Haunts: The Human Element

By Nina Ely

In every Halloween hunted house, it’s the actors who make the show. This book will show how to help your actors be their best.

Learn How To:

-Find the best creatures for the job.
-Develop characters
-Enhance the scenes
-Improve event efficiency
-Maintain haunt safety
-Retain and improve your staff
With special sections on creative costuming and maintaining staff payroll.

Professional actor and the artistic director of the unique acting troupe, The Patient Creatures (East), Nina Ely has been haunting for over twenty years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tricorner Publishing
• Release date: May 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9781311102720

Book preview

Haunts:

The Human Element

A Guide to Hiring, Training, and Retaining Actors

in the Halloween Haunted House Industry

by Nina Ely

Cover photo by Joe Ripple

Illustrations, back photo, and cover design by the author

Tricorner Publishing

Revolutionary, Independent Publishing

Pennsylvania

www.TricornerPublishing.com

Contact Nina at:

www.CreaturesEast.com

This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to

persons living or dead are purely coincidental.

Tricorner Publishing’s Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

For Arlene

Introduction: What’s Really Scary?

People who work in Halloween haunted house events are a special breed. Part actor, part artist, part psychologist, and often part lunatic, as well, they live eleven months of the year just to get to October, and their chance to unleash their inner monster. Get a few of them around a table, and they’ll start swapping stories of particularly good haunts where they once worked, stunts pulled by crazy coworkers, and the live ones, the patrons they scared the pants off of.

Talk to perennial haunt customers, and you’ll get much the same sorts of stories, but from the other side. They’ll fondly remember the particularly frightening actor, the guy who freaked them out, or the girl who seemed so realistically psychopathic. Some of these stories go back years, sometimes to haunts that have long been shuttered, and performers who have moved on to parts unknown.

Effects and props come and go; every year brings the next big thing. But the mechanical device or technical effect that every event goes into debt to buy becomes old hat before there’s frost on the pumpkins. It’s the people, the enthusiastic performers and memorable characters that stay with your guests long after they’ve gone home.

And yet, this aspect is perhaps the most often overlooked. Too many times while a haunt director is up to his or her eyeballs dealing with venue, security, publicity, building permits, fire codes, and a million other details, the actors are left to take care of themselves. It’s often said in business—and your haunt is a business—that people are the most valuable resource. Because it is so labor-intensive, this is particularly true for a haunt.

The genesis of this book was a seminar that I taught at The National Haunter’s Convention in Spring of 2009, drawing on 23 years of experience in the haunt field as an actor and director. Following the seminar, I had many requests for a book on the subject, so here I’ve tried to give Haunt directors an outline for finding the best people for the job, training them for the particular demands of a haunted event, forming them into a strong team, and keeping them coming back year after year.

I have loved the many roles I’ve played in haunts over the years, and consider the time I’ve spent in planning, building, and performing at Halloween attractions to be some of the best times of my life. You can create that same experience for your