ACTING WITH MALICE: Scare Techniques From Scare Actors

By Tom Joyce
The setting sun cast a blood-red glow on the assembly of horrors. Maniacal clowns. Cleaver-toting cannibals. Wrathful ghosts.

All gathered in a field, waiting for their victims. Stakes high, as always.

It wouldn’t be enough to send shivers down spines. They’d need to make people shriek and recoil. Fill the night air with screams of terrified children. Failure to get those results could bring hellish consequences beyond the most twisted Cenobite’s imaginings.

I’m talking, of course, about getting laughed at by a bunch of 14-year-olds. Fortunately, the “scare actors” at Bloodshed Farms in Columbus, New Jersey, proved more than up the task during a recent visit.

As Halloween haunted houses have transitioned from Jaycees fundraisers to large-scale seasonal attractions, scare actors have been honing their craft. Many of them (editorial opinion: rightly) consider it an art, and put a lot of thought and effort into developing their technique.

Some actors from Bloodshed Farms have generously agreed to share their tactics for the HWA. (Please do yourself a favor and watch the accompanying videos. These actors really are great!)

For the group of Halloween fanatics who stage Bloodshed Farms every year, it started in 2005 with a Halloween “haunted prison” at a local historic site that the participants soon outgrew. To this day, it’s still as much a collective of people who love this stuff as it is a business. Full disclosure: I am not affiliated with Bloodshed Farms, but I am personally acquainted with one of the actors.

Like everyone in the haunted attraction business in New Jersey, they have to be particularly conscientious because of a real-life horror story from 1984. That was the year eight teenagers died in a fire at Six Flags Great Adventure’s Haunted Castle.

As a result, New Jersey has the strictest regulations for haunted attractions in the U.S. Any enclosed space must include a fire alarm and sprinkler system. That effectively prevents Bloodshed Farms from having anything indoors, and electronics must be portable enough to stow in trailers should it rain. That, in turn, restricts what they can do with sets and props.

But the people at Bloodshed Farms have found ways to adapt through stagecraft and acting. Movable partitions simulate building exteriors and interiors. Lights are placed to distract the eye and conceal the presence of actors, who work out signals and routines to disorient and startle visitors.

Recently, Bloodshed Farms had to adapt again in response to Covid — changing from a walk-through to a drive-through model and requiring actors to come up with a new set of tactics for getting scares.

They seem to be doing the job, judging by the fact that more than 12,000 visitors still show up every season to scream, shriek, and cry. Yes, literally cry. Heard it myself.

Then pay money to go back and do it again.
It’s horror. You get it or you don’t.

LINKS TO VIDEOS

Check out the videos on our very own Horror Writers Association Tik-Tok!

TIPS FROM A SCARE ATTRACTION
Bloodshed Farms gives its scare actors training so visitors get the best experience. Here are some of the lessons, which may be useful for horror writing.
3 COMPONENTS OF ENTERTAINMENT
• Terror – It may be the main thing that makes haunted attractions entertaining, but it’s not the only thing.
• Spectacle – The “wow” factor. Something never seen before.
• Character interaction – If characters aren’t interesting, they aren’t scary.
3 TYPES OF SCARES
• The startle – As “Writing in the Dark” by Tim Waggoner (not affiliated, highly recommended) made me aware, a true jump scare isn’t possible in writing. But Bloodshed Farms defines the startle as the “in your face” moment. The instant when whatever’s been stalking you shows itself.
• The creep-out – Something’s coming from a long way off. Maybe you can see it. Slow and inescapable.
• The gross-out – Stephen King, famously, isn’t proud. Neither are the actors at Bloodshed Farms.
3 ADDITIONAL TIPS:
• If an actor jumps into a scene too quickly, it dampens the effect. Cognitively, you don’t have time to process the fact that you should be scared. The effect is more unnerving, and the scare more intense, when you know something’s coming that hasn’t shown itself yet.
• That maniac with a knife might be scary when they first jump out at you. But the longer you get a good look at them, the less scary they’ll be. That’s why at Bloodshed Farms, they’ll likely jump back into the shadows immediately. Possibly to emerge again.
• As the Bloodshed Farms training material puts it: “Be forceful.” Actors need to dominate the room. This ain’t no cozy mystery.