Behind the scenes at haunted house
Go behind the scenes at Phobia Haunted Houses, |
PEARLAND — Imagine finding your dream job at 16.
Now imagine it’s 10 or 15 years later, and you’re still working that job. It’s still a dream — well maybe a bit of a macabre nightmare filled with neon clowns, zombies and a guy with a chain saw. But you’re into that sort of thing.
That’s the story for Leo Loving and the band of merry, and often scary, misfits who work at Phobia Haunted Houses.
At face value, Phobia is exactly what the billboard sells: an eightattraction mega-scare “scream park” located on Sam Houston Parkway East that’s geared toward serving and scaring middle schooland high school-age kids for five weeks during the fall.
But what people don’t see is the yearlong effort to prepare the houses for the hundreds who walk through each season. Loving, 27, is a full-time employee who started as an actor in 3D Clown Phobia in 2008. He’s now the operations manager after 12 years and an education at the University of Houston Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship.
“It was hard for me to focus in school because I was looking
forward to the next weekend at Phobia Haunted Houses,” Loving said. “When I first walked up at 16, looking for a job, I was pretty shy. I had friends in high school, but I immediately felt like I fit in at Phobia. It has allowed me to create several lifelong friendships.”
Phobia as family
Phobia Haunted Houses was started in 1996 by Phylo Darke, a Houston-area businessman who has adopted a pseudonym for his side enterprise. The compound was originally at U.S. 59 and Kirby Drive before it moved to U.S. 290, where it operated for 14 years.
In 2014, Darke moved four retrofitted shipping containers to a 35-acre plot in Pearland near Texas 288 and Beltway 8 with room to expand back to its original size of eight haunts. In the years since, the year-round crew has slowly built four new attractions with the latest technology, pneumatic props and a cycling list of fresh and returning actors.
There are 25 actors per haunt per night, but there are more than 250 people hired each season. The actors typically don their makeup and costumes at home before arriving on-site a few hours before the general public.
For five weekends in September and October, Phobia is their home.
Hernan Hernandez, 31, said that he was always a little strange. He had friends in high school but no one with which he could really share his passion for the dark and twisted. Then, he found Phobia.
“It was like I finally found my place in the world — they’re my tribe, my family,” Hernandez said moments before the start of a Phobia Friday night. “That’s why I keep coming back.”
The goal for Loving, Hernandez and every actor on-site? Scare the 17-year-old Boy Prototype: the cool guy who doesn’t let anything
visibly affect him in front of his peers or on Instagram.
If they can get that guy to jump, they know they can scare anyone from ages 12 to 100.
Techno dystopia
The business of scaring has changed pretty drastically in the past 25 years. Long gone are the days when movie theaters, video stores and film critics held the keys to the horror entertainment complex.
With the changing landscape of streaming movie services, television shows like “American Horror Story” and “Black Mirror,” and the average person’s addiction to their personal devices, the term “horror” has transformed and become decidedly more techno-dystopian.
“Since scary movies have desensitized the public, we have begun to install different types of high-tech scares,” Loving said. “Overall, Phobia Haunted Houses has become more advanced with the times since I started 12 years ago.”
There’s no devil worship or witches, and not too much in the way of typical boo scares like vampires or ghosts, Darke explained.
The houses are broken up by genre: genetic nightmare, dawn of the machines, clown house, an asylum of sorts, contagion outbreak, slaughterhouse, etc. Mind Control and the Darke Institute are the only two remaining houses from the original Phobia lineup.
Conjuring up new full-body monsters, with makeup, prosthetics and costuming, can take up to a year, said Loving, whose expertise is special-effects makeup.
“My favorite question from customers is, ‘What are you supposed to be?’ ” he said. “I have created around 100 monsters and try to do something different every night that Phobia Haunted Houses is open.”
Darke believes that Hollywood got lazy with computer-generated animation and uninspired jump-scares. The work done on each haunt takes months of planning, plenty of garage and estate sale trips and its fair share of maintenance.
It’s work to try to make a place look decrepit and creepy.
“Each attraction acts as a family and there is friendly competition between each of them, which helps to boost morale,” Loving said. “I cannot wait to see where technology and the haunted house industry goes. Phobia Haunted Houses started in 1996, and there is no end in sight.”