Two haunted attractions in the US show how far the form can stretch. One is a Portland, Oregon, scream park that aims to frighten people but not too much. The other is a Chicago puppet haunt where visitors watch scenes through slits in a wall.
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NPR reports that millions of people across the US pay each Halloween for the chance to be terrified in houses, mazes and amusement parks.
A scream park that backs off
ScareGrounds is a scream park in Portland, and NPR visited on a dark, wet, cold night. Hundreds of people still came to tour its three haunts. One had a twisted medical theme, with plastic body parts hanging in a maze.
Adam Rominger manages the cast and plays Dr. Buttonhole, a cross between a clown and a deranged doctor. He says the goal is not to traumatise people. If guests seem too agitated, he backs off.
The work behind the fright
A production company called Vendetta Productions plans the sets, characters and narrative, and the work runs all year. Staff start talking about the next year’s haunts in December, and auditions begin in July.
Lead producer Estelle Fulmor says the actors rehearse for weeks. Each knows whether they hunt, assist or fall victim, which builds a storyline. She says that structure makes the experience feel more authentic.
Younger visitors prove especially hard to scare, she says. A threat of murder may only remind them of watching Chucky kill 50 people. What works instead is something familiar. Fulmor says millennials are attached to their pets, so an actor may whisper that the guest’s absence is making their pet sad.
A puppet haunt with peepholes
In Chicago, Rough House Puppet Arts stages House of the Exquisite Corpse V: Blood & Puppets, an immersive puppet haunted house in the Merle Reskin Space at Steppenwolf. It runs through November 1.
The company first tried a puppet haunt in 2018, under the name Harrow House, in the basement of the Chopin Theatre. Artistic director Claire Saxe says it was cool but did not feel like what they were going for.
When Covid arrived, the company rethought the show with audience and performer safety in mind. Today it has six rooms, each made by a different group of artists around a yearly theme.
Visitors do not walk through. Staff split them into groups, and each stop lasts five and a half minutes. Walls hide the performers. Guests put on headphones and look through slits at different heights and sizes.
How each finds its cast
The two haunts also recruit differently. The Portland team auditions actors in July. Rough House stopped holding auditions, which it says created a dynamic it disliked and did not find people interested in experimental puppet and physical theatre.
Instead it runs free public programmes through the year. Around May it sends surveys and meeting invitations to the artists who have joined in, and building starts in late June.
Both teams plan months ahead for a few weeks of fear.
