The rise of the modern haunted house started with the opening of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion in 1969, a relatively tame ride that included some mildly frightening ghosts and goblins. But these days, it takes much more to scare us.
 Modern America is has become desensitized to blood and gore. Ours is a culture of violence normalized, in which the perverse has become passé. According to industry experts. we are so used to casual violence in video games or movies that it is becoming increasingly difficult to scare people at haunted houses. Twenty years ago, a haunted house meant limp spaghetti brains, peeled-grape eyeballs, and people in masks jumping out of corn mazes waving fake knives. Today, that probably wouldn’t even scare an elementary schooler. Our threshold for shock has risen; we find fewer things truly horrifying. Simple scare tricks just don’t cut it anymore.
Modern haunted house owners must use animatronic monsters, fog machines, holographic projections, and elaborate sound and lighting in order to deliver an effective scare. Movie effects specialists that have lost their jobs to the rise of CGI technology flock to work on haunted house productions. People are demanding a more horrifying experience, and haunted houses deliver by using Hollywood-level sets and professional makeup crews to create their monsters.
A Pennsylvanian haunted attraction, “Shocktoberfest”, took things up a notch by proposing a “naked haunted house”. The reasoning goes that people feel most vulnerable when naked. Layers of clothing provide a sense of protection that is literally stripped away in this setting. Patrick Konopelski, the owner of Shocktoberfest, says “walking through the house nude heightens the sense of fear.” He admits that his idea is wild and maybe even slightly creepy but chalks it up to necessity. No matter what the haunted house industry does to improve their scares, Konopelski says “the only way to satisfy customers would be to cut off their arms and slap them upside the head with them.” Basically, it has simply become so hard to scare a desensitized public that haunted houses have to resort to extreme measures.
So what does this thirst for terror and gore tell about us? Timothy Haskell, director of a haunted attraction in NYC, says haunted houses have become an “extreme sport”, and “They’re all mirroring our culture the exact same way. We all want extreme everything.”
When our desire for horror impresses even those that deal in fear itself, that is not a good sign at all.
