This year we all got to participate in a haunting new adventure.  Marc Dams, lead sculptor at Taylor Studios Inc., bought a haunt.  He asked if we could join forces in a partnership and run it out of the Taylor Studios’ production building, an old Wal-Mart.  Many of us have been interested in adding a side business in the haunt industry.  We have been attending tradeshows, learning the trade and crunching the numbers over the last several years.  Marc and several of the artists at Taylor Studios are passionate about the haunt industry.  Marc took the risk to make his passion a reality and invested in purchasing a haunt.

Marc, Jason Thorn, and several others started designing, installing, enhancing, building and preparing for the haunt season in May.  They worked endless nights and weekends to make this a special experience.  With their creative skills, knowledge of creating experiences, fabrication know-how and abilities in prosthetics, make up and costumes, Baldwin Asylum is a nightmare come to life.  Marc runs the production under the company name Slayerville Productions.  It opened with 10,000 square feet of scare and is one of the largest haunts in this area.  The hard work paid off as Baldwin Asylum was voted the second best haunt in IL by Haunted Illinois.

One of the coolest things about this haunt is that it is actor driven.  This means as you wander through the terror filled hallways actors will enhance your experience by interacting with you and other actors.  It’s as if you are in the horror film.  It is a complete immersive interactive experience.  Volunteers were recruited to be a part of this haunt family. About 40 volunteers showed up every night to prepare the show for visitors.  Vampires and zombies arrived around 4:00 p.m. every event day to get their costumes and make up prepared.  Other actors could get in character a little quicker and would arrive throughout the evening.  The show didn’t open until 7:00 p.m. and often stayed open until midnight.  This family was passionate and dedicated to their acting and creating the best haunt around.

I also volunteered for a few nights of the season. This was my acting debut.  I was placed in a cage and was next in line to go to the electric chair.  I was a captive in the asylum and somehow managed to get a knife. There was a doctor in the room with me and we played off each other to frighten visitors.  I would scream let me out of here and strike my knife against the cage shooting off sparks.  The doctor would scream, “SILENCE” and would turn the electric chair on with the poor victim writhing in pain.  The doctor would follow visitors around the corner threatening that they may be next in the chair.  I would scream out, “come back, don’t leave me here.”  We felt success when people were frightened.

Taylor Studios creates experiences that inspire people. In many ways we achieve it the same way we did with our haunt experience with passion for what we do, a staff with a variety of creative skills, making sure from entry to exit we are considering the visitor experience, telling stories, hard work and having a lot of fun at what we do.