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13tth gate the makeup and sean setup to get the scare factor

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13tth gate the makeup and sean setup to get the scare factor

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As the sun sets on fall nights, a spot under the shadows of the Mississippi River bridge comes to life. Screams fill the air, and a nervous, never-ending line of people waits outside an all-black building, blending in with the dark.

That building is The 13th Gate Haunted House, and its frights have become a staple of the spooky season in Baton Rouge since it opened in 2002. It opens for the season this Friday, Sept. 27.

The 13th Gate, put on by Midnight Productions, is a 40,000-square-foot attraction that sends visitors through a nonstop, thrilling and chilling experience. The haunted house has won many awards for its one-of-a-kind scene design and cast makeup. These spooks come to life thanks to a 150-member cast and crew that comes from around the country each year.

On this episode of 225's Between the Lines series, we talked with The 13th Gate scenic painter and makeup artist Johnny Bullard about what goes into making new and exciting scenes each year.

Bullard has worked on sets of shows like The Walking Dead and films like Emancipation and Lisa Frankenstein. And he's been working on this year's new sewer section at The 13th Gate.

"So, the first step in approaching a set or a scene would probably be research and development. I would probably go ahead and go on the internet, start looking at pictures, trying to figure out what the look is that we want, exactly what kind of materials we're dealing with," Bullard says.

"On this set, we've actually just been doing a lot of rusting and aging processes," he continues. "We've been making a lot of organic materials, such as roots and vines, and right now we've got some pipes that we've been using again, and scenic painting and decorating."

Go behind the scenes of the famous haunted house's secret corridors and learn more about the attraction's history in the latest episode of Between the Lines.

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The 13th Gate opens Friday, but here's how scarers have been prepping all year long - [225]

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As the sun sets on fall nights, a spot under the shadows of the Mississippi River bridge comes to life. Screams fill the air, and a nervous, never-ending line of people waits outside an all-black building, blending in with the dark. That building is The 13th Gate Haunted House, and its frights have become a...

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About the Company | 13th Gate – 13th Gate Haunted House

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Since 1994, Midnight Productions has been scaring and entertaining thousands of guests in Louisiana with their Haunted Attractions.

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why do people like scary movies and haunted houses 

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why do people like scary movies and haunted houses 

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(Washington Post illustration; iStock)

All my friends are trying to convince me to go to this super creepy haunted house thing for Halloween. Personally, I hate being scared, and every year I try to avoid going to these things. I scream my head off the whole time. My friends do, too, but then they always seem to be having so much fun by the end! Why do they like being scared out of their wits? If I go to enough scary movies and haunted hayrides, will I start to enjoy it, too?

Here's what science has to say:

Fear is a funny thing in the modern world.

When our bodies are primed for danger - which is the physical state in which fear puts us - we achieve a weird kind of high. You've probably heard of the "fight or flight" response. Humans evolved this reaction to scary situations because our ancestors would have died out without it. Fear gives us a rush of hormones that make us faster and stronger, and back when the world was a more (immediately) dangerous place, people who lacked that response probably didn't survive to pass on their genes to future generations. Our ancestors didn't get any points for being super chill when they encountered packs of hyenas.

As our hearts speed up and we breathe more rapidly, our muscles get more blood with more oxygen in it, which is what we need to fight the danger or flee from it as fast as we can. A hormone called epinephrine (which you probably know as adrenaline) is released to trigger these superpowers, and it can wind your body up so tightly for action that it makes you shake in your boots.

There are slight variations from person to person, so everyone experiences fear a little differently. For some of us, it's a superhero-like rush. For others, it's a nausea-inducing quiver. Maybe a jump scare leaves your heart pounding fast for minutes after the rest of you has recovered, or sends you into a day-long spiral of panic attacks.

But if fright doesn't utterly wreck you physically, it can feel kind of amazing.

Fear is negative, but it's also what we call a "high arousal" response. And those feel good. In his book "Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger," science journalist Jeff Wise called this response "the biological equivalent of opening the throttle."

New research might teach us how to make a scarier scream

"When we're in a safe place, we can interpret that threat response as we do any high arousal response like joy or happiness," says Margee Kerr, a sociologist and author who specializes in fear. "The response is triggered by anything unpredictable or startling. But when we're in a safe place and we know it, it takes less than a second for us to remember we're not actually in danger. Then we switch over to enjoying it. It's a kind of euphoria. That's why you see people go right from screaming to laughing."

