Scares In The Safest Place

Posted by Grant Brott on Apr 20, 2010 in Props | 0 comments

Your haunt is up and ready to go and your first victim has just entered. As they navigate through the dark fog filled dungeon of a maze you have created your first scare spot is approached and out comes your giant hairy dungeon beast that roars at your victim. The victim looks over casually and says “awesome costume” and continues on. WAIT ONE SECOND. That’s not what really happens and it is not why we got into this business of scaring and created creepy scenes. We want to scare the victims right out of their shoes and what happens when this occurs. The victim freaks out jumps around, grabs friends, runs into walls and any other number of crazy things and in this we have to insure our haunt is safe and secure for this type of reaction. This brings me to the point of this article, Haunt Safety.

I could write a book on safety for haunted houses but we are going to cover just a basic walk through for this article. What is a basic walk through you ask, well it is just that a walk through of your maze. In doing this walk through though you will be checking to insure everything is secured and safe. The first thing you need to be checking is that all the walls are secured and nothing is going to fall over if your victims run into one of them. In my early days we did mazes in a garage and it was all made out of cardboard and wow did we ever have to do midnight patch work on those because our victims would freak out and jump around into it and tear them down or go right through them which is a whole other story of safety and purpose for insurance. If you insure everything is secured and in place then you will not have to stop midway through your night for repairs or anything like that.

The next thing to pay attention to is anything that is for decoration that the victim might get caught up in. You want to be cautious on how far down things hang in the walkways and anything else that sticks out. We want the path to be mostly clear of anything a victim could get caught up in which could cause them to destroy a scene or trip themselves up and get injured.

Following the previous one about things people could get caught up on is anything they could catch on that could scrape, cut or injure them. Any nails, screws, staples that stick out through a wall or prop that are in the victims path need to be covered or hammered flat. Remember our victims do not just casually walk through a haunt the freak out run into things, slide along walls to sneak past creepy things and if there is a rogue screw or nail sticking out this could make for an bad night and a real victim.

Haunted houses are so popular because it is a place you can go to get scared right out of your shoes but also done in a place you know is a safe environment for this specific form of entertainment. If your running a haunt make your walk through even get others to do it for you too and if you can get the fire marshal or some off duty cops or firefighters to do it too in exchange for some free tickets take advantage of it because its great free marketing too because they will tell everyone they know but at the same time go through your haunt from a completely different perspective than you and your workers who made it. Safety first.