What haunts the haunted house industry?
Fear is a big business this time of year. We buy giant, inflatable arachnids to put in our yards. We load up on Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups to drop in kids’ bags when they come knocking. We pick up pumpkins at the grocery store and carve them to look sorta scary.
And we pay to be frightened at haunted houses.
One of them is Frightmare Farms Haunted Screampark, about 30 miles north of Syracuse, New York. Among other attractions, you’ll find a haunted hayride through the woods and a maze infested with of a crop of sentient, vengeful pumpkins angry at having been carved.
Frightmare Farms is one of at least 7,500 haunted or Halloween-related attractions in the U.S. The multi-acre park employs more than 100 people for just a couple months out of the year and the park is open to the public for just 11 nights.
“Our season is obviously only October, but we actually work on our show all year ’round,” says co-owner Nicole Ginsburg.
A lot of the staff here are actors. They have to navigate a precarious balance between real fear and play fear.
“That is an interesting line that we walk because you know it really is fun to be scared,” says Sam Herwood, an assistant manager who plays a character named Xavier — sort of a zombie mad hatter. He also trains other actors how to frighten effectively.
“It’s about having fun and you want to playfully scare people, but also people will buy into it,” he says.
Haunted houses are really a subset of the theme park industry, but a quirky one.
“Fear is a negative, immersive emotion, yet there are industries and organizations that make fear their product,” says Lynne Vincent, an associate professor of management at Syracuse University who studies haunted houses.
There’s a whole spectrum of what that looks like. On the very extreme end, “You have haunts that do crazy, extreme things like make you touch and eat bugs. They buzz your hair off. They electrocute you,” says Philip Hernandez, founder of the Haunted Attraction Network, which publishes news for the Haunted Attraction industry.
“But honestly, people don’t really want that. The purpose of a haunted house is to entertain. It’s not to scare. I think that’s the common misperception,” he says.
Some haunted houses are more like festivals, others like escape rooms. They tend to have one thing in common though: A very small labor pool that has time to do this work for two months a year. Take Herwood, for example, who’s played a bloody surgeon, a coal miner, and a mortician.
“My full-time jobs is actually a seventh-grade math teacher,” he says.
Scream parks need a lot of scary people, and there are only so many math teachers. “Staffing is the biggest challenge that I hear,” Hernandez says.
And the fear supply chain is haunted by labor shortages. The supply of Halloween monster robots, for example, is tight — they often sell out instantly.
“There are a lot of vendors that are small businesses. You’re talking about under 10 employees, but they make specialty animatronics that are only for haunted houses, and that’s their whole business. Well, they’re still dealing with staffing up,” Hernandez says.
For an industry founded on a basic and primitive emotion, haunting is actually pretty trend driven. What scary looks like changes over the years.
“Vampires came back in a big way a couple of years ago,” said Ginsburg. “Witches are always classic. Serial killers were there for the ’80s, ’90s, early 2000s.”
Sometimes what’s scary is an echo of something society is going through. Sometimes it’s just a chainsaw-wielding monster running through the crowds.
“There’s so much in the world you should be scared about, says Marissa Felasco, who was visiting Frightmare Farms recently. “So, sometimes it’s nice to come and be scared about something that actually isn’t scary,”
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