Kerr thinks that we also enjoy fear as a distraction. Calling up our fight-or-flight response tamps down our conscious thinking. "We're not worried about groceries or abstract things, but instead feel very grounded and primal," she says.

There's also a sense of achievement, however silly that may sound. "Like any personal challenge, running a 5K or climbing a tree, we stressed [ourselves] and came out okay," Kerr says. "Even though we knew we were safe going in, we feel we accomplished something."

Social bonding is also a big component: When people get scared in groups, the high arousal triggers the formation of a particularly strong memory. The shared intensity can also sort of trick you and your friends into feeling like you've all accomplished something as a group - even if all you've accomplished is paying 20 bucks to get chased around a corn maze.

So should you go with your friends? That really depends on what you want. Kerr has applied some of her research to the real world by helping to design haunted houses, and she says she hates seeing people dragged in against their will by well-meaning friends or family.

13 spooky science stories to get you in the Halloween spirit

"If you feel like your friends are supporting you through this thing that you want but are hesitant about, that can create a great experience," Kerr says. "But it's all about personal agency."

Coercing someone into a scary situation is never a good idea. If you don't feel you're in control, you're likely to just feel scared in a bad way the whole time - all screams, no laughter. So if the idea of a haunted house makes you feel queasy, just wait outside with a pumpkin spice latte and some Halloween candy.

Have a question for Dear Science? Ask it here.

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Dear Science: Why do people like scary movies and haunted houses?

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All my friends are trying to convince me to go to this super creepy haunted house thing for Halloween. Personally, I hate being scared, and every year I try to avoid going to these things. I scream my head off the whole time.

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why do people love to visit horror attractions

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why do people love to visit horror attractions

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‘Not Much Scares Me.’ Then She Entered the Haunted House. (Published 2019)

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Three very different Halloween adventures test a horror-film enthusiast with little experience visiting haunted houses.

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Do you believe in ghosts? Have you ever been in a haunted house? Have strange or eerie things you couldn't explain ever happened in your ownhome?

Share your thoughts or tell us a story in the comments, then read the related article about the many Americans who believe their houses are haunted.

Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
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Do you believe in ghosts? Have you ever been in a haunted house? Have strange or eerie things you couldn't explain ever happened in your ownhome? Share your thoughts or tell us a story in the comments, then read the related article about the many Americans who believe their houses are haunted.

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The makers of Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights taught me how to survive any haunted house — and it worked

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Universal Florida’s Halloween Horror Nights is one of America’s premier Halloween events. We tested out haunted-house survival tips from its creators.

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The science of the scare: Designing the perfect haunted house

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'It's a matter of thinking creatively about novel, different, unexpected types of set-ups' says fear expert

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Louisiana Haunted House Directory - The Scare Factor’s Haunt Directory

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Find Louisiana’s largest, scariest, and best haunted houses, hayrides, trails, haunt reviews, and other Halloween events with our Louisiana Haunted House Directory!

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why do we like to visit haunted houses that creep us out

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why do we like to visit haunted houses that creep us out

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The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, is reputed to be the most haunted house in the world: more than 1,000 ghosts are allegedly in residence. This house, the inspiration for the movie Winchester (2018) starring Helen Mirren, originally belonged to Sarah Winchester, who was the widow of William Wirt Winchester, the gun-manufacturing magnate. Construction of the house began in 1884, completely unguided by any sort of coherent building plan, and it continued unabated until 1922. Rooms, whimsical architectural features and different wings and floors were added haphazardly, resulting in a rambling, bizarre puzzle of secret passageways, stairways and alcoves. There are doors that don't go anywhere, and windows with views into other interior rooms. There is even a room constructed specifically for conducting séances. At its peak, the house had more than 500 rooms, more than 10,000 windows, and many dozens of fireplaces and stairways. The Winchester Mystery House is a place where one could very easily become lost, and there are real scientific explanations for why people believe that ghosts thrive in such habitats. It is, in short, a very creepy place.

Why do places such as the Winchester Mystery House creep us out and induce feelings of disorientation and dread? These places possess combinations of features that humans have evolved to regard with caution, either because they were associated with the presence of predators or natural hazards, or because they provide limited sensory information and restrict freedom of movement in a way that could impair our ability to deal with an emergent threat.

There are different types of creepiness, and the array of things that creep us out ranges from dolls that are too lifelike to clowns in places where clowns should not be. However, the kind of creepiness most applicable to places is explained by a theory I developed with one of my students, Sara Koehnke. (The philosopher David Livingstone Smith has called this the 'threat-ambiguity theory' of creepiness.) This theory was originally applied to people rather than places. The basic premise is that those who in some way fall outside of the norm put us on our guard because they are unpredictable, and it is unclear whether they pose a threat or not.

