Lisa Guyton is the treasurer of the St. Charles Village of the Living Dead, just outside Saginaw, Mich. It’s a scary job, and a busy job. There are about 2,000 breathing residents in the Village of St. Charles, but each October, 6,000 visitors arrive at the Village of the Living Dead, not including the 70 or so ghouls and demonic clowns and ax murderers who work annually for Guyton. The village has operated as a non-profit charity organization since 1985, donating most of its revenue to local youth organizations and Michigan food pantries.
Haunted houses are in her blood.
Her father, she explained, to illustrate her commitment, died in the Village of the Living Dead, many years ago. He was dressed as Michael Myers from “Halloween.” He had an aneurysm and fell to his knees, and it took everyone a few minutes to realize that he wasn’t acting. He was 59.
She let the story sink in. She sat in a lobby of the Schaumburg Convention Center on Saturday afternoon, then continued: Anyway, she comes here, to the annual Midwest Haunters Convention, the second-largest trade show in the country for haunted-house professionals, to get inspired and spruce up their 34-year old undead domicile. By day two of last weekend’s convention, she had already bought about $6,000 in new scares. For instance, she had just paid about $1,100 for a 465-pound headless corpse.
Members of her staff stood beside her, nodding.
They also bought a vampire, a demon girl, a wall that looks like it’s alive and a few flashlights.
“We need to be creative to compete with all the mega-haunts,” she said, referring to the massive, technologically impressive, often million-dollar-plus productions that have come to dominate many regional haunted-house markets.
So each spring, out of duty, they go to the TransWorld’s Halloween & Attractions Show in St. Louis, a large, must-attend event for the $500 million haunted attraction industry. But Midwest Haunters — also produced by Winnetka-based TransWorld Trade Shows, and usually held in Ohio — caters to the mid-size haunt, the charity spooks, even the neighborhood amateurs with elaborate front-lawn graveyards each October. At the St. Louis show, Guyton said, they’re small beans, surrounded by state-of-the-art animatronic dragons they could never afford, but here at least, they are a big muted fish in a haunted pond.
You probably never thought about this, but the people who operate and work at haunted houses need to talk shop, too. They need to talk about the direction of the business and blow off steam with colleagues and see what’s new. They need to discuss their toxic work environments and come up with original ways for making it even more toxic.
Liz Siegel, a haunted-house performer from Oak Lawn, picked up an oozing brain for a moment then moved on, the way you might quickly inspect a toaster at Target. She was dressed as a nurse, with one difference: her head was bandaged and a long syringe protruded from her right eye.
“I’ve been doing the needle thing for years,” she said. “So I thought I would come here and look for something new.”
She passed Adam Durham, who grew up in Chicago but has run Scared City Hauntiques from Arkansas for the past 13 Halloweens. His niche is clever: He buys and sells only objects that might work inside a dark, cob-webbed haunted milieu. On the convention floor, his booth was a flea market of corroded battery chargers (ideal for torture), hospital gurneys, deer skulls, dental equipment and rusty scythes.
Frankly, it looked sketchy.
“It does look sketchy!” he laughed. “And I have the tick bites and tetanus shots to prove it!” He buys his wares from old farms, estate sales, hospitals, funeral homes. “See, I also run a haunted house myself and I don’t want my stuff to look like sculpted foam. So I sell real meat hooks, real chandeliers.” He picked up a hammer. “I don’t give our actors bloody hammers then throw them into the dark — we take pains to ensure that our products have been used!”
Saturday in Schaumburg was beautiful.
About 75 degrees, sunny. The convention center and adjacent Marriott hosted a wedding; in a nearby exhibit hall, there was a gathering of creators of toy slime (yes, those people get a convention, too). But Midwest Haunters — frankly, the place smelled like damp swamp, mildew and latex masks. The hall resonated with pops and bangs and creaks and shrieks and howls — you sort of tuned it out after a while. Men walked menacingly though the crowds in full-length leather executioner gear, their mouths clamped behind zipped masks. Women moved around in bloody lab coats. A ballerina with no face twirled and giggled about. People wore T-shirts that advertised “Ministry of Fear” and “House of Fear” and “Valley of Fear.”
