Old School vs. Oldfashion

So at my house, I have a closet dedicated to movies and at least 100 of the movies fall in the horror section. Since my childhood I have been a fan of watching a horror movie which not only got me during the movie but played with my imagination long after the movie was over.

The best of these was when I was elementary school... the original When a Stranger Calls. Watching it with my childhood best friend, Aaron (he lived three houses down the street); my friends that were spending the night; and my parents. Half-way through the movie the doorbell rings and Kara (who lived next door to Aaron and was in middle school) was there. Kara said she was home alone and a car had been circling the block, she was scared, and wanted to stay at our house until her parents came home. In my entire childhood - not once did this ever happen until this night. This movie had me so scared that when I put the children that I babysit asleep I would sit and watch them sleep from the hallway to make sure no creepy man would be in their bedroom eating them and then begin prank calling me.

More than any other movie that stayed with me. Recently I watched the original slasher film, a Canadian film called Black Christmas. For 70's is was amazing and still today it was really enjoyable and scary. At least scary enough that I wanted to have someone stay the night but instead brave the night alone. Throw-backs to the 70's and 80's horror movies are my favorite.

Then I watched Paranormal Activity - I watched it in daylight since some made a big deal about it. I think it would have been better had the movie been cut 3 minutes sooner. The ending just made it a Hollywood film trying to look homemade. If you’re trying the old fashion home movie technique take a page from the Blair Witch (would make my Top 10 horror list) because it left you wondering and never showed too much. Then you add their marketing when it first came out. Let's just say camping alone in the woods became scarier after the Blair Witch.

So tonight as the weather starts to turn to Spring take advantage of the dark night, breeze in the air, and watch a 80's classic!

Behind the Scenes Creation

So, this year the first attraction to undergo renovation is The Show. Every year each attractions get redesign but the one that gets major renovation comes to the attraction that typically gets renovated first. For the past three months a volunteer crew of 16 haunters has been working on The Show for 2010. The Show is in it's final phases of being completed for 2010 and should be finished during March. The crew first went in and gutted The Show; then they placed 100 wall panels in the current attraction; added the base color of paint; and now the crew is in the detail paint stages. The Show will feature 8 foot tall panels with various skeletons, skulls, and zombies. The artwork inside The Show will assist with creating an atmosphere that customers will get into the mood as soon as they set foot inside the attraction. Since The Show is the first of the three attractions at Dr. Haunt's it is important that it creates a mood and fear that every customer will feel.

Martin Luther King Parade

The cast at Dr. Haunt's Haunted House Scream Park are natural performers and will perform anywhere. What I love best about our haunters is there willingness to do almost anything.

Like on a day when there is no school for our high school students or a holiday for our Army guy instead of sleeping in... they all vote to wake up early, brave the cold, and wear whatever I hand them to march in the Martin Luther King Jr. Parade downtown Gainesville, Texas! This year we had nine haunters that were able to make the MLK Parade to represent Dr. Haunt's Haunted House Scream Park and salute a national hero!

It was our first time to wear the new parade costumes and yes, even The Beast got dress up in a new coat of Black Paint (look at that shine)! The costumes we made where design off of the three musketeer style and still need to get our logo design on the front! The belts are made out of skull rope which seems just right for our crew!

The Show in 2010

So in 2008, we added three attractions to our haunted house and the first attraction was called The Show. During the first year we featured a documentary about Julian Haunt whom is the namesake of our haunted house and in 2009 we continued that tradition, since our customers wanted to know more about this modern day urban legend. But in 2010 we are throwing it all out as we will feature an all new The Show.

Currently we have spent 20 different build days since November creating this new attraction and I would estimate we will be working on this attraction until the end of February to have it all ready to be revealed in 2010!

The Chamber of Fears (our signature house) is known to play off of all fears while our #2 attraction Bloody Fun focuses on people fear of clowns well now our first attraction is playing off of another popular fear... But like all good surprises I'm not going to tell you, you will just have to wait until we open the last weekend in September!

2009 Season

Running a haunted house can be one of the most fun things I have ever done in my life. It can also be one of the most craziest! This year our 2009 season had 17 nights that we were open to scare customers, 83 build days, 3 communiy events(parades/depot days), and 10 hardcore marketing days driving all through Texas and Oklahoma distributing our materials.

Highlights of the 2009 season:
10. Devil being removed from Shleby by a 10 year old
9. Hail storm during the season and customers kept coming to stand in line in hail
8. Fellow haunted house jealous of our marketing
7. Depot days - 500 kids later (I guess when you offer free face paiting compare to the face painters charging $5 you see a lot of action)
6. Removing an entire wall while customers kept coming through the haunt "Kim their coming for you"
5. Nathan in the wedding dress, why is it every year straight boys want to wear that dress
4. Bloody Fun - is the best clown attraction in a 200 mile radius - yes we beat the one in East Texas but after 7 months building that thing we should have been the best
3. Skull football
2. Late nights hanging out after work days at a resturant!
1. Fellow haunted house entire cast and crew jealous of our haunted house (even sweeter since they wanted to buy the haunted house 3 years ago but instead spent 4 times as much buying another one and there's can not compare)!