We tested our theory in an online survey of 1,341 individuals. We asked them to rate the likelihood that a hypothetical 'creepy person' exhibited 44 different behaviours, such as unusual patterns of eye contact or physical characteristics such as visible tattoos. Participants then rated the creepiness of 21 different occupations, and listed two hobbies that they thought were creepy. Finally, we asked participants to express their level of agreement with 15 statements about the nature of creepy people. The results were consistent with the idea that creepiness is a response to the ambiguity of threat. Non-normative non-verbal and emotional behaviours, unusual physical characteristics and hobbies or suspect occupations set off our 'creepiness detectors'. Men were more likely to be perceived as creepy by males and females alike, and women were more likely to perceive sexual threat from creepy people.

So we get creeped out by people who behave in bizarre and unpredictable ways and violate the subtle social conventions that enable us to understand their intentions. In other words, they are an ambiguity: are they someone to fear? This ambivalence leaves us uneasily frozen in place, and is the psychology behind feeling 'creeped out'. It is a reaction that might be adaptive if it helps you maintain vigilance when threat is uncertain and sharply focuses your attention on resolving the uncomfortable ambiguity at hand.

Our theory received additional support in two experiments conducted by the Canadian psychologist Margo Watt and her colleagues. Watt had people rate faces on creepiness, trustworthiness and attractiveness, as well as give detailed reports of creepy encounters they had experienced, and describe what a prototypical creepy individual would look like. Her results confirmed that men are more likely to be perceived as creepy than women, and that uncertainty about whether a person is trustworthy was a key ingredient. Watt and her colleagues noted the quick, nonconscious way by which judgments of creepiness occurred, indicating that such judgments are intuitive and rely on emotional reasoning rather than deliberative, detailed cognitive analysis.

I propose that places can creep us out for the very same reasons that people can: by presenting us with ambiguous information that makes it unclear if the place poses a threat or not. Places have this effect on us because they activate an evolved psychological adaptation known as an 'agent-detection mechanism'.

Agent-detection mechanisms evolved to protect us from harm at the hands of predators and enemies. If you're walking through the woods alone at night and hear the sound of something rustling in the bushes, you will respond with a heightened level of arousal and attention. You will behave as if there is a wilful 'agent' present who is about to do you harm. If it turns out to be a gust of wind or a stray cat, you lose little by overreacting. But if you fail to activate the alarm response and a true threat is present - well, the cost of your miscalculation could be high.

The evolutionary precursors of human agent-detection mechanisms can be found throughout the animal kingdom, and most of these are evolved responses to predators and to the environments that harbour them. For example, virtually all primates have an aversion to sleeping on the ground where they might easily be found by predators such as large cats or snakes. Isolated populations of prey animals that have been free of predation for dozens of generations, such as rodents, Sitka black-tailed deer and Père David's deer, display enhanced vigilance and tension in response to environments and stimuli associated with ancestral predators; this is a testament to the genetic durability of these adaptations. Vestiges of such responses have also been documented in human children who intuitively understand which environmental features offer the best hiding places from predators, and who prefer sleeping arrangements that minimise fears of things lurking beneath them.

We love places where 'you can see without being seen, and eat without being eaten'

Research by environmental psychologists has confirmed that the most attractive natural environments contain things such as running water and open meadows surrounded by woods - the very features that would have been beneficial for the survival of early humans. In other words, people who were drawn to the 'right' places did better than those who were not, and over time their genes were favoured over those of individuals who spent too much time in sparser, more barren landscapes.

But places exhibit more abstract evolutionarily relevant features as well, and it turns out that being drawn to the 'right' psychological features of places might have been just as important for our ancestors' survival. Places that lack the right psychological features set off our creep detectors.

In his book The Experience of Landscape (1996), the British geographer Jay Appleton described two physical qualities that determine whether a place is attractive or frightening to humans: 'prospect' and 'refuge'. Refuge means having a secure, protected place to hide where one can be sheltered from danger, while prospect refers to one's clear, unobstructed view of the landscape. Attractive places offer a lot of prospect and a lot of refuge, or what the American landscape architect Randolph Hester in 1979 called a 'Womb with a View'.

