Colorado Haunted Houses: A Hard Way To Make A Scare
It is one of the odd things about our culture, that people are more than happy to pay you to scare them as near to death as possible. The haunted house business market has been one of those things that has been running for years, and from all I can tell, will keep running for years to come. While haunted houses are likely not to ever leave entirely, as a business they can be very risky propositions.
Colorado haunted houses, like haunted houses around the country, bet the greater part of a years work on 6 weeks of business. Because of the brevity of the holiday season, a Colorado haunted house needs to make sure they get it right and that they get it right the first time. While I have supported haunted houses before I always kind of thought of them as if they were charging too much. Often it was 20 dollars or more for a ticket, but the more I learn, the more I think paying just 20 dollars is a good deal. Let’s talk about what goes into making a good Colorado haunted house (or any other state for that matter): You need space When you build a haunted house you need a enough space to walk people through for about 30 minutes in most situations.
If you know anything about real estate you’ll know that getting commercial property with the zoning to scare hundreds of people late into the night isn’t an easy proposition, and that isn’t the only complication. You also need to consider you how get a property for just the amount of time that you need and the reality is that this isn’t really doable. Say you want to get a property for just 3 months – that will give you 6 weeks to set up, do the show, and close down. You likely won’t be able to do that and if you can, you’ll be paying a significant premium.
The other thing is getting space in a good marketable spot. Location is going to affect your traffic and getting a good spot will be hard. You need people I’m not talking about customers, I’m talking about employees. Start thinking about how many people it would take if you made a haunted house in a 5 bedroom home. With the living room, kitchen, family room, dining room, garage, stairs, and bedrooms you would be dealing with over ten rooms plus hallways. Can one person properly haunt a single room? Maybe, but probably not.
So you will need to be employing dozens and dozens of people who more than not will need both costumes and makeup. Lets say that you are working with 30 people, and you are running 6 days a week, 6 hours a night; that is a 1080 man hours a week. Let’s say you pay everyone 20 dollars a night, that would be 21,600 and we haven’t considered electrical, insurance, supplies, or rent costs. You need a set plus an artist/craftsman Building a Colorado haunted house means your house needs a good bit of creative work. Maybe you can do that on your own, but otherwise you are going to need to hire it out. Some of this likely will have to be done every night with makeup.
The thing is that the more I look at what would go into building a Colorado haunted house or one in any other state the more I realize that the people doing it have to love it. There are scenarios where you could have a killer year and really make a good bit of money but the odds of that happening seem very hard to predict. So, if you are considering going to a haunted house think twice before complaining about the price and try to appreciate all the work that goes into it. Of course, if you are able to appreciate it too much, there may not be enough scaring going on…