$20,000 robots? How haunted houses became gentrified with the little guys left for dead
The strip mall looked dead. No, deader than dead. It still had a video store. That kind of dead. Long beige facades of empty storefronts sat dark beneath cold autumn skies. It was the loneliest strip mall in McHenry County, and it was home to the last Jaycees haunted house in all of Illinois. The very last. The others, slowly, torturously, over years, had been picked off, slaughtered by professionals. In Lombard, where the United States Junior Chamber civic group (aka the Jaycees) had run a haunted house since 1971, landlords became less likely to donate real estate to a haunted house. Then there were the ghouls, the army of local teenagers who reliably volunteered their October weekends to play witches and werewolves and demons. They were recruited away by big-budget haunts that paid them. “Believe me,” said Jacalynn West, president of the Lombard Jaycees, “we did not want to die.” In McHenry the other night, only days before the last Jaycees haunted house in Illinois opened, chapter Vice President Mary Kozel moved through a maze of wooden frames and padded masonite walls, noting where black goo would ooze, where the Cannibal Kitchen would cook, where a small fortune in fake cobwebs needed to become a gothic nightmare. She noted chicken wire, electric chairs, decapitations, soiled dolls and a small landfill of plastic human bones. She said, other than the $13,000 in rent they were paying, the state Jaycees gave them $5,000 to construct (and market) this year’s haunted house —
Less than a week to opening night, the place seemed more like a serial killer’s yard sale than a journey into madness. Kozel looked spooked. “I would love to be like the big guys with their animatronic monsters, I would love to keep up with the Statesville Haunted Prison and the Massacre (in Montgomery), but the truth is this job has become a lot of ‘How can I make this small stack of plywood and 2-by-4’s look horrifying?’”
Once upon a midnight dreary, nonprofits like the March of Dimes, Campus Life and the Jaycees dominated Halloween haunted houses, from coast to coast. But that time is gone.
Quietly, like a festering evil mushrooming through the walls, gentrification has come for your haunted house.
What had been a seasonal business run by amateurs has in the last decade become an industry, with its own trade conventions, insurance companies, airlinelike ticket upgrades, $20,000 robot creatures and million-dollar-plus, artfully distressed haunted compounds. Want to include a virtual reality experience with that haunted house? Extra. Spend the night inside a haunted house? Extra. Tip off the ghosts to who’s coming and spook your best friend? Extra.
If you don’t feel the sting of class resentment when you sit in airline coach, just head to a haunted house: At, say, the Massacre, there is general admission ($25), fast-pass admission ($40) and “Platinum VIP Immediate Access” ($50). Would you like an escape room with your chainsaw murderers and demented surgeons? That’s a $7 upcharge.
“A lot of smaller haunts are simply being priced out,” said Brett Hays, president of the Haunted Attraction Association, which represents more than 300 haunted houses. “If you don’t bring some Hollywood-level quality to a house, it’s become hard to stay viable. The days of tucking flyers under windshield wipers to promote your charity house, that’s over. Some spend $30,000 to $50,000 on social media marketing alone.”
The Chicago area — with around 60 haunted houses within a two-hour drive — has one of the largest concentrations of haunted attractions in the country, but even here, in the past year, longtime haunts in Cicero, Frankfort, Antioch, Kankakee and Alsip have sent their paranormals packing. Kris Zahrobsky, who founded the website Haunted House Chicago in 1999, plans to review 20 fewer houses this season. “A kind of haunted house Darwinism is happening,” he said. “The people who put second mortgages on their own homes to keep their haunted homes going, who don’t have millions to compete with the money being spent now, they’re being pushed out. Haunted Trails in Burbank gave me a call to say they would not be opening their house this year, which was so sad. That was a big part of my childhood.”
Don’t fear: The modest amusement park, which opened in 1976, is not closing, said Elena Ruane, its vice president of marketing. But many visitors were not stopping at the park’s haunted house, and considering the work it took to keep the attraction relevant in 2018, Haunted Trails wondered it could make it through Halloween without the haunt.
These days, if you can’t afford to compete, you can’t afford to scare Illinois.
Joe Jensen used to joke that a haunted house was “performance art for the suburbs.” For 20 years, he ran Hades Haunted House, which began in Mount Prospect in 1978, and was one of the first large-scale, go-for-broke haunted spectacles in Illinois. To visit, in many ways, was to get an image of the quintessential homegrown, old-school October haunted attraction seared into your brain — the long lines of teenagers eager to hit two or three haunted houses in one night, the volunteers in monster masks startling unsuspecting couples, the strobe-lit graveyards, snarling fiends, claustrophobic hallways sweaty with people knocking into each other. At some houses, you might spot a demon flipping a cassette recording of creaking doors and cackling witches; at another, you might wait hours, only to get shoveled through the darkness in 15 minutes, cheerfully.
Haunted houses were unabashedly cheap. And, oddly, charming. Jensen, who had started in the Chicago theater scene, hired local scenic artists and puppeteers from Wicker Park to create Hades. By the time the house closed in 1998, it had ballooned from 6,000 to 60,000 square feet, and had 80,000 visitors. Today, he still consults for haunted houses but sounds dispirited, even bored by the business: “It’s now basically buy all the latest props, piece a house together.”
Today, the haunted house business is a modest chunk of the $9 billion Halloween season — depending on who you ask, it’s worth somewhere between $300 million and $500 million. But the horrors of the modern hauntrepreneur are myriad, viral.
Marcus Bales is a haunted house consultant helping the Chicago Park District assemble Park After Dark in Chase Park on the North Side. He says the popularity of blockbuster attractions like 13th Floor Haunted House in Melrose Park and Statesville in Crest Hill has created a generation of haunted house customers who assume a haunted house needs to be technically sophisticated and physically big to be fun.
Chad Savage, who runs Sinister Visions, a Chicago marketing company dedicated to haunted attractions, recalls a decade ago when “a flush of entrepreneurs heard haunted houses were easy money but never realized how much was involved — you saw lot of people come and go quick.”
Beyond unrealistic expectations and fly-by-night opportunists, there are insurance fears, fire codes, safety codes, noise ordinances, property concerns. Then again, your local haunted attraction has long faced the kind of practical troubles that multiply like so many zombies.
One of the newest fears is the feeling that the industry’s push for professionalism has unwittingly created a creeping sameness, a body snatcher-like conformity, draining innovation. Ken Spriggs, who quit the business six years ago after running Dream Reapers in Melrose Park for 13 years, said: “I hate to sound down on my industry, but the public doesn’t go to many houses; if they did they’d know it’s all the same. … I recently went to a haunt in Florida run by a guy who went to the same seminars as every other owner, bought the same effects at the same haunt conven-