The body on the table tries to sit up. It moans, taking deep, rasping breaths. My first guess would be asthma—I used to have trouble breathing myself, as a child, whenever the temperature dropped, and this guy has only a thin, blood-soaked cloth to keep warm.
If the morgue attendants let this chilly room warm up a bit, our cadaverous host might stop groaning. But I’m no doctor, and all of the real doctors here, I’m told, have been torn apart by a vengeful, rampaging horde of human-animal hybrids recently escaped from their cages.
David Spear is on his knees alongside the table, tooling with a hidden mechanism. Suddenly, the rubbery torso shoots forward to a sitting position. “There we go,” says Spear, standing up again. He’s the dead body repairman, making his afternoon rounds.
“This is a sit-up creature,” explains Jeremy LaPointe, Spear’s business partner, who stands a few feet away at a blood-streaked wall. “If you buy these online, they cost about two grand. But this creature is built from automatic door parts. Dave put it all together.”
Spear, 48, and LaPointe, 38, are giving me a tour of the ground floor of the Button Building on Union Street in Easthampton, a 7,500 square foot space they leased earlier this year under the name DementedFX Inc. and have since transformed into the Valley’s newest destination for seasonal scares: a fringe-science facility, run by the fictional BioMedCorp.
Spear, a traveling service technician, and LaPointe, a general contractor, have known each other for 20 years. That’s about as long as LaPointe has been talking about starting a company that creates and runs “haunts,” a term that covers all shapes and sizes of commercial Halloween attractions.
A more traditional haunted house might play to expected tropes, with cobwebs, creaky doors, and howling ghosts. But in LaPointe’s mind, a haunt can just as easily manifest as a tomb, a swamp, a prison, a spaceship—or a biomedical facility.
Farms put on haunted hayrides, and Six Flags hosts some Halloween fun, but LaPointe and Spear are attempting something different: a new company’s takeover and transformation of an existing space. On these grounds, LaPointe says, DementedFX’s closest competition is the Factory of Terror in Worcester.
“I want this to be the part of the country you come to for Halloween,” he says. “Our ambitions are huge. We’re thinking on the level of what Disney can do. We want to get to be the best haunt in the United States. I want people traveling from across the country to come here. Of course, we can’t do that in the first year. But by the tenth year, we might be damn close.”
They have a two-year lease on this space, and they’ll be back in it throughout 2015 getting ready for next year’s iteration. The BioMedCorp storyline will remain the same, they say, and the path traveled by visitors—which is ADA handicapped accessible—won’t change much for now.
But a few years down the road, as the company grows large enough to move into new venues, LaPointe is hoping to build a 15,000 square foot classic haunt with moving walls. “I’d like to be able to push 30,000 or 40,000 people through in a season.”
For this year’s haunt, Spears and LaPointe say they’ve put in more than $200,000, drawn from their savings as well as personal and home equity loans. With only 22 days of business between Sept. 27 and Nov. 2, recouping costs will take hard work, good word of mouth, and a fair amount of luck.
Tickets are priced at $20, so 10,000 paid visitors could get the haunt most of the way back to black. LaPointe sees this as a reasonable goal.
“We need to make a name for ourselves, and you only get one shot at making a first impression,” he says. “We don’t expect to break even this year. But you’ve got to start somewhere.”
We take a walk together through the haunt. Spear and LaPointe lead the way; I follow, as does Lukasz Socha, a 20-year-old employee of LaPointe’s construction company, Quality Crafters. LaPointe took Socha on board three years ago, when Socha was fresh out of tech school for carpentry.
As we wind our way along narrow corridors—through a space that was kept wide-open by its previous tenants, Landry Furniture—it’s clear how useful LaPointe’s contracting experience has been. Hundreds of slabs of sheetrock and countless nails, screws, and two-by-fours divide a dark series of rooms and hallways, which feature some meticulous attention to painting, props, and set dressing.
“I do the 3-D design portion,” says LaPointe, who studied sculpture and effects at UMass. “Dave does the mechanical portion.”
