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uscannenbergmedia.com
A haunted house, or also known as a haunted maze is defined as entertainment that exist to scare people. Many could argue that a haunted house is easy to create where costumes and scare actors just pop out and scare, but in a way it is rather difficult to design a house that is much more than that. In this article, Horror Frights will breakdown an effective haunted house to show the elements of horror at the highest standard.
To begin with, the 5 elements of horror include:
- Darkness
- Creepiness
- Confined Spaces
- Anticipation
- Fear of any situation
These 5 elements can branch off into many different situations such as the anticipation of a serial killer chasing you or even a creepy doll just staring at a broken mirror, the result would lead to an effective scare, if done correctly. A 5 star out of 5 rated haunted house doesn’t need to have the 5 elements all together to be at that level, it is more in line on how it is created. A standard house has a minimum of 3 scenes and 3 actors for each scene. Even though it could be extremely small to be considered scary, the use of space and other advantages such as scare actors placement would be beneficial.
Here’s an example of a standard structure of a haunted house:
The circles here is where the placement of the scare actors would be. The left door is an entrance for staff/scare actors and the right is where the audience would come in.
There is no right or wrong answer when creating a haunted house but in order to reach a full 5 star rated house, it would depend greatly on how space and creativity is executed. With the expansion of the horror industry in recent years, who knows what could come next for the future of haunted houses.
