“This looks better than I thought it would,” Mr. Kopelman said. He pointed to the spiky fangs and horns with their creepy decay and added, “I didn’t like the color, so I had my painter go back and add cracks and stuff.”
Mr. Kopelman is a professional haunted house producer and designer, or “haunter” in industry parlance. He opened his first haunted house 30 years ago in Phoenix, and promoted it by driving a huge Frankenstein head around in a truck, making sure it broke down on the city’s busiest corner during rush hour. (“I read P. T. Barnum’s book,” he said.) In recent years, he has designed or promoted multiple “haunts” across the country every Halloween season.
A genial, salt-and-pepper-haired man of 56 who lives in Houston, he isn’t a big fan of horror films or Goth culture — or, for that matter, dressing up on Halloween. He sees haunted houses as a profitable business, and likes the theatricality. “I always had the dream of producing movies,” he said.
He was at the Fairplex to oversee construction of Rob Zombie’s Great American Nightmare, a collaboration with the rock musician and horror-film director, based on the gory Rob Zombie oeuvre. The production, Mr. Kopelman said, is the biggest of his career: a $2 million budget; three haunted houses encompassing 33,000 square feet; a “Bloody Boulevard” outdoors; and 150 employees, including three seamstresses and “a guy that shoots you with CO2 as you go through.”
Great American Nightmare may be the best example yet of the upsizing of haunted houses over the last decade, in the vein of “mega haunts” like Netherworld in Atlanta and the Beast in Kansas City, Mo., which have elaborate sets and are staffed by actors and the prop and makeup artists who have found themselves out of work in a C.G.I.-dominated Hollywood.
There are now more than a thousand such large-scale attractions around the country, said Larry Kirchner, editor of Hauntworld.com, and haunting has become a sophisticated, $1 billion-a-year industry. Even the season itself has expanded: many haunted houses open in late September and extend past Halloween to early November. This year, the National Retail Federation’s annual Halloween survey found that more than 31 million Americans plan to visit a haunted house, often paying from $15 to $30 each.
Ray Kohout, who created one of the first large-scale, themed haunted houses in St. Louis in 1991, marveled at the evolution. “Now there’s animatronics and realistic props,” said Mr. Kohout, who franchised his project, known as Silo X, to nine cities at its peak before getting out of the business 10 years ago. “Back then, it was much more primitive and simplistic, a lot more about blood and guts.”
For Rob Zombie, who remembers the lame haunted rides at carnivals in his ’70s youth, the goal is a Disney-like level of art direction. “Going into the Haunted Mansion as a kid, your jaw drops,” he said. “The attention to detail at Disneyland is outrageous. That’s what I want to be able to do here.”
As with his movies, however, he wants visitors to leave with a vague sense of revulsion. “My approach has been to create that weird, unnerving feeling that you can’t shake,” he said. “I like to screw with your head.”
THE MOST COMMON TRICK haunted house designers employ is the startle scare: the man who jumps from behind a corner; the animatronic skeleton that drops from the ceiling, its jaw clattering; the sudden, bloodcurdling scream. Timothy Haskell, an owner and the creative director of Nightmare, a popular and long-running haunted house in Manhattan, said startles are necessary but “ephemeral.”
A veteran theater director, Mr. Haskell writes a 20-page script every year and “plays upon people’s empathy,” he said, to induce a more lasting bout of heebie-jeebies. Last year, for his serial-killer theme, he designed a set where visitors executed Ted Bundy. “They had to actually flip the switch,” he said. “And feel in their hands the electricity pulsing through.”
Ben Armstrong, of Netherworld, strives to incorporate new forms of technology, he said, which he often finds at the Halloween and Attractions Show, an industry trade show held every spring in St. Louis. Lately, he has been experimenting with projection effects. “I found a particular material that you can see through, but it grabs light,” Mr. Armstrong said. “You see the ghost, but you see past him to the background.”
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