News - Carnegie Mellon University: From the very start, Comley, an associate teaching professor who teaches Experience Design and other entertainment classes at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), thought of her haunted houses as training grounds.
4 comments:
The design aspect of haunted houses is so cool! It’s also not something that people tend to think about. It’s just a few dark hallways, right? Nope! I love that this article talked about all the rules and codes that they have to take into consideration while designing it. Haunted houses have to find the sweet spot between dark and creepy, and not unsafe. And that balance might shift from place to place and haunted house to haunted house depending on the unique situation of each location. I would further be interested to know about what goes on to be able to have kid friendly nights, low sensory nights, etc. for the haunted houses that do those things. For example, haunted houses that have kid friendly nights often make the experience a little less dark. However, that slight change might be an entirely different design in terms of the lights.
This is one aspect of entertainment that I have never considered before reading this article. Learning about how Ruth Comley works in entertainment and the horror world was super interesting to read about. I have never really thought about the different layers of putting up and running a haunted house. The biggest one of these was all the codes and regulations that they still have to follow. Horror is supposed to be scary and thrilling but also making it legal and safe adds a whole other aspect of design that I hadn’t thought of. Additionally, I liked reading about how she takes her real-world experience and brings it back to the classroom to teach her students. As a current student, hearing that my professors have real-world experience and application of what they are teaching shows me that what I’m learning is directly applicable to the work force and that the professor knows what their teaching well.
Haunted houses certainly do have a lot of codes that they need to be held to, and the author makes a great point that if students know the codes and regulations that need to be followed that they will be able to get further ahead in jobs. Being able to work with all the restrictions that are in place to protect the audience and performers alike from so many different disasters that could occur is a great challenge that if navigated properly creates a fantastically frightful and safe attraction. I haven’t worked with haunted houses, but my school did do an escape room and it was such a great way to understand how much and how varied an audience can perceive the same information presented to them, with some instantly understanding and others finding clues in places we didn’t even know existed. How people responded in that informs how much I should put into other aspects of design, just like how Comley used their haunted house experience is a fully different part of entertainment.
I never considered haunted houses as something we could design with our skills and know-how. It's important for students to realize just how many codes the haunted houses must be held to in order to keep all the house-goers safe. It reminds me of an escape room, almost. Except I think escape rooms have video and audio feed of the room and someone is watching them at all times to make sure they are safe and not stuck in there being all confused. Haunted houses probably don't usually have advanced enough technology or money to have live video feeds and to have someone watching the video feed at all times. I mean, where is that money coming from anyways. Most haunted houses are very simple endeavors put on by friends, schools, family, churches, etc.
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