How to Set Goals for a Haunted House

Series Summary

A good haunted house is much more than a few creaky doors, goblins and spider webs; you can achieve those effects with a puppet show in your attic. No, the stand out haunted house is a playground for the most demented thoughts of your deranged mind. Think of your project as an assembly line of scares, and you are the manager of the factory. Or consider this your big chance to star in and direct your very own horror movie!

In this series of spooky videos about how to scare the heck out of your friends and neighbors, our haunted house expert tells you everything you need to know about setting up your own haunted house. Matt Cail, designer and director of the University of Washington's campus haunted house, shares the tips and advice he gained from putting the fright to university students. He begins by discussing goals for a haunted house then tells you how to achieve them with the seasoned advice of someone who has been there and done that. From mapping out your scares to hiring helpers and a guide, this series is as thorough as it is fun to watch. You will learn how to set up fake walls and fake scares, as well as how to guide your terrified guests from one scare to another.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Matt Cail and on behalf Expert Village I'm going to show you how to set up a haunted house. So you've decided that you wanted to set up a haunted house, you have set for yourself one of the most ambitious projects possible for this October season. You're going to need a lot of help, you're going to need to answer a lot of questions before we can even think to get started. Now while this set of instructions is going to be able to help you, we're going to have a basics working assumptions and you're going to have to tailor what I am going to tell you based on a situation bases. For example think about some of these questions; how much space do you have available? How many rooms are we talking about; a condo, apartment, a whole house? Is it your house? Is it somebody else's house? Do you rent? Do you own? All of these things are going to constrict or expand the options that you have. How much time do you have to setup? The less time the less elaborate the smaller the house. Naturally the less space you're going to have the less you're going to be able to do with that space. You're going to need to set up the basic parameters for yourself before you can even begin to think of what type of design and skits and other things you're going to need for your haunted house. I strongly recommend that you sit down and you start taking some notes for yourself right away about how much time and space you're going to have to put together a haunted house."