Our love of such spaces shows up everywhere. Universally, children enjoy playing in enclosed spaces such as cardboard boxes, tree houses and in bushes or other dense vegetation where they feel hidden. The concepts of prospect and refuge can help to explain the almost magical quality of the feelings evoked by memories of favourite childhood hiding places and the richness of detail that can often be recalled about them decades later. Similarly, people dining in restaurants usually prefer to occupy tables in corners or nooks, especially when these locations allow them to sit with their backs against a wall, and they will usually settle for tables in the centre of the room only when all of the more desirable seats have been taken. In the words of Appleton, we love the feel of these spaces because they are, evolutionarily speaking, places where 'you can see without being seen, and eat without being eaten'. The optimal environment for human comfort is one that offers a lot of prospect and refuge for the individual; the worst combination is very little prospect or refuge.

Research has confirmed that places that offer bad combinations of prospect and refuge are perceived as unsafe and dangerous: they can offer a lot of hiding places for people or things that might intend to do us harm. Scary places also lack what environmental psychologists refer to as 'legibility'. Legibility reflects the ease with which a place can be recognised, organised into a pattern and recalled - in other words, a place where we can wander around without getting lost.

The cinematic portrayal of haunted houses has remained remarkably consistent across time: they are like 'real' haunted houses on steroids. In a sense, these fictional spaces act like the 'supernormal stimuli' identified by ethologists who study animal behaviour. Supernormal stimuli amplify the essential features that trigger instinctive behaviours, resulting in a more intense performance of these behaviours. Current human obsessions with stimuli as different as doughnuts and pornography are often thought of as responses to 'supernormal' stimuli that exceed anything that occurred naturally in the ancestral environment in which humans evolved. Haunted houses are filled with such discomfiting 'supernormal stimuli'. They give us the creeps not because they pose a clear threat to us, but rather because it is unclear whether or not they represent a threat, and so the agent-detection mechanisms discussed earlier are on full alert.

Things that activate hypervigilance for natural or supernatural malevolent forces abound in large, draughty old houses: rattling or creaking sounds in an upstairs room; the sighing and moaning of wind passing through cracks; ragged curtains fluttering in the breeze; echoes and cold spots. It is very easy to imagine that one is not really alone in such a place.

Haunted houses also limit our opportunities for escape. Research has consistently shown that we feel uncomfortable when our personal space is violated anywhere, but especially so in situations where we feel as if escape will become difficult. Such feelings of discomfort are symptomatic of the fact that we are constantly - even if unconsciously - scanning our surroundings and assessing our ability to flee, should it become necessary.

The classic Hollywood haunted house is our worst nightmare as it makes fleeing difficult. The darkness and confusing layout can cause us to get lost or, at the very least, slow us down. Escape could further be impeded by hedges, iron fences or crumbling stairways. Haunted houses lack 'legibility': they are a bad combination of a very low prospect for us, and a very high refuge for the creepy-crawly things that are lying in wait to get us. The typical haunted house is large, dark, surrounded by overgrown vegetation, and full of surprising architectural features such as secret rooms and closets under staircases. Attics and basements are also must-have items and, of course, spider webs, bats and rats make nice accessories.

Similarly, it is no accident that the prototypical Hollywood haunted house is in a remote, isolated location, far removed from the rest of society - think of the off-season resort hotel in The Shining (1980). If bad things happen, help would be a long time coming, even if communication with the outside world were possible. Conveniently, in old horror movies the telephones always stop working. Isolation in natural environments such as the woods in The Blair Witch Project (1999) provides the same enforced helplessness that is so often a prerequisite for horror. And places that isolate people without their consent, such as prisons, orphanages and insane asylums, are considered scary, almost as if an institution that once housed a 'troubled' population of people has become 'contaminated' by this association.

Then there is the so-called 'Hum'. The American sociologist Margee Kerr who studies fear notes in her book Scream (2017) that large old buildings full of rotting wood, exposed ductwork and other structural defects can produce infrasound that makes what is already a creepy experience even spookier. The 'Hum' is a sensation caused by exposure to low frequency sounds of 20 Hz or less. These soundwaves, known as 'infrasound', are inaudible to humans but their slight vibrations still register as an unidentifiable, ambiguous signal that can set off our creep detectors. In some people, the 'Hum' can produce sleeplessness and even nausea. Two British scientists conducted an experiment on the Hum in 1998, which was followed up in 2002 by the psychologist Richard Wiseman and the composer Sarah Angliss at a concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London. They exposed an unsuspecting crowd to infrasound through loudspeakers, resulting in widespread reports of uneasiness and chills from the concertgoers.

