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Explanation:
The origins of the haunted house date back to 19th-century London, when a series of illusions and attractions introduced the public to new forms of gruesome entertainment. In 1802, Marie Tussaud scandalized British audiences with an exhibition of wax sculptures of decapitated French figures, including King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Marat and Robespierre. Tussaud's likenesses were remarkably accurate, and with good reason — she created death masks of the French Revolution's many guillotine victims. When she set up a permanent London exhibition, she dubbed her grotesque collection the "Chamber of Horrors" — a name that has stuck to the wax museum to this day.
At the turn of the 20th century, as Rebekah McKendry describes in Fangoria magazine, the closest relatives to modern haunted houses began experimenting with macabre themes. In Paris, the Grand Guignol theater became notorious for its on-stage depictions of graphic dismemberment; the theater's director, Max Maurey, famously boasted that he judged each performance by the number of people who passed out, shocked, in the audience. In 1915, an English fairground in Liphook debuted one of the first "ghost houses," an early type of commercial horror attraction. The public appetite for horror was picking up.
Lisa Morton, author of Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween, tells Smithsonian.com that Halloween-themed haunted houses first emerged during the Great Depression as American parents schemed up ways to distract young tricksters, whose holiday pranks had escalated to property damage, vandalism and harassment of strangers. "They came in about the same time as trick-or-treat did," she says. "Cities looked for ways to buy these kids off, essentially."
An outside entrance leads to a rendezvous with ghosts and witches in the cellar or attic. Hang old fur, strips of raw liver on walls, where one feels his way to dark stepsWeird moans and howls come from dark corners, damp sponges and hair nets hung from the ceiling touch his faceDoorways are blockaded so that guests must crawl through a long dark tunnelAt the end he hears a plaintive 'meow' and sees a black cardboard cat outlined in luminous paint..."
The haunted house didn't become a cultural icon, though, until Walt Disney decided to build one. Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion opened in 1969, nearly two decades after Disney first approved the beleaguered project. The attraction, which was designed in the style of the Evergreen House and the Winchester Mystery House, quickly became a success. In a single day shortly after its debut, more than 82,000 people passed through the Haunted Mansion. The attraction's centerpiece is the Grand Hall, a 90-foot-long ballroom sequence of dancing ghouls at a birthday party. Disney brought to scene to life through an exceptionally complex series of illusions known as Pepper's ghost, which use refracted light to project and shape ethereal images. "A lot of the professional haunters will point to one thing, and that's Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. It's the start of the haunted attraction industry," Morton says. The attraction was revolutionary, as she explains in Trick or Treat:
What made the Haunted Mansion so successful and so influential, however, was not its similarity to haunted houses and "dark rides" (that is, tawdry carnival haunted houses) of the past, but its use of startling new technologies and effects. Ghosts were no longer simply sheets hung in a tree, but were instead actual shimmering translucent figures that moved, spoke and sang. A witch wasn't just a rubber-masked figure bent over a fake cauldron, but a completely realistic bodiless head floating in a crystal ball, conducting a complex séance.
Within a few years, the haunted house had spread across the country. The United States Junior Chamber, also known as Jaycees, became famous for raising money through its haunted houses. (The fundraising venture was successful enough to spawn its own how-to guide.) In California, Knott's Berry Farm began hosting its own Halloween night attractions, which soon transformed into a multi-week slate of events. Every year, a man named Bob Burns attracted national media attention for his detailed recreations of classic horror movies. Evangelical Christians even made their own anti-Halloween attractions; Jerry Falwell and Liberty University introduced one of the first "hell houses" in 1972.
A Halloween without haunted houses? Now that's a scary thought.