Spear started young with electromechanics. “Even when I was a kid, I was always trying to put bigger motors in my toys,” he says. “Then I graduated to go-karts and motorcycles and hot rods. This is different in a lot of ways, but it’s still the same kind of fun.”
We duck under some bags hanging from the ceiling. The bags move. They’re filled with a particular animal. I won’t say what.
In another room, Spear steps behind a wall, and an enormous mechanical puppet—what they call a mech—lunges forward.
“Without Dave, we would never have gotten to this level,” says LaPointe. “We have things in here that you need to be an electrical engineer to even assemble, let alone to design and fabricate from scratch. We have stuff in here that you’re not going to be able to find at any other haunt, because it just doesn’t exist.”
That sit-up creature, LaPointe, says, “will be going up and down until I’m 80.” That’s why it’s worthwhile to make your own props when possible. “The industry standard for Halloween products is junk. It’s mostly put together in garages by these small companies that design them so that they work a couple of times and then break.”
“Like the spider legs,” says Spear.
“Yeah. We’ll have to fix those this afternoon.”
Mid-season fixes, and all of the daily surprises from customers’ reactions, keep the team on their toes.
“We’re directing the scares better now,” says Spear. “We’re modifying here and there, to get all of the rooms to work in harmony.”
One of their most helpful tools: a system of 16 video cameras placed throughout the haunt. Those video feeds play simultaneously in what LaPointe calls the Control Room, which helps him and his staff of scarers—typically about 30 a night—make decisions about repairs, actor placement, and audience flow in real time.
“I cannot tell you the learning curve,” he says. “It’s been amazing, the difference from day one to now. It’s a crash course in the art of scaring.”
The most reliable scares, LaPointe says, come from misdirection. “When you think you’re coming into a room to get scared here”—he claps his hands off to one side—“and we start to scare you there, but then we nail you from behind, then you’re going to be on the ground and crawling away.”
Spear laughs to himself, perhaps a bit too maniacally.
We walk into a room with a huge boiler and some metal oil drums. LaPointe points out an enormous puppet, one of the select few that DementedFX has purchased rather than built.
“This is the hellhound,” he says. “He comes at you in the black light. We have people falling over these barrels.”
Ticket buyers aren’t just falling down. LaPointe indicates some dents and craters in the sheetrock. Visitors are running into the walls. They’re kicking out. They’re jumping onto furniture.
“You’re not the most cautious when you’re being scared,” Spear says. “We have to make repairs every day.”
Those repairs happen before opening each night, but they also happen throughout the evening. Spear or LaPointe will jump into a room during the 30 seconds it’s empty, fix a mechanical issue, and flee before anyone rounds the corner.
Every two or three minutes, a new group of visitors is let in. But the speed at which they move is unpredictable. And bunching up is bad, LaPointe explains, because it diffuses the scare. If you’re in a long line down a dark hallway, and the people in front of you got scared by something around a corner, the surprise is ruined for you.
Some people end up running through at a jog, past the group in front of them, and the group in front of that. “But others are ridiculously slow,” LaPointe says.
It took five or six days for the staff to fully implement the solution: live actors in the haunt are now able to better tell when a cluster of visitors is made up of more than one social group. “Now they get in people’s faces more. They split up the groups, and they block people from joining up again. And they stay in character. It really works. You can’t be watching a scare from afar. It has to be on top of you.”
But if it’s really too much for someone? An actor will break character if they encounter a ticket buyer who’s in really bad shape, and they’ll lead that hyperventilating mess through one of the numerous exit doors. “That happens about 25 times a night,” says LaPointe.
With 12 days of business left to go, LaPointe says the actors have all learned how to get the best scares out of people. LaPointe, in turn, now knows which actors are most effective in which rooms.
This past Friday night, the backstage dressing room bustled with dozens of actors. A few are professional actors, but most are students from UMass and the Five College area.
Countdown to opening has begun: five minutes until visitors start coming in the front doors to line up.
LaPointe stands at the top of a short staircase, scanning the actors as they put on makeup and shuffle into bloody lab coats.
He signals an actor. “Rat room! Go!” He waves to another. “Security office! Go!”