A recent study reveals yet another reason why dark, foreboding places come across as less than hospitable to us. In a series of seven experiments, the American psychologist Kurt Gray and his colleagues discovered that, while we can easily imagine both moral and immoral people as having an afterlife, the types of afterlife we bestow on them are quite different. Good people are pictured in 'transcendent immortality', inhabiting a spiritual paradise such as heaven or, if their spirits remain on Earth, as inhabiting expansive, open places such as mountaintops and deserts. On the other hand, the malevolent spirits of deceased evil-doers are most easily pictured in a 'trapped immortality' where they exist in highly circumscribed surroundings such as a particularly dense forest, a haunted house or even a single room. Given these data, it is no surprise that we are scared rather than comforted by any spiritual presence that we might encounter in old houses.

Our enjoyment of haunted houses and horror movies might tap into evolved psychological mechanisms

Whether or not a house is perceived as haunted doesn't depend only upon the building's physical features. Just as important are the beliefs of the person exploring the house. Individuals who believe in paranormal phenomena and have expectations that creepy things might actually be present in such a place are more likely to engage in the sort of top-down cognitive processing that induces fear. For these people, otherwise innocuous but uncertain surroundings can become a chilling experience.

The old expression 'whistling past the graveyard' reflects the longstanding unease that humans have around places associated with death. The sites of death frequently become seen as haunted, and these locations are common settings for horror movies and books. The more gruesome and traumatic a death, the more likely it is that the place where it happened becomes tainted by the event. Deaths by suicide seem to be especially likely to infuse a place with a sense of foreboding, and the creepiest suicide venue is probably Aokigahara, or the infamous 'Suicide Forest' in Japan.

This forest is a beautiful, dense, 14-sq-mile patch of vegetation near Mount Fuji, Japan's sacred mountain, and it provided the inspiration for the US horror film The Forest (2016). The place has long been associated with mystical and supernatural phenomena, and in the 1800s it was a popular destination for abandoning elderly people so that they could die alone and with dignity in the woods. In his book The Complete Manual of Suicide (1993), Wataru Tsurumi describes the forest as 'the perfect place to die', and copies of his book have been found on the bodies of many suicide victims in the forest.

In the 1960s, the forest featured in a Japanese novel about two lovers who end up killing themselves. Since then, suicides have become so common there (105 victims in 2003 alone) that the area is regularly patrolled by police and teams of volunteers seeking to save people from themselves or recover the bodies of those whom they could not save. Throughout the forest, signs read 'Please consult the police before you decide to die' and 'Your life is a precious gift from your parents'. Thieves prowl the forest looking for dead bodies so that they might rob them of any remaining valuables.

The forest has all of the trappings essential for being creepy. It is full of densely packed trees, rotting logs, moss and underbrush, and its lack of legibility is exacerbated by the fact that compasses don't work there thanks to the high concentration of magnetic iron in the rocky volcanic soil. Folklore has it that the spirits of people who have killed themselves there call others to the forest, and then prey upon those who are sad by luring them off of the trails, deep into the woods.

Given how easily we are creeped out by haunted houses and other spooky places, why would we ever intentionally expose ourselves to them? How have commercial haunted houses, with an estimated 5,000 such attractions operating in the United States each year, become an integral part of 21st-century Halloween theatre? Although I have focused on the frightening, negative experience of horror, it must be acknowledged that under some circumstances creepiness and horror can be seductive, as evidenced by the sums of money we spend each year on horror movies and commercial haunted houses. Clearly, for many people, the creepy can have a peculiar 'allure'. How could such things possibly be entertaining to us?

I propose that our enjoyment of commercial haunted houses and horror movies taps into the same evolved psychological mechanisms that exist to help us learn from the experiences of others. For example, as I argued in Scientific American in 2008, humans have evolved an intense interest in gossip because a strong evolutionary advantage accrued to those who stayed abreast of the private affairs of allies and enemies alike. People who kept up with the scuttlebutt of the tribe knew who was worth knowing, who was sleeping with whom, and who was plotting against whom. Hence gossipers were poised to exploit openings that would be advantageous to them and to avoid fighting battles that they could not win. These people became socially successful, and it is the genes of these busybodies that have come down to us through the ages.

Ordinarily, we are most interested in people who are known to us personally, but we can also be quite interested in stories about strangers who have survived extraordinary mishaps such as shark attacks or airplane crashes, and we can become similarly intrigued by stories about very successful people. In other words, our interest in 'strategy-learning gossip' is driven by the evolutionary advantages of aquiring survival and success strategies vicariously through the experiences of others. Our enjoyment of haunted houses and horror movies might tap into the same evolved psychological mechanisms as strategy-learning gossip, so finding ourselves drawn to horror stories can have real benefits.

