Haunt Weekly

Send us Fan Mail Religion and haunted attractions have always been a strange mixture. Sure haunts have long had exorcism rooms and themes surrounding the devil, but typically haunts have avoided straying too far into to the religious. But while haunting has been reluctant to approach religion, religion has been very eager to approach haunting. Across the nation and the world hundreds of churches a...

Send us Fan Mail The two of us have been blessed with our haunt experiences, nearly every single time we've been through a haunt we have enjoyed ourselves or, at the very least, had something great to take away. We've been able to tour some of the greatest haunts in the world and have shaken hands with some of the best actors, builders and creators our region and our industry. You couldn...

Send us Fan Mail Haunters have always had a strange fascination with evil. We love using the fear of evil to build a mood and get scares in customers. Our attractions regularly feature grizzly murders, demonic creatures, inhuman villains and much, much more. We even advertise how "evil" we are in a bid to draw more customers. Basically, the haunt industry has long used evil to sell itsel...

Send us Fan Mail Rejoice Haunt Weekly lovers it is time for our fourth news episode as we get you caught up on all of the things going on in the haunted attraction industry. While it's true that the ides of march (or close to it) is far from peak season for haunt news, there is still a great deal going on including the announcement of a brand-new year-round Walking Dead-themed attraction open...

Send us Fan Mail Backstory. Not every haunt has one, not every haunt needs one, but if you're looking for a great, free way to improve your customer's experience and your marketing, it's a great place to start. However, not all backstories are created equal and even great backstories can be implemented poorly. So this raises the question: What makes a great backstory for a haunted a...

Send us Fan Mail Though tech has become an important part of almost every industry, it's been playing a unique role in the haunt industry for nearly 50 years. What started off as parlor tricks meant to impress and woo crowds has slowly turned into an integral part of haunting. Whether tech is aiding or replacing actors, whether it's a central scare or taking a background role, tech in ha...

Send us Fan Mail It's a simple fact of haunting, while everyone loves scaring the ever-loving hell out of the customers, there's a lot more that goes into a haunt than just putting on a costume and scaring people. So this begs a simple question: How many hats do you have to fill when building a haunt? We actually started thinking about this weeks ago during HAuNTcon as we talked about al...

Send us Fan Mail 12 is divisible by 4 so that means it's time for us to do the news! While February might not seem like a time bustling with news for the haunted attraction industry we have a couple of major stories this week as we learn of one year-around haunt closing and another lynchpin haunt that is staying put despite rumors it was leaving. The industry has also been getting some intere...

Send us Fan Mail When opening up a haunt, one of the first questions that has to be answered is whether the haunt will be a touch or a no touch haunt. This decision is crucial because it affects nearly every decision that will come later including the design of the haunt, the marketing of the haunt and the actors you get for it. It can even impact your insurance and even your zoning. So with this...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt weekly, we make our triumphant return from HAuNTcon and present our thorough recap including a breakdown of the classes we attended and some of the highlights of what we learned. As a result, this episode has a little bit of everything going on. Expect to learn a bit about haunt marketing, makeup tips, fireproofing, fire code compliance, haunt design and much, m...

Send us Fan Mail This week on Haunt Weekly, we are at HAuNTcon. However, since the conference is ongoing you'll have to wait until next week for our wrap up and other wonderful content. However, we aren't ones to disappoint, we have a great show this week as we bring on what we hope will be our semi-regular guest, Kyle. Kyle is, without a doubt, one of the most experienced and talented h...

Send us Fan Mail It's that time again! Another month has passed and it's time for us to cover the news. This week's episode is mostly about the biggest story in the haunted attraction industry this month: HAuNTcon. We will be in attendance at HAuNTcon (one of us will be speaking) and in this episode we have a full rundown of not just what we'll be doing there, but all of the th...

Send us Fan Mail The most common question actors have when they start a new role is "What do you want me to do?" Sadly, the answer isn't always straightforward. Sometimes, what the haunt owner or supervisor wants is not necessarily what is best for that actor or the room. That's because there is a wide variety of scares actors can do and not every actor is right for every scare...

Send us Fan Mail Websites. Your haunt has to have one. So how do you make sure your website doesn't suck? Here at Haunt Weekly the only thing we've done more than build haunts is develop websites and it's time for us to have a serious sit down about this issue because, let's face it, our industry stinks in this area. So, from two web workers to the industry, here's how we...

Send us Fan Mail It's time to talk some business. When it comes to running your haunt, you're trying to operate a year-round business that's only open for about 6 weeks. You need to attract as many customers as possible and bring in as much money from each of them that you can. How you do that is through price differentiation, lowering your price to customers who demand it while off...

Send us Fan Mail It's episode 4 of Haunt Weekly and that means it is time to get caught up on the news! We have a lot to go over this week as we're covering all of the news stories from early November to mid-December, meaning we have six full weeks of stories to go through. In this episode we cover:  A Major Legal Victory for Haunted Attractions in the U.S.A Maryland City Openly Courting...

Send us Fan Mail Previously we discussed haunt safety much but now we get to the nitty gritty: How to build and design a haunt. Obviously, this is too much to unpack in one episode so think of this as a whirlwind tour the basics of haunt construction and design. Why construction first? Because most haunts are built the same way and that technique has a huge impact on design. This episode covers: O...

Send us Fan Mail When it comes to running a haunted house, nothing is more important than safety. At the end of the night, you want every customer and actor to go home safely. So, in the spirit of safety first, we're making our first real episode of Haunt Weekly a whirlwind tour of basic safety. While we're going to delve into a lot of these issues more deeply later, this episode covers...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to the first episode of haunt weekly! In this episode we introduce ourselves, Jonathan and Crystal, and we talk a bit about our backgrounds, what we want this podcast to be and, most importably, how you can help.----more----Our goal is to make this the podcast that the haunt industry wants and needs so your suggestions, advice and help will be invaluable. So leave us a com...