Halloween is just around the corner and that means that one of my all-time favorite activities is undergoing its open season. That’s right: I love haunted houses. I love haunted houses almost as much as I enjoy roller coasters. When I was younger, I used to dream of owning enough property so that I could build my own haunted house/labyrinth every Halloween and watch people go through it. While that dream is still, sadly, somewhat out of reach, advances in technology and science will make it easier for me to pull this dream off in a few years…provided that the real estate market settles back down into reality versus non-reality.
So, if I could wave my hand and have a haunted house ready to go right now, what would it contain? Well, aside from the expected Spanish-moss-like spider webbing all over the place and the black lighting (no haunted house is complete without black lights!), it would have a few robots that were clearly killer robots while a few would be robots passing for zombies. I might get something like a Roomba and reprogram it to follow a certain path while making it look like a ghostly animal of some sort. I’d use tablets arranged to look like windows and mirrors with applications designed to show scary reflections of those who stood in front of them (maybe reverse-engineering a camera app to pull this off) or to show a twisted version of the landscape outside (think Google Maps street view with a serious twist).
I’d use isolation on the rooms to make them as soundproof as possible. To keep the doors from being sound-leaks, I’d build them all knobless and instead have a motion detector set on them that would swing them open when a person got within a certain distance. The door opening would mute the music for both rooms and would trigger a specific sound effect — someone screaming, crying, maniacal laughter, etc. The doors would then close themselves as well. I might use conductive doors so that anyone touching them would feel a mild buzz from a very, very, very low dose of electricity. Each room would have its specific theme or scene in the overall story with appropriate music — hence the desire to keep things as soundproof as possible.
Now, if I could go completely nuts on this as in no budget needed, I just wish up a technology and it exists for me, then I’d steal a page from Cube and have each room rotate or shift place within a larger whole. Every room would have an exit…when it was over the exit area. But doing that would require a lot of careful planning. Still, it would be a tremendous amount of fun to build and to experience.
After the haunted house itself was over, I’d offer haunted hayrides through a forested area. At the end of the hayride would be a general barbeque where people could have a quick burger, hotdog, or ribs and get a drink and laugh about how funny or scary the whole experience had been. Yes, to pull this off I’d have to charge a small fee for entrance but I’d probably wind up doing something like this even if it didn’t make me any money. I just love haunted houses.
And you? With Halloween coming up, what are your plans to spook up this holiday? What new technology or gadgetry will you use to enhance the creepiness around your neck of the woods?
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