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October 17-23, 2002 city beat Pitching Fright
Entrepreneurs are tapping the lucrative market of wet-your-pants entertainment. On a rainy night in South Philadelphia, inside a pitch-black loading dock, Aven Warren is just about the only thing that isn’t scary. Donning a cartoon tie and handmade ankle splint, he looks more like a hobbled birthday magician than a pioneer of the fright industry. And that’s what he wants you to think -- just before he jolts you with a surprise “Wha-HAH!” He calls it “distract and attack.” Warren, 42, has taken such military-sounding "scare tactics" and turned them into a business model for haunted houses. Along with his two partners -- the "Architects of Fear" he calls them -- Warren has opened Haunted Hallow in New Jersey, Frightland in Delaware and, most recently, The Fright Factory in Philadelphia. This year he predicts that 20,000 guests will shell out $17 apiece to visit his Philly warehouse of fright. After a banner opening weekend, with five times last year's attendance, there's no reason to doubt him. Located on the shredded asphalt of Swanson Street in a remote section of Pennsport, the only thing that distinguishes Fright Factory from neighboring warehouses is a poorly lit sign. Warren wanted a haunted house in Philadelphia for a long time, but it took a call from the Mummers, and some cheap square-footage, to goad him into action. The Masonic group commissioned a single haunted house in August 2000, and, with help from a brigade of Mummer-affiliated carpenters, the haunt was built in less than a month. "For the amount of time we had -- we built that in days -- it was pretty good," says Warren. In its first year, Fright Factory drew 4,500 people, and in 2001 that number doubled. For Warren, exponential growth simply wasn't good enough. He expanded Fright Factory's offerings, and this year the warehouse is divided into three haunted attractions. "Pitch Black" is, as the name implies, a lights-out maze where you use your hands to navigate winding walls and groping actors. "CarnEvil 3-D" is a collection of clown portraits drawn in 3-D fluorescent paint. If Albert C. Barnes had ever joined an LSD-friendly fraternity, he probably would've come up with something similar. Last up is "The Forgotten Insane Asylum," so named because Fright Factory's building was once an insane asylum for people who lost their jobs, and then their minds, in the Great Depression. At 10,000 square feet, it's the largest haunt, and it houses the greatest number of costumed actors. Actors are essential in Warren's paradigm of fright. A scare tactic like "the gross-out" simply doesn't work unless you have a character like Snot-Man, who sneezes a nasty amount of methyl glucose, which looks like stringy snot. "People go, ŒUgh, that's disgusting.' But it distracts them and sets up the next scare," says Warren. That would be "the startle-scare," which consists of an actor lurching out of a drop window and yelling angry gibberish. It's a primitive stunt, but completely effective -- at nearly all of the 800 wall panels, at least one visitor leapt back into the arms of a complete stranger. "Distract and attack" is the final scare tactic, and also Warren's favorite. "You build something that people look at, go ŒHey this is cool,' and then, bam!" Some of the disarming distractions include a hanging man, a chainsaw-wielding doctor, and an old lady who is launched into a TV set. But, when it comes to the attacks, Warren insists that they not be revealed: "I look at haunt gags like magic tricks; you don't want to tell anyone what's going to happen because it destroys the illusion." Turns out his frumpy magician aura is for real (and so is the splint -- he stumbled and broke his ankle while doing a promotional appearance costumed as a Yeti). As a boy, Warren loved pulling pranks on family and friends. "Every parent in the neighborhood hated me." An early aptitude for makeup and disguises led him to design costumes for a local Jaycees fundraiser. He parlayed that experience into a job in the film industry, working on B-horror movies -- drive-in fare with titles like Zombie Holocaust, Psycho Sisters and Female Mercenaries on Zombie Island. Eventually Warren realized there was more money to be made in fright consulting. Eleven years ago he teamed up with Phil Miller, a prop wizard, and Robert Dudzieck, a terror-inclined artist, to form Haunted Industries. Their timing couldn't have been better; Halloween-related attractions, fueled by baby-boomer enthusiasm, have exploded in the last 10 years. Haunted Industries Consulting has made a fortune turning mom-and-pop hayrides into revenue-cranking machines. When they were hired to revamp two "Scream Parks" in Delaware and New Jersey, the company quickly increased attendance from 3,000 to 50,000. The strategy was simple: "My theory is, if you're going to build one haunted house, see if you can grab some extra space and build two." Of course, with every new haunted attraction, you up the admission. "Down [at Frightland] in Delaware, we designed a haunted house, haunted barn and a haunted hayride. The year before they'd been charging $8 and we upped that to $20.... and people love it. The $20 isn't a problem." Using modular sets and drop-panels, Warren and company were able to increase actor efficiency, getting 25 people to do the work of 60. They also invested heavily in marketing, spending a minimum of $50,000. "It's what makes or breaks you," says Warren. Remarkably, each of Haunted Industries' parks has recouped their initial capital expenditure -- e.g., $170,000 for Fright Factory's construction and media -- after the first year. Haunted Industries isn't the only group who's seen the growth potential in haunted houses. In the Philadelphia suburbs, farmers have gone retail and turned their crop fields into giant haunted mazes. This new business, called "agritainment," has saved many farms from financial collapse. As most of the attractions are built from field corn (not the sweet corn we eat), "Maize Quest" is a favorite name -- farms in Pennsylvania and Delaware employ the pun. Even the Christian church has joined the haunting bonanza. Last year, Trinity Church in Cedar Hill, Texas, made headlines (and inspired a critically acclaimed documentary) when they created Hell House, an attraction that shocked the politically correct more than it frightened young kiddies. Highlights included a homosexual dying of AIDS, a girl in an abortion clinic (with fake blood between her legs), a reenactment of Columbine and a mom who leaves her family for someone she met on the Internet. Perhaps the scariest thing about Hell House is that it attracted more then 10,000 people. Locally, there's Eastern State Penitentiary's "Terror Behind the Walls," The Bates Motel in Gradyville, and Shocktoberfest in Reading. Oddly enough, Aven Warren doesn't see these operations as competition. In fact, they've bound together to do co-op advertising. The rationale is that the people who patronize haunted attractions are fright junkies, always jonesing for their next scare. "If people go to one of these attractions, they'll go to two," says Warren. "The horror groupies are our customer base. We're talking about 300,000 people. I've got some who will go, ŒI've been to Bates tonight, I've been to prison, now I'm coming to you.'" All of these haunted attractions are angling for a piece of the booming Halloween market. In 2001, despite post-9/11 jitters, sales of candy, costumes and decorations reached almost $7 billion, a new record. Businesses like Fright Factory are gobbling up as much of the $60-per-capita spending as possible. And they're also going after the $9.6 billion theme park business. Though theme parks don't report seasonal revenue, John Robinette, of Economic Research Associates, estimates that companies like Six Flags, Great Adventure (N.J.), earn 10 to 20 percent of their annual income from events like Shocktoberfest. Yet, despite his success, Aven Warren isn't satisfied. Currently, Haunted Industries is working on new attractions in Delaware, Virginia, Baltimore and Arizona. They've even been contacted to build a haunted house in Japan. Only one question remains: Why are so many people willing to pay to be scared? Warren shrugs, "It's speeding up your pulse, adrenaline, making the hair on the back of your neck stand up, and knowing that you'll walk out OK." He grins, squinty-eyed. "Then again, you never know. There may be that one nut loose in here with a machete." 
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