In short order, LaPointe sends the other ready actors out into the haunt. “You! Second spider room. You! Baby autopsy. You know where the baby autopsy is? Go. Emily—first autopsy. Where’s Josh? You—hallway before the morgue. Get on a coat and go. Colin—do the drop-down in the morgue. You’re killing it. You—right where they come through the plastic in the morgue. Get on ’em and stay on ’em.”
He turns to an actor. “You’re going to start with the guys in the elevator. They’ll show you what to do.”
He eyes another. “The gurney. Take a gurney. Ask Erica. She’ll show you.”
“Erica” is Erica Pinto, an actor in a destroyed nurse’s costume who is currently applying black paint to an actor’s eye sockets.
LaPointe waves at a murdered lab technician. “Go.”
“I need to spray him,” says a makeup artist, grabbing a bottle.
“Quickly!”
The technician gets a few thick squirts of red blood to the face.
“They’re looking for intensity,” says actor Aaron Lafond, 30, of Chicopee. He stands in the front hallway in his lab coat. “They want you interacting with the crowds.”
Lafond does this in addition to his work as a real estate agent in Longmeadow. “But I don’t look at this as work. I always loved going to haunted houses when I was a kid. I like all of this. I’m a big horror movie fan. I love the George A. Romero movies, and I’ll see anything with zombies in it.”
Lafond is stationed in the room designed to look like BioMedCorp’s security office. “I have it lucky, because I’m right after the first mech, which means I can hear people’s screams right before they get to me. So I can plan how I’m going to get them. There’s always something new you can do to scare someone.”
Other actors, he explains, are often shuffled around the haunt from night to night. “You’ve got to go in looking at your surroundings and see what you can do with it. Every spot requires something different from you.”
“And it always depends on the crowd,” he adds. “Because you get different reactions every few minutes. If it works to slam on a filing cabinet, great. But if other groups aren’t scared by that, you got to do something different.”
This goes on for five to six hours at a time. “You have to be ready. You can’t pass on a group. You can’t be tired. And if you need a break, you can’t leave until you’ve been replaced. On Fridays and Saturdays, we come in at 5:30 or 6, and we’re here until 1:30 in the morning.”
Tom Venne, 31, of Granby, took a break from his position as bouncer recently to try his chops as a scarer. “It’s a lot of fun,” he says.
Doing security is also fun, but not always, he says. “I don’t know how many times I’ve had to go in looking for people’s keys. They drop them, or they throw them. Some kid lost his shoe the other night, and we had to go find that.”
Venne, who is LaPointe’s brother-in-law, helped with some of the construction as well. “I love how it’s turned out. It’s great to see everyone coming through. We get some teenagers, but also a lot of people in their 30s and 40s and 50s.”
LaPointe has noticed this as well. “The big draw we’re seeing, through our Google ads, is from the 25-36 age range. I would have thought more high schoolers would be here. But we’re getting more of them than we are ages 17-25. That blows me away.”
One group of four in the darkening parking lot, visiting from eastern Massachusetts, walks out laughing. It took them about 15 minutes to walk through the haunt—a pretty average speed. “It’s our anniversary,” says Shay Smith. She and her husband, who are in their early 30s, are joined tonight by her parents. “We figured what the hell, we’ll come meet them here,” says her father James, who’s 67. “I’m really glad we did it. It was really enjoyable.”
Other reactions, from those emerging from the haunt, are almost all enthusiastic, adrenaline-fueled support.
“Awesome. Loved it. Awesome.”
“Wow, great job!” says another to Venne. “Every room scared me.”
Another middle-aged couple: “Fantastic. Fantastic.”
This from those who had the breath to speak. A quiet minority, breathing chill Easthampton air again, marched briskly away, shoulders hunched. One woman strode slowly to her car as if still in a dream, with glazed eyes, open mouth, and a hand to her heart.
Some of these guests, perhaps, weren’t scared. For them, LaPointe and Spear will have to try something different next year.
Some of those hurried, pinched faces, though, will say they didn’t appreciate their forced brush with the void. Still, DementedFX would call that a success. Not everyone likes to be scared. But scares are what’s for sale.•