Some real psycho stuff, courtesy of the Haunted Mines haunted house in Colorado Springs.
Pre-condition your customers with repeated similar “safe” props so they’ll learn to not expect a scare from this type of prop. A few occurrences later, blam! Invoke an effect from the prop. The customer will learn this pattern well if repeated over a short span, so use it one or two times at most. If twice, overlap the occurrences at the beginning, but run one set in a short span and the second across your entire haunt.
The classic way to scare your customer is misdirection. Get their attention focused in one place (called the distraction), then startle them from a different place. Seems easy, right? It is if you do it the correct way: operate in the startle zone and adhere to the proper inspection time.
The startle zone is the area within 30 degrees of the edge of a person’s peripheral vision. Remember that we all have peripheral vision as a defense mechanism from our evolutionary past, so unprocessed activity in this region more quickly triggers a panic reaction. Although peripheral vision is approximately 180 degrees (90-degrees to each side), in a haunt you must consider that your customers are scanning up and down and side to side as they go thru your attraction. Thus the volume encapsulated is larger, so the startle zone is roughly 45-degrees behind the customer. If you get too much ahead of this, your customer can see the actor/effect approaching too early. If directly behind, your customer will miss the approach of the effect entirely.
It’s also important to get all the members of the customer group looking in approximately the same direction at the time the startle effect is triggered, thus the name for this technique. If one customer is looking at the distraction while the other three are looking at the approaching actor, the impact is only 25%. But don’t fret too much if you can’t guarantee 100% distraction, because 50% works well. Those that get startled actually entertain the un-startled customers in the group!
Inspection time (covered later) is also important in misdirection.
Provide a simple way for your customer to self-verify that a prop (or actor) is “safe”, then moments after the verification, activate the prop. For example, the ‘half-open closet’, or the actor who can convincingly pretend to be a manikin.
So what happens if your fancy scary prop jumps out at customer, and then stays there for 15… 20… 30 seconds? You might get an initial reaction, but then the customer examines the prop and determines that it really isn’t scary, and it really isn’t a monster, but that it’s just a latex mask (whatever) on a stick. The scare is ruined. And, you’ve potentially destroyed the experience for the next customer who sees it before you want them to.
OK, so you speed it up. Now your scary mask on a stick jumps out and back in an amazing one second time. Blindingly fast. Too fast, unfortunately. You may hear your customers comment “What was that?” and “Did you see something?”.
What’s the ideal time? It really depends. You’ll need to actually test your effects and adjust to get the ideal time, but in most scenarios you’ll want to time it for 3 to 7 seconds of exposure.
Thus: present the prop/actor/effect to the customer quickly… but not too quickly.
Give your customers a little taste of what’s to come around the corner (or in the next room or in the dark ahead) by using a non-primary sense (sound, tactile, temperature, etc). The customer’s imagination will often produce a much better scare then you really have for them!
Keep your rooms small and intimate. In addition to the benefits of maintaining customer group integrity and flow control, a room that is slightly smaller than human scale will heighten the effects within the room. One exception: theatrical scenes, where the drama of size overwhelms the customer.
TBD
Avoid the Domino effect….
Overall factor applied in concert with the roller-coaster rule.