The season was fun and worth it. We started construction for the 2010 season and have been working really intent this year already. The hours that went into the 2009 season made a huge difference and customers that enjoyed 2009 will have some really pleasant surprises in 2010 since we are only strengthing what we have started. 2009 marked our 7th year and each year we just keep growing!

The Year has Begun

I know for most people the year starts In January but for us at Dr. Haunt's the year started last weekend. We had over 50 actors working their butts off with an energy level that was off the charts. The customers came and felt the mood base on the new design which is totally awesome but the actors as always took control and made the customers feel the intensity! As always not all customers could finish all three attractions - we had two customers faint; two run off into the tree line to escape the physco clowns; and the highlight of it all was everyone that exited Chamber of Fears had nothing but great comments to give us. never in my 7 years have we had an opening night as good as this. It is going to be an amazing year base on crowd response.

I had a complete stranger look me up on facebook just to tell me how much they enjoyed the show - this year is going to be great we had people from Plano, Ardmore, Norman, Sherman, Denton, Fort Worth, and Gainesville come through and with word of mouth we should be expecting huge amounts of customers thsi year.

Looking forward to the remaining 15 nights!

Fresh Meat

"Is it scary?" the group of teens ask!

The only response they get from the man in solid black biker attire is a deep throat laugh.

Then a few seconds later he grabs his mag lite and bangs on the metal door making a sound that ha made grown men jump. He opens the door and simply says "Fresh Meat".

The chills run down your spine - for the first 4 years of our haunted house this was the man that greeted our guest. I simply call him the man as oppose to actor because there was no part of his look or his voice which was acting. This was who Tom was... the type of man you did not want to make mad and then meet in a back ally.

So as the 2009 haunted house season is about to begin, the words Fresh Meat play in my head. Tomorrow night I will host actor training for community members that want to act inside our haunted house.

Dr. Haunt's has been around for 7 years and during that time we have won more awards then any other haunted house in Texas or Oklahoma but each year as we grew from 12 actors a night to 50 actors a night we saw the need for quality control - thus actor training was born.

So in less than 24-hours I will have fresh meat before me to learn the scare tactics that we use inside the haunted house and to ensure we always stay true to our first review "the Most Hardcore Haunted House in North Texas". This is a badge of honor that we wear - I mean no other haunted house in Texas allows their actors the freedom that we do and thus creativity is born in the moment.

Dallas Scariest Haunted House

Catacombs Part II

So during my last post - I was saying how amazing and scary the catacombs were but I forgot to mention how dangerous and deadly they were.

Last Monday we were adding detail throughout the haunt - you know the usual cob webb here; bloody head there; creepy moss everywhere...

So we swept the room - yes even haunted houses need cleaned every now and then and the catacombs was a masterpeice. I looked around in awe thinking this was truly an amazing design - one that will blow the minds of our customers. So after my moment or all awe - I pulled the emergency exit door shut thus blocking out my daylight and headed towards the actor back passage in the dark. I have gone this route 100s of time but for some reason - something was different and I walked eyebrow first into the edge of a catacomb. I knew immediatley based on the pain - that this was going to bruise.

I headed out and got an ice-cream cup (only thing we have in the freezer) and placed it on my eye. Then when it started to melt I ate it on the way home. That night about 3 hours after the catacomb incident my eyebrow had a bump the size of a ping pong ball. I thought my eye would be swollen shut by the morning at this rate. So I went to bed with an ice pack on my eye. To my surprise morning came and the bump had decreased and it was not that noticable. I went to my job and as the day progressed so did the black/purple shade on my eyelid. By day two I had people wondering why I only put purple eyeshadow on one eye until they realize it was a black eye.

I am still amazed how when I walked into the catacombs edge only my eye got hit. It sounds like one of those stories that you here a victim of abuse make up - I fell down the stairs and got this black eye but it is the truth. Unless..

Of course, it could have been the ghost of Julian Haunt that hit me in the eye and I just thought I walked into a catacomb.

Dallas Fort Worth Haunted House

The Catacombs - The Scariest Room

In 2003 after our first season was over in Gainesville for our haunted house, the best actors sat around and discussed what was good, what was bad, and what we wanted to do different in 2004. This tradition has stucked around and this is why every year our haunted house gets more and more creepy!

Well from that group discussion they decided to expand the catacombs in 2004. This work so well that in 2005 and again in 2006 the group wanted it to be our exit since it is truly a terrifying place to be! Then in 2007 and 2008 we moved it closer to the front to get customers in the mood very early on. This worked as in 2007 we became the only Texas or Oklahoma Haunted House to be Nationally Ranked by Fearnet.

Well my friends it appears in 2009 it gets even better. The catacombs is now double in size which means over 50 corpses just lieing around waiting to greet/get you!

