Article By Me- Home Haunting For The First Time, with a $3,000.00 budget!!!!!

This is an article first written for "Yahoo Answers." It was 3 and a little pages on "Microsoft Word." So, here it is.


Haunting for the first time with a three thousand dollar budget.

Holy crap, dude, $3000? I've been haunting for years now at home and even now I don't have that much worth of stuff. You are VERY lucky to be able to do that. But, before you start, make sure everyone is willing to do there share. I work about 25 hours for every minute long that my haunt is. So, I work 100+ hours every year, and my haunt isn't even very detailed. If you want all that you can get out of your money, then you need to make sure everyone who contributes is willing to give 150%. In other words, don't spend 2 grand on materials on October 16 and end up with two empty rooms and $1500 worth of raw materials. I start in early August, but I have less money and therefore can afford less details. You on the other hand can afford much more and therefore should start at the beginning of summer if you want to get it done.

Now, before that time, I strongly recommend joining Halloween Forum AND Hauntworld Forum. They both have different things to offer. Halloween Forum has more of a "Home Haunters Unite!" type of feel, whereas Hauntworld Forum is open to all haunters and tends to be where the pros hang out, so you can get ideas from them. I am a member of both.

Remember, with your kind of budget, you need to plan so that it's money well spent. Some theme ideas include- insane asylum, morgue, cemetery, traditional haunted house, haunted circus, creepy hillbillies, meat shop with slaughterhouse in back, hospital, farm, cave, post-apocalyptic scene with realistic (ie- not bright green with one eye) aliens, army camp, cornfield, pyramid, and a crypt, just to name a few. To get ideas you can look at local haunts, as I'm sure a fanatic like you would, or Google search for haunts such as The Darkness, The Thirteenth Gate, Spookywoods, and other infamous haunts. Also, be sure to check out Terror Syndicate, it is by far one of the greatest home haunts of all time. Once at the home page, click on the "Haunts" link to the right and select the year that you would like to view. I recommend looking at them all, as it is a great haunt that relies at least 50% on animatronics.

The theme I try to use is the hippie/ farm/ ghost town idea because you can fit so many scenes into it. Clowns, meat shops, insane asylums, and mines can all be used in this theme by making buildings look run down and using a little imagination.

Planning-
Graph paper is a key tool to planning out haunts. What I do is make cutouts of rooms with entrance and exit and then draw out a layout of the space and try to piece the puzzle together. You will need to change the rooms slightly, and that's perfectly OK. Remember to design your haunt so that as many walls as possible can be 4 foot by 8 foot.
This is very important that you think of this step in the planning stages and not 2 hours before you open- Good Haunts Have a Flow!!!!! They don't go from scare to scare to scare; they have breaks, which, if timed right, will make the haunt believable. This is a skill that I am still working on. People will know, in the back of their minds, that this is fake, but if scares are perfect and the haunt has a flow, you will not give them a chance to remember that. Make them think along the way, don't just scare them. Give them sub-conscious tasks that occupy the back of their minds so that they can't use the back of their minds to think about how it's fake. These should be simple- "Where's the exit to this room?" or "How do I avoid the monster up ahead?" Make sure you don't make the tasks too difficult. If they are too puzzled, they will think "This haunted house is dumb." Just like that, you've got someone leaving who's going to tell everyone the know "That haunt sucks." Haunting is, in essence, playing mind games with people to make them scared. Now, back to the concept of flow. The best haunts go like this-
1. Very detailed opening scene- It is very important that you use this time to build tension, do not throw the guests right into the action.
2. Dark, twisting hallways, used to further build the tension. This should also be used so that when guests get thrown into the action there is a contrast,
3. The action! This is where 70-80% of your haunt should be.
4. Relief. This is essential to make sure that your final scare is a scary as can be. Around here there is a haunt called Terror in the Corn. Their attraction consists of a 5 minute hayride through the corn, a trail through the corn, and then a 15 minute ghost town. After the ghost town, you take a five minute walk through a graveyard with funny names on the tombstones. Then comes a small shack with strobe lights and intense scares. It is only so scary because of the graveyard before it.
5. Final scare. Pull out the big guns, baby, it's time to send kids screaming down the street. For your situation, I'd recommend a chainsaw. Come on, they're only a hundred bucks and without the chain they're perfectly safe, so long as you have proper ventilation so nobody gets carbon monoxide poisoning. Also, remember to keep the gas out of wherever you're haunting so you don't burn your customers. This haunting cliché is overused, but for a good reason. It is the greatest means to scare anyone in the history of haunted houses.
The last planning note is to use "Google Sketchup." It's a great free tool and because it's through Google you can trust that you aren't downloading a virus.

