Haunted House anyone?

Question

I am in charge of an area/room in the Haunted House at my school, and I was wondering if anyone here had any good ideas.

If so, please be very descriptive!

Please and thank you! :)

Answer 1

1st and foremost: It must be kept as dark as possible. If you use a strobe lite, paint over a gel and put it over the light so that you only have about 10% - 15% bleed through.

Now, ideas about your scenes:

Not knowing what your school will allow, I will only tell you what has worked for me in the past when I was designing haunted houses for our local Jaycees chapter 10 years ago.

We would build up the tension.

The first thing we did was build a box out of sheets of 4'x8' plywood and 2x4's. Customers would have to crawl through the box in order to get into the haunted house. The box was covered in black visquine, so there was zero light getting in.

After that, we would have a scene where our "monster" was being electrocuted. Using 2x4's again, we built a very crude chair and had it such that an outdoor light cover (like the kind you get at home depot) was on the guy's head, and a strobe was beneath the chair. A switch was by the monster's hand and he would flick the switch, twitch, etc. until dead, when he would turn the switch off. As the crowd was passing by, he would lurch at them, flick the switch and holler "I'm not dead yet" and try to grab them as he came out of his buckles (they were attached to his wrists and ankles, but not to the chair.

Then, we would take them into our "mad scientist" room where the scientist would be cutting on our victim and slinging the blood over the crowd (ok, it was only water, but it looked like blood with a darkened red gelled strobe light).

If you have a big enough staff, you can make the person the scientist is cutting on be beheaded and get up and chase the people around the scene. This works best if the Mad scientist is cutting off the head, (like a mannequin), and swinging it around madly.

Our next scene would be in a kitchen where our victim was strapped to a picnic table. Our deli cook would take a loaf of french bread and insert it into the arm hole of the victim. Taking bites of corn syrup dyed red bread, the cook would spit food at the crowd as he chased them down with a baseball bat, machete, or other instrument of death.

He would be wearing an apron that said "kiss the cook".

Our last scenes would be a witch stirring a cauldron. She would be standing between the crowd and the exit. As the crowd approached the cauldron, our monster would pop out and scare them. At that time, he would jump out the cauldron (we were using tree planter pots as our cauldron) and stand between them and the exit. At that time, our guy that was behind the crowd would crank up the chainsaw and goose them on the legs to scare the willies out of them.

As the crowd was trapped between our chainsaw, witch and monster, most of them would cower and fall on to the floor - at which time we would dance around them tormenting them until one of them released his water.

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My favorite scene was where we created a gypsy fortune teller.

Set up in her tent, with a fish bowl filled with saran wrap and a very small flashlight to lite it up, she would entice the crowd to gather around while she read fortunes.

Things like" You are going to stink up your next test, you will get a zit on you face, you have bad breath, and You are going to die tonight (again, school may not let you do this). At that time, our Freddy/Jason/Michael Myers would come out and scream "In fact, you are going to die right now" and he would chase them off with his weapon of choice.

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Avoid the following: Any type of hangman's noose. To much Political correctness today to allow anything like that.

You will get shut down.

If you do have a chainsaw, keep it away from flammables. We were almost shut down one year because of haybales and gasoline fumes in the same building. So, we got rid of the gas powered chainsaw, and used a soundtrack to simulate the noise. It was not the same, as nothing is more real than seeing hot smoke spewing from the exhaust of a chain saw.

We ultimately made nice with the fire marshall and were able to keep the chainsaw, as long as the gas can was kept outside.

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Answer 2

heres some ideas
Dracula’s Lair
Someone dressed in a vampire costume lies in a coffin, which you can build from a large cardboard box cut and formed to a coffin-like shape and painted black. As guests walk by, the vampire suddenly opens his eyes, sits up and bares his fangs.

Mad Scientist’s Lab
Gather up all your old science fair equipment, beakers and tubes from the microscope set, and anything in your kitchen that resembles a scientist’s lab. The performer wears a white, wild-hair wig and a lab coat. A fake head or a full-faced mask stuffed with newspaper can sit on a table nearby.

Witch’s Room
For an eerie witch’s cauldron, fill a black, plastic Halloween cauldron with hot water and add dry ice and a glow stick. (Don’t let children handle or get near the dry ice.) Your performer, dressed in the traditional witch regalia, is at the cauldron, stirring and telling a scary story

Ghostly Graveyard
Set up gravestones (large cereal boxes painted gray and marked with black letters) in a dark room. Add a fog machine (available at rental stores and for sale with the fog juice for about $40) for a spooky effect. If your haunted house is outdoors, tiki torches stuck in the ground along the path will create an eerie effect

Answer 3

I'm not sure how gross you can get, because it is at school, but a scary cafeteria would be cool. Set up tables loaded with body parts and bugs, have gross things "boiling" in big pots filled with dry ice and put your zombie servers in blood-splattered aprons. A fog machine and a strobe light (or red lights) will add to the effect. Have the servers approach thee guests with these platters of "food" and see how many screams you get.

Answer 4

I would do something with shadows. Have a white sheet up and have a light and you behind it.And have like a guy lying on a cutting table and have you operating on him and pulling out guts and stuff like that.The people on the other side will be so scared.Throw fake blood on the white sheet if you like to scare them also.

Answer 5

If you can get a few people to dress up and jump out at people, that's good. (a vampire in a coffin (you can make a coffin out of wood or cardboard) a ghost, etc.

Answer 6

I don't have any ideas that aren't totally lame maybe I'll just sort of blind link something --- http://www.hauntedhouse.com/industry/haunted-house-ideas.html