In the safety of a movie theatre, watching others deal with serial killers or paranormal threats allows us to mentally rehearse strategies that we might use if we would ever find ourselves in a similar situation. At such films, it is not at all uncommon to hear gasps from the audience as a character begins to open the door to that room or to hide in a very inopportune place. And so we feel better prepared for creepy encounters because we have seen what happens to others in harrowing circumstances.

Similarly, walking through a commercial haunted house can provide relevant feedback about ourselves. It might be useful to know which types of things are scary to us and which are not, and examining our emotional reactions to unsettling experiences can help us gauge our level of preparedness for dealing with paranormal encounters. This in turn might tell us which strategies could work best for us if such an eerie real-life encounter should ever occur. So, yes, horror can be fun if it's not the real thing, and it can help to prepare us for the next serial killer, the Zombie Apocalypse, or whatever other horrors await us.

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Why do we like to visit scary houses that creep us out? | Aeon Essays

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The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, is reputed to be the most haunted house in the world: more than 1,000 ghosts are allegedly in residence. This house, the inspiration for the movie Winchester (2018) starring Helen Mirren, originally belonged to Sarah Winchester, who was the widow of William Wirt Winchester, the gun-manufacturing magnate.

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What’s the Truth Behind Haunted Louisiana? - louisianalife.com

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The Myrtles For years, owners have marketed The Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville as “America’s most haunted house.” Several apparitions apparently haunt The Myrtles, but the most famous is Chloe, an enslaved woman who purportedly had her left ear removed when she was caught eavesdropping on a business conversation between the owner, Clarke Woodruff, and area residents. To further the…

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the design and phycology of haunted houses

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the design and phycology of haunted houses

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Written by Jessica Rapp, CNN

For more than two decades, Phil Miller has been building a world of nightmares on a 1,300-acre farm in Delaware. With eight attractions, Frightland opens for a month each October, shocking visitors with ghoulish hayrides, a grim cemetery and a prison riddled with zombies.

Miller, a former home remodeling contractor, also turns up the terror with CGI effects and theatrics. But there is one iconic symbol of horror that he feels is essential to every haunting experience: a Victorian manor.

With a little help from Hollywood, these historic homes and their Gothic counterparts, known for their wrought iron gates and ornate, asymmetrical structures, have a longstanding reputation for being creepy.

This notoriety appears to have emerged sometime in the 1930s, when elaborate Victorian styles were abandoned in favor of a return to simpler colonial architecture. This paved the way for empty, decrepit homes that served as inspiration for films like "Beetlejuice," "House on Haunted Hill" and even Disney's "Haunted Mansion."

So while many of America's thousands of haunted attractions are simply set in large warehouses or rely on props behind a black wall, Frightland's founder is convinced Victorian architecture makes his experience more engrossing.

There may be a deep-rooted psychological explanation for our unease, according to Frank T. McAndrew, a professor of psychology at Knox College, Illinois. When it comes to inciting fear, "the older the house, the better," he said in a phone interview.

"Anything that gives it the feeling of being old will help, because the longer the place has been there, the greater the chances are that something terrible has happened there," he continued. "Whereas if the house has only been there for five years, it just hasn't had the time to become haunted.

"But a lot depends on the reputation of the house -- you get creeped out because you're unsure if there's something to be scared of or not."

McAndrew said certain Victorian characteristics can reinforce our sense of fear, but any rundown home will do, as long as it's coupled with the visitor's preconceived expectations of what might exist inside.

Sense of unease

The layout of a home can contribute to the feeling of unease. Humans have a natural, evolutionary need to feel safe, and haunted house architects can exploit this.

"It's what we call 'lack of legibility' -- it means the homes have a confusing layout and it looks like you could ... get lost," McAndrew said. "There are hallways that twist and turn, and rooms that are hard to find. If you got in there and suddenly had to get out, escaping would be difficult."

The emergence of commercial haunted houses in the 1990s gave rise to new challenges, like adhering to strict safety codes and handling big groups of visitors, according to the founder of Hauntrepreneurs Themed Attraction Design and Consulting, Leonard Pickel.

This is when the floor plans transformed from traditional multi-bedroom homes into houses with zigzagged pathways. By keeping the line of sight as short as possible, designers could prevent people from seeing what scary surprises had happened to the group ahead.

Pickel trained as an architect before going into the haunted house industry more than four decades ago, when it was still in its infancy. The secret to creating a scary space, he said, is breaking all the rules he learned in school.

