INTERNSHIP: The Haunting

shawke
Oct 29, 2015
2 min read

Anyone who knows me knows I love Halloween. Therefore, when my internship offered me an opportunity to work very closely on a Halloween event I was over the moon.Downtown Orillia was testing a pilot project with the Orillia Opera House and the Orillia Museum of Art & History to create an adult oriented Halloween event. The idea being that groups of tours would make their way through walking tours in the Downtown with OOH & OMAH being the start and end points with their own activities. OMAH decided to offer up the building's jail cells for not only historical tours but to turn them into a full blown haunted house. With the event being offered to adults only, we were encouraged to make it bone-chillingly terrifying.The museum's Registrar pulled out a series of 'creepy' dolls from our archives and we dressed them in the jail cells.

I became involved when it came to lighting and creating a soundscape. The normal fluorescent lights are less than creepy, but when all the lights are turned off the space becomes instantly goose-bump inducing. That being said, we can't have visitors wandering around in the pitch dark. This led to bringing in some very strategic lighting to keep everything dark and mysterious but also safe. I brought in blacklights and incandescent bulbs, and used strings of lights found in the museum's basement. We lit everything very low, casting creepy shadows on dolls and jail cell walls. I then covered any wiring or unwanted light with black fabric which would make it invisible in the dark.

For the soundscape, I opted for creating two main themes. In the hallway I wanted the sounds of chains clanging, screams and a whole lot of torture chamber sounds. I collected a series of sound bites of people screaming, metal hitting metal, chainsaws, wind blowing, creaking doors, dragging feet, and even ghoulish groans. This became edited into a 9 minute soundscape that just looped throughout the night. It was meant as ambient sound to create an atmosphere with accents periodically to add to the 'jump factor'. The secondary soundscape was to play in the jail cells alongside the dolls on display. This was a much subtler soundscape that was meant to be almost unnoticeable but increasingly unsettling. I used sound clips of wind blowing, a music box, wind chimes, synthesized chords, a piano, children giggling, and a child singing 'Ring Around the Rosie'. I layered them in dissonant chords to make the music less melodic and more haunting.

Finally, during the night of the event visitors could have their pictures taken in our jail cells as a reward for making it through the haunted house. Stephanie Lamb was our photographer for the evening and we worked together with the challenge of low lighting and creating spooky images. She did a great job with the photographs and then I handled the post-production editing in making them creepier still.

It was a widely fun evening and every blood-curdling scream that emitted from the jail cells felt like a compliment.