I went to an art museum the other day and came home with the ultimate idea for a “haunted house” attraction.
First off I wouldn’t call it a haunted house. Only a certain crowd of people go to haunted houses. If you really want to scare people, you need people who are not expecting to be horrified. For this reason I would call it something along the lines of “Museum of Horror” or perhaps “Museum of Haunted Houses.”
Next, I would model the attraction after a museum. It would be completely white inside, have marble floors and high ceilings. The first few rooms would have bizarre art pieces, artifacts and a few models of famous haunted houses with information about them.
The first floor would offer a maze of directions and exhibitions. This would make it seem like there was a lot to see and also encourage people to wanter about, potentially separating themselves from their group.
No music would be playing in the museum. It would be silent except for the whispers of those visiting. (Some rooms might have music or sounds, but I’ll touch on that later.)
Around the middle of the first floor there would be a few secret rooms which would entice a visitor in. (Some might be labeled with a “one person at a time” sign.) The inside of these rooms would be dark with only a few lights shining on display cases. A sophisticated camera, thermal and motion tracking system would watch a visitor enter a room, make sure no one was in the vicinity or watching the door and quickly perform a few tasks. The first would be to drop the lights for a second. In the pitch darkness, covered by any potential screams, the entrance to the room would vanish and be replaced by a different exit. The lights would snap back on and the visitor would go on their way, only to discover they came out in a different part of the museum.
The bizarre artwork would continue throughout the museum. Many pieces could be sculptures and paintings of demons and malformed beings/creatures. Other pieces would be of things like clowns or grotesque monkeys. It might also be creepy to have some sort of mangled doll that keeps appearing in or on the artwork of different rooms.
One of the art pieces would be a realistic sculpture of a girl who drown herself. She would be pale and have wet hair with a muddy face and hands. Her dress would be wet, warn, frayed and perhaps ripped a bit. a few rooms later, I would have wet footprints on the floor and a pool of water in front of a painting. This might happen in other places as well.
The stairway going up would discretely skip at least one floor on the way up. (Perhaps having the levels offset one step for every floor, perhaps all in one go. The tall ceiling can help to fake this. Also many museums have half levels or partial levels that go up a few steps at a time.) This way they visitor will encounter new and strange floors on their way back down. It will also mess with their perception as they go down more floors than they went up.
There would be a number of rooms on different floors and in different areas that would be identical, except that they would all be facing different directions. This would help to disorient the visitor to thinking they know where they are going when they really don’t have a clue.
Sound and sound effects will come into play in later floors and rooms. In the museum I visited there was a panel of speakers in the wall where a voice kept saying things like “na na na na” when heard from adjacent rooms it actually sounded creepy. If odd noises like that continued to occur from time to time it would be very scary. Especially if you didn’t know where it was coming from. Again using cameras, motion and thermal sensors, it would be easy to trigger sound events in rooms that are either adjacent or near someone walking through. A simple AI program could ensure that it doesn’t happen rhythmically or systematically but rather have a randomness so the visitor does not realize it is automated. Another sound effect to use would be footsteps to make it sound like other people are walking around.
The other sound I would use is the sound of little children laughing or playing. For those that played Zelda: Twilight Princess, the Celestial temple in the sky had creepy background music. It really made me uneasy when I played it. I would do something similar for some of the rooms, although I wouldn’t have as much or any background music, just the young-children-esque sounds.
Using projectors, (with the sensory equipment) I would make people appear in the room ahead of the visitor and walk out of sight (around a corner), then disappear. Neat shadow effects could be done as well. The projectors would have to be hidden in such a way that no visitor would ever see them. This could be done in a number of ways, but it is vital to the efforts of terror.
There are artists that create 3D murals on the side of buildings. I would have a room that featured a giant 3D painting on two of the walls. I would have several doorways in the painting, most of which would just be painted doorways. One of them would be real, though. It wouldn’t be *hard* to find your way out of the room, it would just cause some confusion at first.
At one of the half stairways I would place a pool of fake blood, with a trail to make it look like a body was dragged away.
Most of the museum would be well lit, minus a few strategic locations where some trickery must be done. One room, or perhaps a small cluster of rooms would have lights that flicker on and off, like there was a broken or faulty power cable. I would take advantage of this lighting to maybe have a picture or two switch positions from time to time.
Something potentially harder to pull off, but even cooler to do, would be to have a couch that was indented like an invisible person was sitting on it. When a visitor entered the room, it would expand out, as if someone stood up and left. A similar feat could include a table chair that gets pushed back from the table accompanied by footsteps of someone walking away. (Motors and/or magnets would have to be used here, but it would be vitally important that the visitor could not see any mechanics behind it.)
The main concept of my haunted house would be that of emptiness and loneliness. Many haunted houses try to do scare visitors by surprises and darkness. I think open empty whiteness is more likely to freak people out and create a memory that will last longer in-your-face jack-in-the-box style events.
What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea? Where can I improve things? Does anyone want to fund this project?