"I make sure I have some lower spaces that are really wide, and some tall, thin spaces to make people feel uncomfortable," he said in a phone interview. In presentations, he uses the term "darkitecture" -- unnerving design devices like crooked towers or vertical forced perspective, which makes objects appear closer or further away than they really are.

There are plenty of other design tricks in Pickel's playbook, from creating the perception of loose floorboards, to painting a large black spot on the floor that prompts visitors to jump over it. Interior design, he said, is becoming increasingly crucial to these attractions.

"There has to be enough scenic value and cool things to look at, because some people you just can't scare," he said. "You have to entertain them. One of the biggest changes (in the industry] in the last 40 years is the level of detail -- the level of detail is ridiculous. Like, if you look in the wastebasket in the room, there's probably a newspaper in there with a story about the haunted house."

Growing expectations

At Scareventures, in La Mesa, California, owner Kris Golojuch prides himself on creating this level of detail through two-dimensional facades, constructed to look like dilapidated buildings, that tell a themed story. They're generally made from fire-proof foam, specially textured and illuminated to create the appearance of brick or stone.

While the haunted house industry has grown over the last three decades, Golojuch believes his art is becoming increasingly rare.

"Building the facades and making the classic Victorian haunted house -- that's dying," he said in a phone interview.

Instead, the industry appears to be shifting towards what Golojuch called "extreme haunting," with designers using special effects game to stay competitive and find new ways to catch people off their guard.

"TV shows like 'The Walking Dead' have made children so immune to gore and violence," he said. "I've seen little kids walking past (faux) decapitated bodies, and when I was a kid, people would be horrified to see something like that."

Golojuch remains a traditionalist at heart. While his background isn't in architecture, he is well-versed in repurposing everyday materials into extensive, creative facades. One Saturday a month, he meets up with other haunted house enthusiasts at the California Haunters Society to exchange ideas about creating ghostly facades and interiors that can both scare and impress.

"It's a feel-good moment for us when you see people completely taken aback by how cool a scene was," he said. "For the actors, the greatest achievement is a scare, but for me as a builder and designer, it's when they come out and say 'I didn't know I was still in a parking lot.'

"That, to me, is the biggest compliment."

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the art and psychology of haunted house design - cnn

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The dark art of designing haunted houses

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Haunted houses are popular during the Halloween season. Here are the design tricks architects use to terrify visitors.

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The scariest haunted house of 2017 is a giant walk-through attraction located in the former Georgia Antique Center in the outskirts of Atlanta. Named Netherworld, it features 3D special effects, aerial performers and, of course, flesh-eating clowns. Netherworld frightens so effectively, so inescapably, that people with heart conditions are warned against buying tickets.

This is what a haunted house is supposed to do. They exist to scare people. The idea behind haunted houses is not new, of course- people have entertained themselves with spooky stories for centuries - but haunted houses are different because they are inseparable from the holiday that vaulted them to cultural prominence. The tradition could not exist without Halloween; Halloween would not be the same without it.

The origins of the haunted house date back to 19th-century London, when a series of illusions and attractions introduced the public to new forms of gruesome entertainment. In 1802, Marie Tussaud scandalized British audiences with an exhibition of wax sculptures of decapitated French figures, including King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Marat and Robespierre. Tussaud's likenesses were remarkably accurate, and with good reason - she created death masks of the French Revolution's many guillotine victims. When she set up a permanent London exhibition, she dubbed her grotesque collection the "Chamber of Horrors" - a name that has stuck to the wax museum to this day.

At the turn of the 20th century, as Rebekah McKendry describes in magazine, the closest relatives to modern haunted houses began experimenting with macabre themes. In Paris, the Grand Guignol theater became notorious for its on-stage depictions of graphic dismemberment; the theater's director, Max Maurey, famously boasted that he judged each performance by the number of people who passed out, shocked, in the audience. In 1915, an English fairground in Liphook debuted one of the first " ghost houses," an early type of commercial horror attraction. The public appetite for horror was picking up.

Lisa Morton, author of Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween, tells Smithsonian.com that Halloween-themed haunted houses first emerged during the Great Depression as American parents schemed up ways to distract young tricksters, whose holiday pranks had escalated to property damage, vandalism and harassment of strangers. "They came in about the same time as trick-or-treat did," she says. "Cities looked for ways to buy these kids off, essentially."