“You know you’re at a haunted house convention when half the room is dressed in black and everyone smells like cigarettes,” said Maris Blanchard, a former high-school art teacher from Oklahoma who now sells animal bones and skins and taxidermied artifacts. Her clients tend not to be haunted houses (her products are too subtle in the dark), but rather haunted-house performers, thinking about accessorizing with an Australian cane toad or bat skeleton.
Watching all this was Adriana Johnson of Burbank.
She was selling her homemade dips. Spinach, dill, zesty Tomato. “I had no idea a convention like this existed, then I thought, but these people host Halloween parties, right?”
That’s just Business 101 — find a niche.
Shalee Tschida of Portland, Ore., OR, one of the world’s leading suppliers of fake blood to haunted attractions — and certainly the scale of her booth and scope of her product line made her to the go-to gore purveyor here — worked previously as a surgery technician. “So my thing is realistic, believable blood.” She led me to a bucket marked “CHUM.”
Sloshing around inside, a gory scarlet pool of synthetic (I’m just guessing here) stomachs, kidneys and intestines.
Around the corner from that blood bath: Professor Mysterious’ Fog Fluids, a year and-a-half old company out of Grand Rapids, Mich., that specializes in various types of threatening fog. “Unfortunately, at this time, you cannot get a colored fog for your house,” said John Waldmiller, a product development manager, “but we can find the fog that’s right for you. They have different characteristics.”
Their “Ground Hugger” does just that, while “Whiteout” lingers. (Need that fog scented? They also offer “Midnight Forest,” “Gothic Mansion” and “Tropical Breeze.”)
Someone selling a metal tray of (fake) severed ears sat across the aisle from someone selling fashions for the living dead, complete with accents of twigs, moss and soil. Haunters Against Hate had a booth to raise awareness of LGBT issues and hate speech in the industry. There was a company from Texas selling stilts for grim reapers, and a company from Peoria selling scheduling software for haunted-house managers; there were contact-lens vendors and prop makers offering a variety of styles of devil babies and a Wisconsin firm selling insurance for haunted houses.
Need a possessed popcorn maker?
You need to talk to Rocky Elrod, a prop maker from South Carolina who said he has been in the haunted-house business since fifth grade. New this year, he sells a pushcart popcorn stand with a monster hidden beneath the kernels.
Still, at least for him, “Midwest Haunters is less of a buyers show than a get-your-name-out-there kind of convention.” Meaning, roaming the aisles thronged with haunted-house managers and set decorators, there was fresh meat. A tombstone maker looking for traction. Fledgling mask sculptors. And many performers, seasonal actors who float from haunted attraction to haunted attraction, looking for work. Think of it somewhat as a job fair for abominations.
John LaFlamboy, owner of Zombie Army Productions, which runs Statesville Haunted Prison and HellsGate in Lockport, two of the most successful haunts in Illinois, stood at a booth taking business cards from hopeful ghouls.
“I mean we get so many people asking to work with us here,” he said. “I even get parents swinging by to ask me how soon before we can hire their kids for our houses.”
Trevor Pinegar, who owns a small haunt in southeast Iowa, walked the floor with bare feet, wearing a straight jacket and a rusted metal torture cage on his head. He glowered and glared, but asked what he was doing here, he smiled: “You want to attract volunteers and meet good people!”
Then his smile sank and he stumbled off.
David and Carol McGregor of Hoffman Estates appeared. They wore matching Hawaiian shirts. They said they were looking to add new blood to their front lawn display this Halloween. We want to improve the ambience, David said.
Wait, how big is this display?
“Well,” he said, considering, “our neighbors hate us.”
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @borrelli