In 2009 customers will get a first hand taste of what it feels like to be underground with rotting corpses and little creatures. The key to the catacombs is trying to figure out which is a rotted corpse and which is an actor but then with 50 corpse and 4 actors I have a feeling you will be screaming!

But rest assure that Catacombs has an emergency exit for those of you that feel it might be too much. I mean why else is Dr. Haunt's constantly reviewed as the Most Hardcore Haunted House in Dallas Fort Worth!

Crazy, Demented, Deranged, or a Visionary

Kim “Hey give me a hand – there a really awesome dummy that’s been hiding in this body bag”

Emily “Oh wow, he’s really good but the blood splatter does not look realistic”

Kim “Well first we would tie up his hand and feet using duct tape”

Emily “Then we would put tape over his mouth so they can’t hear him screaming”

Kim “So if we hit him in the head the blood would flow this way”

Emily “But if we stabbed him in the chest it would be more like this”

Kim “Let’s make his hair color black and let’s put a pair of underwear on him so he’s not naked”

Emily “All we have are these boxer briefs”

They were Calvin Klein Boxers and this is how this poor soul became known and lovingly referred to as Calvin. It was shortly after Emily and I made Calvin apart of our attraction that Emily had a dream in which she became a monster inside our haunted house – if memory serves she killed somebody. Does the haunted house make you crazy or are crazy people drawn to the haunted house. Well, for people that know me they will tell you I could fall in the prep category but…

Crazy, demented, or deranged is what some people might call me or think it takes to be the designer behind Texas and Oklahoma’s Award-Winning Haunted House ; it has been reviewed as the most hardcore haunted house in Texas. There are over 100 haunted houses in Texas and Dr. Haunt’s Chamber of Fear was reviewed as the most hardcore! But I would prefer to be called a visionary over the other options!

We started designing Dr. Haunt’s Chamber of Fear in 2003 when we were a single attraction of 6,000 square feet. What our customers loved was the fact that every year they could depend on us to bring an entirely new haunted house for them to enjoy which at the beginning designing 20 new rooms a year to fill 6,000 square feet was somewhat easy. By constant redesign this would always keep everyone guessing and makes us truly unique- since the haunt industry standard is 25% change up with 75% the same. Now we have over 15,000 square feet of space with three attractions and it’s become a badge of honor to always redesign. It takes a full 10 Months to redesign all three attractions. We started in November and will finish this Month!

That badge of honor… it reminds me of my high school theater department when the students use to design the sets, decide lighting patterns, create the costumers, and do everything by ourselves. We had amazing faculty that would challenge and allow us this option by giving us the room to grow and explore. Our department would mock other high schools in which there faculty would be in charge of designing or worse yet they purchase the professional designs or had their costumes made by local costume shops. I always thought the purpose of our theater education was to learn to be a set designer, costumer mistress, light designer, etc. But I guess instead those other schools were teaching there people how to be business managers by outsourcing goods and services. I actually quit my junior year when I was Technical Director because our new theater faculty members were no longer allowing the students to do it themselves and instead wanted to purchase designs (we became like the schools that we mocked)!

So my principle, integrity, and creativity walked away and here it is a decade latter and I am producing Theater for the Living! Yes sometimes it’s a comedy -when your friend wets themselves, but of course if you are the friend -it’s a tragedy and we definitely know how to serve up the Thriller or the Horror genre! So my rule is we do it new every year – new ways to scare the customer, new lighting, entire new walking paths, entire new scenes. Throughout the season I evaluate what worked and what did not work. Those that don’t work get deleted while the Scenes of Scream get expanded. But it is those scenes that are brand new that leave my actors, the press, and friends asking “How do you come up with that?” No I’m not a serial killer but yet I do think how this would happen to make it realistic. That realism is what our customers feel each year when they come and this is why we emergency exit 1 in 4 customers that throw in the towel and cannot go through the entire haunted house.

So the secret to being able to produce an award winning haunted house that has been named Texas Most Frightening Haunted House Well I’ve watched over 1,000 horror movies to get inspiration for scenes, make-up, and costumes. Yes even the oldest school black and white can inspire – remember 2007 the Year of the Zombie?!? Or when I am shopping I see something what you might use in everyday life and think if I put this twist on it… yes with a twist, some blood, a finger or two I could make this work. I spend hours in my workshop at my house designing new one-of-a-kind props – I wonder what the neighborhood children would think if they saw the heads (oh wait Suburbia already came out). But the main factor is the people I surround myself with – they are the most creative and energetic people I know and so when you put more then one in a room it is amazing to see what they come up with.

The scene creates the mood for the haunted house and then we place the sounds, the scents, the lighting, and the actors and well, you have no chance but to scream but then again that’s a good thing because you came to be scared. But just know through our craziness, demented, and deranged ways you are guaranteed an Amazing Haunted House Experience at Dr. Haunt’s Chamber of Fears Scream Park