Those first haunted houses were very primitive. Groups of families would decorate their basements and hold "house-to-house" parties. Kids could spook themselves by traveling from basement to basement and experiencing different scary scenes. This 1937 party pamphlet describes how parents could also design "trails of terror" to spook their children. The effects may seem familiar to anyone who has ever been disappointed by a sub-par scare:

An outside entrance leads to a rendezvous with ghosts and witches in the cellar or attic. Hang old fur, strips of raw liver on walls, where one feels his way to dark steps....Weird moans and howls come from dark corners, damp sponges and hair nets hung from the ceiling touch his face....Doorways are blockaded so that guests must crawl through a long dark tunnel....At the end he hears a plaintive 'meow' and sees a black cardboard cat outlined in luminous paint..."

The haunted house didn't become a cultural icon, though, until Walt Disney decided to build one. Disneyland's Haunted Mansion opened in 1969, nearly two decades after Disney first approved the beleaguered project. The attraction, which was designed in the style of the Evergreen House and the Winchester Mystery House, quickly became a success. In a single day shortly after its debut, more than 82,000 people passed through the Haunted Mansion. The attraction's centerpiece is the Grand Hall, a 90-foot-long ballroom sequence of dancing ghouls at a birthday party. Disney brought to scene to life through an exceptionally complex series of illusions known as Pepper's ghost, which use refracted light to project and shape ethereal images. "A lot of the professional haunters will point to one thing, and that's Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. It's the start of the haunted attraction industry," Morton says. The attraction was revolutionary, as she explains in Trick or Treat:

What made the Haunted Mansion so successful and so influential, however, was not its similarity to haunted houses and "dark rides" (that is, tawdry carnival haunted houses) of the past, but its use of startling new technologies and effects. Ghosts were no longer simply sheets hung in a tree, but were instead actual shimmering translucent figures that moved, spoke and sang. A witch wasn't just a rubber-masked figure bent over a fake cauldron, but a completely realistic bodiless head floating in a crystal ball, conducting a complex séance.

Within a few years, the haunted house had spread across the country. The United States Junior Chamber, also known as Jaycees, became famous for raising money through its haunted houses. (The fundraising venture was successful enough to spawn its own how-to guide.) In California, Knott's Berry Farm began hosting its own Halloween night attractions, which soon transformed into a multi-week slate of events. Every year, a man named Bob Burns attracted national media attention for his detailed recreations of classic horror movies. Evangelical Christians even made their own anti-Halloween attractions; Jerry Falwell and Liberty University introduced one of the first " hell houses" in 1972.

As Hollywood began to embrace slasher movies like Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th, the haunted house industry reaped the benefits. The horror boom fueled a demand for scary attractions, not to mention cross-promotional advertisements. "If you went to a haunted house in the 1980s and 1990s, you would've seen a lot of Freddy Krueger, Jason, Pinhead. The haunted house industry really followed the movie industry at that time," Larry Kirchner, president of Haunted House Association, a trade group for haunted house operators, tells Smithsonian.com.

Professional haunted houses first emerged as a force in the same era, quickly outspending non-profit groups like the Jaycees. Then, tragedy struck: A fire at a haunted house in New Jersey trapped and killed eight teenagers. In the aftermath of their deaths, attractions were shut down, and politicians enacted stronger safety regulations. Volunteer organizations struggled to compete against new competition under tougher rules. Soon, many were forced out of business. It was a watershed moment for the industry, says Kirchner: "The Jaycees got pushed out because their haunted houses were fairly basic. It was based on the premise that people would volunteer, but when you have people opening big haunted houses with lots of advertising, that's hard," he says.

During the next two decades, the number of professional haunted houses erupted. Kirchner estimates that roughly 2,700 of them operated nationwide last year. A large haunted house attraction can reportedly earn $3 million during the Halloween season, and the industry is worth $300 million, according to an NBC report.

These days, haunted houses are no longer just about creepy characters and hyper-realistic horror. Instead, the industry has flocked to all sorts of new, extreme frights: zombie runs, escape games, and experiences seemingly designed to traumatize. How long will these successes last? Can the haunted house last another half-century? And if it does, what will it look like?

Kirchner doubts that the haunted house is here to stay. "If I was going to guess, I'd say no," he says. "Every business will eventually fail, so we just want to last as long as we possibly can."

A Halloween without haunted houses? Now that's a scary thought.

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The scariest haunted house of 2017 is a giant walk-through attraction located in the former Georgia Antique Center in the outskirts of Atlanta. Named Netherworld, it features 3D special effects, aerial performers and, of course, flesh-eating clowns. Netherworld frightens so effectively, so inescapably, that people with heart conditions are warned against buying tickets.