Make Truly Horrorific Haunted Houses with Actual Murders

Hey, let's walk through this cornfield. There's nothing that could go wrong. Oh my god, it's a clown, RUN! Oh my, another clown, and a ghost! KEEP RUNNING! Decapitated body! Flan! Evil Scarecrow! Tim Curry from “It!” Tim Curry from “Charlie's Angels!” Chainsaw guy!!!

Sorry if that haunted house got a little too intense for you there. But as a survivor of upwards of 12 lifetime haunted house-goings, I am an expert in the industry and can offer you a couple ideas to make your haunted house a fright to remember.

Protect yourself by using a disclaimer like this. Customers
will think it's facetious. It is not.

First off, keep in mind October is really the only time you can have a house of horrors designed to cause people to defecate themselves. Although April at an H&R Block comes a very close second. Use this knowledge to send your house over the top. Use real blood, real zombies and real hanging corpses. I'd recommend viewing “American Horror Story” and investing in a gimp suit. Realness shows a compromised mental status, which will cause haunted house goers to question what the house is truly capable of doing.

Making tweens look like idiots and douches at the same
time should be your haunting goal.

Secondly, construct on actual haunted grounds. I'm talking the Manson household, Buffalo Bill's backyard or any theater that ever showed “Whip It”—some place where something truly terrible happened. However, the sheer hauntingness of said area makes it hard to use that land. You'll have to deal with far too many kids wanting to have sex with ghosts, and while that is frightening, it's just a little too real for what we're trying to achieve.

But you're in luck, you can make any area haunted by ensuring various tragic deaths occur within the house of horror. It's pretty simple to make someone die from fright or a strategically placed barbed wire to the face. Once you do that, you have a truly haunted area, and that's not even counting the backed up toilet “props.”

Another great thing to do is recruit actual chainsaw murderers to play the chainsaw murderers. Since every haunted house must have one of those, simply drive up and down I-5 picking up “hitchhikers” to play your murderers. Tell them to enjoy themselves, they probably won't even ask for compensation. Of course that is aside from the satisfaction of bathing themselves in tweenagers' blood.Also, ask them if they can do a delayed slice effect (a victim's head gets cut off and it takes several seconds for it to split away) because with a chainsaw, that would look really neat.

Hitchhikers can also provide their own chainsaws.

But washing the walls in blood and ghosts is not enough to make an amazing haunted house. I've been to my share of houses recently, so I know about the latest trends in horrifying experiences. One of the best advances in haunting technology is the squishy floor. Imagine walking along through a cornfield or mausleum or Chuck E. Cheese and all of the sudden the floor gives out. But it only drops a knee-shattering two inches before bouncing back. Bam, another victim of squishy floor. This is the trend of haunted houses 2011, if you don't have one, you're behind the times.

Mazes seem like a cheap trait, and that's because they are. But they work. The other day when I was at a haunted house, I was working my way through a maze segment. The criss-crossing nature of it caused my group to run into another group. This caused the 13-year-old I accidentally walked into to freak out and yell “There's a person there!” before running away. I'll admit, in my jeans and a t-shirt, I might have looked a tad bit frightening, but really it was the maze aspect that pushed me to the verge of causing cardiac arrest in someone who really should be nothing more than chainsaw bait.

By being sick and depraved in your haunted house, you will make a truly great haunting experience that everyone will tell their friends about—ermmm, that is the few who survive.