A witch wasn't just a rubber-masked figure bent over a fake cauldron, but a completely realistic bodiless head floating in a crystal ball, conducting a complex séance. Ghosts were no longer simply sheets hung in a tree, but were instead actual shimmering translucent figures that moved, spoke and sang. What made the Haunted Mansion so successful and so influential, however, was not its similarity to haunted houses and "dark rides" (that is, tawdry carnival haunted houses) of the past, but its use of startling new technologies and effects. The attraction was revolutionary, as she explains in Trick or Treat: It's the start of the haunted attraction industry," Morton says. Disney brought to scene to life through an exceptionally complex series of illusions known as Pepper's ghost, which use refracted light to project and shape ethereal images. "A lot of the professional haunters will point to one thing, and that's Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. The attraction's centerpiece is the Grand Hall, a 90-foot-long ballroom sequence of dancing ghouls at a birthday party. In a single day shortly after its debut, more than 82,000 people passed through the Haunted Mansion. The attraction, which was designed in the style of the Evergreen House and the Winchester Mystery House, quickly became a success. Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion opened in 1969, nearly two decades after Disney first approved the beleaguered project. The haunted house didn't become a cultural icon, though, until Walt Disney decided to build one. Hang old fur, strips of raw liver on walls, where one feels his way to dark steps.Weird moans and howls come from dark corners, damp sponges and hair nets hung from the ceiling touch his face.Doorways are blockaded so that guests must crawl through a long dark tunnel.At the end he hears a plaintive 'meow' and sees a black cardboard cat outlined in luminous paint." The effects may seem familiar to anyone who has ever been disappointed by a sub-par scare:Īn outside entrance leads to a rendezvous with ghosts and witches in the cellar or attic. This 1937 party pamphlet describes how parents could also design "trails of terror" to spook their children. Kids could spook themselves by traveling from basement to basement and experiencing different scary scenes. Groups of families would decorate their basements and hold "house-to-house” parties. Those first haunted houses were very primitive. "Cities looked for ways to buy these kids off, essentially." Lisa Morton, author of Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween, tells that Halloween-themed haunted houses first emerged during the Great Depression as American parents schemed up ways to distract young tricksters, whose holiday pranks had escalated to property damage, vandalism and harassment of strangers. "They came in about the same time as trick-or-treat did," she says. The public appetite for horror was picking up. In 1915, an English fairground in Liphook debuted one of the first " ghost houses," an early type of commercial horror attraction. In Paris, the Grand Guignol theater became notorious for its on-stage depictions of graphic dismemberment the theater's director, Max Maurey, famously boasted that he judged each performance by the number of people who passed out, shocked, in the audience. When she set up a permanent London exhibition, she dubbed her grotesque collection the "Chamber of Horrors" - a name that has stuck to the wax museum to this day.Īt the turn of the 20th century, as Rebekah McKendry describes in Fangoria magazine, the closest relatives to modern haunted houses began experimenting with macabre themes. Tussaud's likenesses were remarkably accurate, and with good reason - she created death masks of the French Revolution's many guillotine victims. In 1802, Marie Tussaud scandalized British audiences with an exhibition of wax sculptures of decapitated French figures, including King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Marat and Robespierre. The origins of the haunted house date back to 19th-century London, when a series of illusions and attractions introduced the public to new forms of gruesome entertainment.
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