By Charly SHELTON

For those in the haunted house maze business, the Halloween season starts in summer. Work begins with design – adding in the gags, finding the “scaractors,” incorporating the new tech that has come out for this haunt season and whatever else the designers can get their hands on. So the end of summer is the perfect time for a haunt trade show, showcasing the best of technology and techniques new and old.

The trade show Midsummer Scream was held last month and was focused more on haunt industry professionals who were looking for things to add to a house. The second of two shows, ScareLA, was held last weekend and it was geared more toward haunt fans, giving a behind-the-scenes look at the basics of how haunters make the sets, the costumes and the scares that go into a house.

Some of the small stage highlights included demos on how airbrushes are used to apply horror makeup, how to use a hot knife to carve Styrofoam into faux stone and wood, and, perhaps most importantly, crafting the perfect liability release to protect both the haunter and the guest, among many other things. The panels and presentations on the main stage were kind of niche in that most of them dealt with movies and shows that a viewer needed to be familiar with in order to understand, but there were some events that everyone could enjoy – like meeting George C. Romero, son of legendary director George Romero, as the 50th anniversary of “Night of the Living Dead,” quite possibly the most iconic zombie movie ever made, was celebrated. Or the Universal Studios Hollywood Halloween Horror Nights panel, which saw USH Creative Director John Murdy and Art Director Chris Williams take the stage to talk about the upcoming season of mazes at the theme park.

In a surprise visit, Murdy and Williams were joined on stage by legendary guitarist Slash, who wrote all of the music for the most recently announced maze, Universal Monsters. Classic horror icons like Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and his Bride, The Wolfman, the Hunchback of Notre Dame and more will be found in one maze, as well as a Masque of the Red Death scare zone, all with brand-new music written exclusively for the event by Slash, with sound design by Stacey Quinealty. The pair first worked together on another maze in 2013, Clowns 3D. This time, they are doing a more intense scoring job; instead of one track that is played throughout the entire maze, as was done in Clowns 3D, the Universal Monsters maze will have different soundtracks for each room.

“I got to work out a cool sort of theme for the entire [maze],” Slash said. “I hooked up with Stacey and we started working together like we did the last time, but this time was a lot more extensive. I got a guitar synthesizer and started doing all kinds of orchestrations for different instruments with a basic idea but in all different types of musical tones.”

He added that different versions of the same melody, with different feels and different instrumentation, will reflect the varying time periods and monster themes being created for the maze.

Slash and Quinealty played several tracks from the new maze for the audience in attendance at the panel, which you can hear in the video on CVWeekly.com or by scanning the QR code.

Overall, ScareLA was fun and is a nice way to get excited about the haunt season to come. For more info about the show and dates for next year, visit ScareLA.com.

  Charly Shelton