Some of you might find this offering a little more editorial than my usual review/recap or nostalgia offerings, but it’s been a different kind of haunt season this year, and I wanted to turn the spotlight back on some of the amazing and talented people we have met running around in the fog the last few years.  And believe me knowing most of them I am sure they would just as much prefer I didn’t, but there have been a few stories out this year about how difficult is has been to be an “independent” haunt, and the gauntlet of financial, safety, legal, and just plain exhaustion issues that a typical operator has to endure just to try and put a little fright in our lives.

Rather than try to replicate what others have already documented a quick recap of just a few key points:

• Haunts are very very very very expensive to produce, even the ones that appear simple in assembly.  The actual figures would astound you.
• It is harder and harder to sustain the models that worked in the past.  Requirements have changed, insurance is hard to obtain, the markets are so saturated with so many different types of “haunt” experiences that it’s hard to get word of mouth out there.  (Don’t believe me? just Google escape room)
• And the appetites have changed drastically, hardened haunt veterans are seldom satisfied with the simple jump scare mazes anymore.  Limits have to be pushed, long standing rules broken, experience more and more immersive.

And this year I have already heard some crazy stories…people demanding refunds for actually having nightmares after being scared?!?! Wow, that’s like demanding a refund from a doctor if they actually help you get well.  Many of the friends we have made, even long standing members of this community, people who have pushed the creative boundaries of what a haunt is, are honestly thinking of giving up.  Let’s face it if you had to spend 300% of your life managing your haunt, fixing what people knowingly tear down, and defending yourself against bogus (and honestly easily identified as totally false) Yelp reviews it might drive you back to that straight 9 to 5 life where you could enjoy your July through November.

Yet the community continues to grow.  More and more people are coming to love and appreciate that Halloween is a season, not just a night.  Check the growing conventions, the throng of haunt related media (including our site) that continue to expand public awareness.  Here in Southern California some of the preliminary appetizers for the upcoming season begin as early as March, and bigger courses are served up through the summer, until the main course and desert (served together) arrive earlier in September every year.   Most of all the crowds have grown, and sell-outs occur (at the big haunts) earlier, and more often each year.

All of this seems like it would be a boost to the business right?  Lines should be around the block with the influx of new consumers.

So whats the problem?  Like any good hangover, it starts with over consumption (and ends with a messy argument in a parking lot with your significant other.)

Let me ask you a few questions:

• What do you expect when you attend a haunt?
• How many mazes do you want to experience?
• How long are you willing to wait?
• How detailed or interactive do they have to be to meet your expectations or cause that strange scare euphoria?
• What are you willing to pay and how many times are you willing to pay it?
• What length of experience are you expecting?
• (and for some of us) How important is it that it either have a place to hang with your friends (drink) afterwards or be close to a bar to (drink) savor the moments afterwards
• Do you want to interact, be “interacted” with? Have to sign waivers that look like it took teams of lawyers most of their legal career to create, so that you can legally allow someone to simulate more intense experiences that *gasp* violate your personal space or ideas of normal interaction?

Several years ago I went with some friends to Sinister Pointe for the first time.  To get from room to room you had to solve puzzles, take some risks that violated long held ideas of safe and normal.  Yes I stuck my hand down that garbage disposal and jumped.   Like a great horror movie, there was “safe” danger there.  The heart raced a little in the best way, and the laughter after the scare was addictive.  Many of us lament that there aren’t more year-round experiences yet few that have been attempted in the last year have found the financial model to sustain operation.

To quote almost every Caesar type (at least in every cheesy roman empire movie I have ever seen):  “(Haunters)…Are you not amused?!?!”

Pay a visit to our friends at Savage House in San Diego,   Gregg and Jenn spend most of the year working on new sets, custom props and effects, and storylines that they cram into a tiny corner of a mall parking lot.  After he helped establish some of the other Haunts down south locally, he studied for a few years everything he could about the business models, safety requirements, marketing, and operational practices for his haunt, but more importantly he gathered talent around him that take characterization and scare skills far beyond the jump scare.  Yes you will get some surprises in this ~20 minute experience, but you will also feel like you have been through a fully developed story.    I am sure they would love to offer multiple mazes, a bar to relax in (pre and post scare),  and even a Mariachi band, but this isn’t a theme park, it’s a popup independent haunt in the ever increasing white noise of experiences opening calling themselves “haunts.”  College kids are lining up for hours to “conga-line” through parts of Balboa Park in the dark, not realizing just over the hill is something with some real frights.  Yet the passion shows in the attention to detail, the variety of amazing horror movie props he shares in his haunt adjoining museum.

Or you could take a page from Carolyn, who has a vision for her “family friendly” haunt Motel 6 Feet Under, which operates almost in the direct shadow of Disneyland’s Matterhorn.  She wants to use her haunt to rehabilitate and train people with important carpentry and construction skills.  She always has the biggest smile and warmest greeting for everyone who visits, and her boo crew has managed to create an experience that truly harkens back to what most of us imagine a “good ol” funhouse experience should be.  Her desire to attract new guests to journey through their unique and beautifully creepy creation, is evident when you see her and her “monsters” giving out free tickets at the summer conventions, just hoping that those tickets will lead to fear joy experienced and shared with friends.  But this is more than just the passion for the scare, (honestly the night we went to see this year, she hadn’t even been through it herself yet) this is trying to build up the Anaheim community through pure heart.

Thats seriously what it comes down to.  The heart to run an independent haunt, particularly in amusement park haunt saturated Southern California, is all about the local haunt community.  If you are one of the growing members of us that “live” for October, then I encourage you to get out and support these and the myriad of other smaller haunts out there…some in shopping malls, some in pumpkin patches, and some just running in someones yard.   Many of them give all they get to charity, some rely on this as a source of income, but they all have something special to share, a unique scare, and in many ways I am sure you will find, as I have,  everything you experience in the bigger haunts, actually originated from the creative imagination of those that dare to scare.