Construction- I won't go into a lot of detail on this, but how I build my walls is-
1. Materials- 2 by 3s, not 2 by 4s, the cheapest particle board I can get my hands on, 3" wood screws, drill, bits to both drill holes and drive screws with, circular saw.
2. Cut down the materials to fit the size of the plywood. It is best to use 4' by 8' panels for storage reasons and to best fit your haunt together. Drill holes. If you don't, the wood will split and might cave in. Screw it all together. There you go- basic haunt walls.
3. Painting- I'm no expert. Last year I had one room that was painted in my entire haunt. So really, if I lectured you about painting a haunt, I'd probably be giving you crap I've gotten off the web and not telling you from experience. However, there is one thing I learned from not painting my haunt- it is important that you paint your haunt or else the environment will not seem real. So paint your haunt!

Special Effects-
A few ideas-
Tin foil + strobe light = reflections from the strobe everywhere and VERY disorienting.
Black light + white stuff (ie- sheets, t-shirts, flourecent paints, glow in the dark props, even some dish soaps and detergents) = purplish glow everywhere that you have something white
Compressed air- for a small amount of money, you can purchase a laser sensor kit that you solder together. This is a toy for tweens that is like a burglar alarm. If you disable the buzzer and hook it up to a solenoid valve, you can use it to spray compressed air whenever someone is standing between the consoles. Combined with a strobe pointed at the eyes in an otherwise pitch black and very claustrophobic hallway, this can be one of the best actorless scares that money can buy.
Let me tell you about a little effect we use called the white room. Basically it's an 8' by 5.5' room, or tunnel, where you enter on one end, and zigzag through hanging sheets to the other. Here's the catch- there's one strobe light at each end of the room, and a leaf blower at the other end, so the sheets cling to each other and you have to fight to get through. This scene is ruined by the presence of an actor, so keep your actors in hiding until people get out. However, it is a great opening room, and is even scarier if the strobes and leaf blower are hooked up to a switch and actors can turn them on a few seconds after the first person enters, for that extra startle. Peolpe are scared of unknown noises! I'm not lying, we've had people run back out because of the leaf blower.
Animatronics- I haven't used them, but there are lots of sites on the web that'll give you step by step tutorials. If followed right, they can be very effective.

Scaring with Actors- A haunt is nothing without its actors. Without them, there is no realism, and in most cases, no actual fear. Here are some ideas-
Misdirection!!!!! This is the most important and easy way to scare people. Cause a diversion to get people to look away from the actor, and pounce at the very moment when everyone is looking at the diversion.
"Dummies" are when you have an actor pose completely motionless until the group examines him, or wait until the group thinks he's just another prop. Then you come to life.
"Oh, he can't get to me, that fence is in the way" That's what people will think when your actor lunges at them from behind a fence. Keep count of the scares. You've already startled them once. Give them a chance to feel relieved. Then come out through a break in the chain link fence between you and the guests. Just like that, you've scared the guests twice with one actor.
Remember the balance that we talked about in the planning stage. Don't startle them again and again and again. This gets old after awhile. Switch between breaks, startles, and interaction time with the monsters.

Costumes- Shop yard sales in the spring. Often times you need to spend over a hundred bucks to get a good costume at Halloween, so make your own!

Masks and Makeup- As far as masks go, here are signs you should get one. Don't just pick up any mask you see. Make sure it meets this criteria-
You have a character that it goes with.
You have a costume that fits it.
The actor in the mask will be able to scare well in it and not have trouble breathing in it or having it make him slobber all over the place.
The mask is one you feel is the best choice for that character.
The mask will fit the prop if it will be used as a prop.
For makeup, I just get a family sized horror kit for $7.00 at Wal-Mart.

My site- theterrorhauntedhouse.yolasite.com

Again, you are very lucky to have so much money to spend on a haunt. Make use of that money. Make sure everyone is committed to making this dream a success. Oh, one more thing. I find it very annoying to work for months for only one night of operation. This year Halloween is on a Sunday. I'm opening on Friday and Saturday too. I recommend you do the same. Also, advertize! Give flyers out to everyone in the neighborhood. Then go out there and put on the greatest haunted house ever. Best of luck to you. Now go make this happen.