Tue, Oct 04, 2011 page16

• Theme parks cash in on guests’ Halloween screams

  • By Mitch Stacy / AP, ORLANDO, Florida
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  Universal Orlando’s first foray into Halloween Horror Nights 21 years ago involved one weekend, a single haunted house tucked away in the back of the park by the Jaws ride and some people in store-bought masks jumping out of dark corners.

  What was largely an experiment that first year has evolved into a monster draw for the Orlando theme park. Once the creative types figured out that people loved having the wits scared out of them and would pay for the privilege, the challenge was on to create something bigger and better every year.

  This time the event runs 25 nights and takes over the entire park, with eight themed haunted houses and mazes, two live shows, sophisticated makeup, film-quality set decor, buckets of fake blood and as many as 1,000 “scare-actors” involved. Planning and production takes place year-round now, and the event draws hundreds of thousands of people who pay US$42 or more to attend.

  “I think it all has to with escape,” says Patrick Braillard, a production show director and one of the gleefully demented minds behind the event. “People love to be transported, they love to be taken somewhere they’re not familiar with. So our job is to create eight immersive environments. When they walk in, they are completely somewhere else.”

  The concept is basically the same as in the cheesy neighborhood haunted houses that spring up every year to raise money for charity: costumed characters jumping out of dark, creepy surroundings to make unsuspecting patrons scream. But for a generation raised on computerized special-effects, slasher movies, video games and the Internet, Universal and other theme parks that get into the scare business every October have had to step up their game. And that means realism.

  The Universal haunted houses and mazes are on sophisticated studio soundstages and all have a theme and eerie story attached. Attention to detail and sense of place is stunning. In one, visitors walk through a misty haunted cemetery as corpses emerge from disturbed graves and crypts. In another, souls that perished at sea on Christopher Columbus’ fourth ship forever haunt a Spanish fort. (The gallows setting in that one alone could induce nightmares for those who are prone.) Another has an obligatory tie-in to a Universal movie, in this case The Thing, which comes out later this month.

  Horrible-looking zombies and other ghouls lurk in “scare zones” throughout the park. This is definitely not for younger kids and the faint of heart.

  “You’ve got moments of breathing room, like the bathrooms and any food lines that you might go into, but pretty much you’re ours as soon as you hit the gate,” Braillard says.

  Universal Studios Hollywood stages its own Halloween Horror Nights, with original mazes based on 1970s shock rocker Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare, Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses and The Wolfman. Also new this year is a maze built around La Llorona (The Weeping Woman), the fearful story of melancholy and murder that has terrified Mexican and Latin American children for generations. For the uninitiated, La Llorona was doomed to wander the Earth forever after drowning her children in a desperate attempt to win a lost love.

  Scott Swenson, creative director of Busch Gardens’ annual Howl-O-Scream, says he thinks people come to the park to be scared for the same thrill they might get from extreme sports.

  “It’s an adrenaline rush that if you let your imagination go is just as real as being terrified anywhere else,” he says. “But deep inside, you know you’re still going to be safe. You can get close to the edge.”
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