SCARE TACTICS

The Art Behind the Haunted House

Denver's haunted houses skirt the city in a wide noose of tangled highway. They flourish at the end of tight construction, past the power plants in Commerce City, and behind shopping malls. To visit them I drove a car that seized up last week at 70 miles an hour; the trip alone inspired fear. I was amply rewarded. The Haunted Mansion, Primitive Fear, and Alien Terror each offer visitors a different kind of terrorÑ no less real, but far more enjoyable for its artistry. Each has its own theme and style which keeps the experience fresh.

The Haunted Mansion attracts a large crowd of parents, children and teenagers to its spook house/ costume shop at 5663 S. Prince Street in Littleton. While waiting to tour the haunted mansion, customers shop among a huge display of skulls, masks, gnarly fake hands, makeup, life-size horror movie figures, wings, ravens, plastic torsos and a huge rabbit coming out of the hat. Classic rock-and-roll music plays in the background while mechanical prairie dogs and the Grim Reaper dance on video. Magicians and bands sometimes take the stage behind the counter; the shop is open all year.

The Mansion itself reflects owner Greg Reinke's attention to design and taste for high horror and intricate sets. Reinke Brothers (a company owned by Greg and, duh, his brother), has done effects for movies. Like all of the haunted houses I visited, it's made up of a number of interconnected rooms with different scenes in each, ranging from a mad scientist's lab full of preserved heads to the wilderness. Some of the scenes disoriented visitors with sloping floors and strobe lights. Some of the scenes just amused, like the woman with the weak-bladdered turtle, or a fairly quiet Egyptian room. All of them, however, were richly detailed, and all of them served their purposeÑ to distract the eye.

And while the eye looks elsewhere, actors come out to scare. "What I do here is what we call a laundry-room scare. You know when you're in the basement doing laundry and someone comes up behind you and goes, 'Boo, ' and you jump, and you turn around? That's what scares people," said Reinke. "Now there all kinds of phobias in there, and there's people that are terrified of clowns, spiders, and even just the dark, so we play on all those type of phobias too."

Reinke also noted that timing the scares is importantÑ too many at the beginning will desensitize a viewer. He also eschews blood and guts, knives and death threats in his houseÑ "Somebody would always get punched. But if you have a good show that mentally and physically stimulates people, they'll have a good time."

Twenty to twenty-five actors do much of the actual scaring at Primitive Fear. They walk more of a tightrope than other actors I saw, and despite occasional timing issues they were often terrifying. They came closer, and one even chased me down an aisle with a chainsaw.

"We encourage the actors to take the initiative to come up with skits on their own, decide what would be scariest for the room they're in," said Duane Morrison, one of the designers of Primitive Fear.

The house has a reputation for scariness; there were no children there on the night I went. One man, leaving the large warehouse holding the sets, said that he worked for another haunted house, "You guys blow us away."

Extreme disorientation may be Primitive Fear's secret weapon. It pounds strobe lights and techno music to get the visitor's heart racing the second he or she enters the house. In certain sets, the strobes conceal actors until they are a few inches from a visitor, a trick Alien Terror also uses. In others, the strobes highlight the effect of pushing through curtains or going over a shaky bridge.

Even the layout perplexes. "We don't want people to walk through it in a straight line or an S-shape. We lay it out so it's confusing. We try to cross it up, go back and forth and crisscross," said Morrison.

In contrast, Alien Terror plays on the dread of finding yourself in a familiar horror movie scene, waiting for the inevitable. All of the rooms in the house are based off of cinema, from classics like the Bates Motel to scenes from The Matrix. Alien Terror's skits also require the visitor to act, interacting with the sets and the actors.

Alien Terror's team of designers and mechanical engineers provide the tech to make these reenactments memorable, according to designers KathE Walker and Dennis Phillips.

"We actually created the Black Hole," Walker said, referring to a popular rotating star tunnel seen at several houses that dazzles visitors as they walk through it. The house also features a drop elevator and carefully-chosen music, some created by Phillips.

For more information and directions, visit www.scared.com