When Chris Moore reads reviews online for The 5th Realm that state “I’ve never been as scared of a haunted house than I was at this one,” he knows he’s done his job.
Moore, a Lisbon resident who manages the Bijou Theatre in Mount Vernon and the Fantastic Escape in Lisbon and Marion, has been running an indoor haunted house at Lindale Mall during the month of October for the last four years now.
Even being indoors, Moore said that it’s hard to know what to expect for the business of the haunted house.
“There are certain timeslots, where people have a 40 minute wait to go through our haunted house, and there are other time slots where people get right in and right back out,” Moore said. “We really expect things to ramp up business wise these last two weekends leading to Halloween, especially as the word of mouth for the scares we’re offering up gets into the area.”
This year has been a lot different than trying to manage a haunted house last season when no one was vaccinated from COVID-19.
“We had to be much more mindful of keeping our actors and performers separated from one another, because if one of our actors got sick, we’d lose them and anyone they were in close contact for two weeks,” Moore said. “It meant that a lot of our actors couldn’t be right next to one another in some of our spaces.”
This year, with far more staff and visitors vaccinated, it’s allowed the haunted house to as Moore puts it “find the secret sauce” that gives a blend of the horror and entertainment people have been looking like in a haunted house experience.
“What I really enjoy the most is providing an experience where people get lost in the maze and forget they’re in a storefront in the mall, but actually feel themselves transported to a haunted sanitarium for a few minutes in their Halloween.”
Helping Moore with that mission is production manager Autumn Arnold, who tackles a lot of the set design and animatronics for the space.
“For me, the best thing is when I create a room that’s able to scare myself in what I envisioned,” Arnold said. “That’s the payoff to me, because if I the person who designed the space am scared of that environment, someone else is going to be scared, too.”
The duo said their biggest challenge this year has been in not allowing the same interactivity between guests and the space as has been had before COVID-19.
“We want to be allowing more of the ‘you need to reach your hand in through a wall to find the switch that’s going to let you get through the space,’ but with COVID-19, we’re still keeping that touch interaction and immersion something we’re not dealing with as much in our designs this year,” Moore said.
Both Moore and Arnold come from the ethos that what’s scary isn’t over the top gore, but more the unexpected jump scares and animatronics or item you didn’t expect to see.
As well, they work with production designers to develop the lighting and atmosphere of the haunted house.
Fog machines, smoke, laser lights and other optics help set the theme and scene for the haunted house, provided by technical director Jesse Peterson. Then, there are countless actors who have a space within the haunted house to provide scares to those in attendance.
While Moore and Arnold don’t like to set an age restriction for the haunted house experience, as some youth have a tolerance for horror elements than others, they do believe the experience may be too intense for some youth under the age of 10.
“We’ve had some 6-year-olds who decided this is something they wanted to experience and had a fun time, and others where they
A spider-web coated hallway in the haunted house in Lindale Mall.