comes last, the cherry on the cake (or the severed head on the gate, as the case may be). Before fiends and monstrosities can be cast, coached, and encrusted, the designer of the house has to plan a full narrative and immersive experience for the effects and characters to inhabit.
Each consumptive lady of the evening or sinister cutpurse prowling Sanburn’s dangerous London has a backstory.
The first step in constructing a haunted house experience is to choose a theme. With the luxury of a large space, Sanburn can keep some popular ones for a few years while rotating out others; scary journeys this year include a Jack the Ripper tour of squalid, industrial London, along with a sinister version of Oz. Beyond that, the rooms have to be designed, and Sanburn uses these individual spaces to tell a story. “It’s not just jump scares—there are jump scares, but it also tells a story. Some people don’t get the story because their eyes are closed, but it’s there.” Populating the spaces with ghouls, monsters, and assorted menaces is the last step, and again, story is important; each consumptive lady of the evening or sinister cutpurse prowling Sanburn’s dangerous London has a backstory, which comes out in their performance: “The coroner is an opium addict. You’ll see him twitch.”
Sanburn noted that he has to balance his own vision with what we might call the vocabulary of horror. For research into late Victorian London, for example, he must not only research the facts of the Jack the Ripper murders, the squalid tenements among which they occurred, and the cholera outbreaks that threatened those same neighborhoods, but must also watch media like From Hell and Ripper Street to see how people imagine this evocative time and place. The 13th Gate crew must also stay alert to active trends in horror: the recent remake of IT means audiences are even more primed than usual for scary clowns, and it’s just not a haunted house without reference to power-tool-wielding hillbillies à la Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Beyond the obvious tributes, Sanburn also includes Easter eggs for sharp-eyed horror fans who will catch more subtle references and illusions—this year, look for an homage to zombie-cabin classic Evil Dead.
[Also read: Monster Masks: Composite Effects makes monsters out of silicone.]
An important but often overlooked aspect of haunted house curation is smell. Realtors use the scent of cookies to entice homebuyers and we’ve all splashed on a little-smell-good before a date, but the odors Sanburn needs are less inviting. “For the morgue scene, for example, we mix the scents of corpse and hospital.” It turns out Sanburn and other haunted attraction designers buy scents from companies like Froggy’s Fog, which among its various special-effects wares offers an assortment of scents and diffusion systems. The widely diverse smells available include apple pie, campfire, jet fuel, charred corpse, and urine—a prankster’s dream, though I’ll admit to being so old that I can remember when you could make a room smell like urine for free.
This year, as you tour your choice of horrors in 13th Gate, try as hard as you can to keep your eyes open—a lot of hard work has gone into scaring you silly. Details here.
