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bipolarber -> RE: Haunted Houses (8/21/2008 9:03:27 PM)
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Yeah, the "Ringu" television set gag would be pretty cool... but you have to take the human element into account. If her haunted house was anything like the ones I've worked, they turn into "people pumps" in the last two weeks of October. Imagine yourself in that getup, crawling out of an old TV cabinet... and then doing it for the next group, and the one after that, and the one after that, again, and again, and again, and again.... night after night, after night.
This is the idea behind "low impact haunting" you have to come up with scenes and gags that don't turn into torture for the people performing them. Sure, you can swap out actors on occasion, but don't count on having the help all the time. (Most haunts end up using students for their actors, and believe me, getting them to stay at their posts, and do a repetative scene a hundred times a night, for little to no pay, is a major challenge.)
The single best design/style we've found is to build a huge maze of a floorplan, make it confusing as all hell, and have only a handful of actors who know their way around, and who can "float" to different areas as they please. This also makes it easy to switch them out for breaks, and they aren't stuck in one area, listening to the same sound effects track until they start hearing it in their sleep. The same actor can move around to scare the same group moving through the house four or five times in different places. (Which can be pretty disconcerting... at first the groups think everyone is dressed the same... then it begins to dawn on them that they are seeing the same people over and over again... and they wonder of maybe they haven't been walking in circles.
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