Kyle Paradis ducked through a fireplace into a secret passage and made his way past giant rats, grinning skulls, dismembered torsos and a filth-splattered bathroom.
“I love this thing,” said the 28-year-old Vancouver resident, entering a narrow hallway lined with gore-flecked skeletons and gobs of intestines.
The plywood walls were painted, the spike wall was hung and the bathtub was programmed to explode. But there was still much to do in the 48 hours before the horrifying Hill House welcomed its first guests on Oct. 2.
“We haven’t even started hanging all the meat stuff,” Paradis said, looking exhausted.
He and his business partner, Jason Greeley-Roberts, co-owners of Four Horsemen Haunted Attractions, had been working nearly around the clock for several weeks with a small crew of people to create four nightmare scenarios inside the cavernous South Hall 3 building at Clark County Event Center at The Fairgrounds. There was Hill House; the Asylum (the eerie site of 1940s radiation experiments on patients); Screamhouse in 3D (clowns! mazes! freaks!) and Android Rebellion laser tag (eliminate targets while dodging return fire).
“Want to know what it is like on the inside of a horror movie? Think you can survive? This is your chance to find out,” says the Four Horsemen’s website, fourhorsemenpdx.com.
A hankering for horror
Bringing such a macabre project to life involves a slew of skills — business acumen, set design, carpentry, construction, electronics, pneumatics, hydraulics, welding, metal fabrication, making molds and props, lighting and sound effects — and, of course, a sick and twisted imagination influenced by video games, fairy tales, books and movies.
“I’ve seen every horror movie on the planet. I like it all,” said Paradis, an Evergreen High School graduate who attended college for Web design, graphic design and computer-aided design and drafting.
Greeley-Roberts, 28, built sets and acted in theater productions as a Milwaukie High School student in Oregon. In his junior year, he volunteered to work as an actor in a haunted house, then was hired to build sets. He studied acting, technical theater and business administration in college.
The business partners met after high school when Paradis was a drummer for a band, Lunaractive. They got their professional start at Scream at the Beach in Portland, where they became the haunt’s production managers in 2009.
“We fell in love with it,” Paradis said.
In 2012, they decided to strike out on their own with Four Horsemen. They wrote a business plan, looked for buildings and shopped the plan around to investors. In the end, they got only half the money they wanted (the plywood alone they needed to get started cost $18,000), but they pushed forward anyway.
The toughest part was finding a location that fit their budget. Commercial real estate is expensive, and many owners wanted five- or 10-year leases, minimum. The Four Horsemen used an 18,000-square-foot retail space at Delta Park in Portland until the building was slated to be torn down, but during those two years, they doubled attendance at the haunt.
They took 2014 off for another project before relaunching this year at the Clark County “SCAREGrounds,” billed as the Northwest’s Largest Indoor Halloween Event.
If You Go
• What: Four Horsemen Haunted Attractions presents three large, indoor haunts: the Hill House, the Asylum and Screamhouse in 3D, plus the Android Rebellion, an interactive laser tag walkthrough adventure.
• When: 7 to 10 p.m. Oct. 9-11, 15, 18, 22, 25 and 29-31; and 7 to 11 p.m. Oct. 16-17 and 23-24.
• Where: Clark County Event Center at the Fairgrounds, 17402 N.E. Delfel Road, Ridgefield.
• Cost: $20 for all three attractions, $7 for laser tag.
• Website:www.fourhorsemenpdx.com
In addition to Halloween-themed attractions, Paradis and Greeley-Roberts build sets, special effects and props for film projects, as well as local events including the Santa’s Village at America’s Largest Christmas Bazaar and the Superhero Adventure at this year’s Clark County Fair.
“We’re giant art nerds, basically,” Greeley-Roberts said.
Testing guests’ limits
In September, Four Horsemen held auditions and hired 45 actors to inhabit the SCAREGrounds wearing ghastly masks, makeup, prosthetics and wounds crafted by a pair of makeup artists.
When it comes to their haunts, the goal is to create things people “haven’t seen a million times,” Paradis said.
“If you like scary things, then you will have the time of your life,” Greeley-Roberts said. “We don’t want to be one of those small guys. I don’t want to be viewed as weekenders. This is our passion, what we want to do.”
Rather than buckets of blood and gore, they rely on lights, sounds, special effects and misdirection of attention to scare the audience. They train their actors to “read” the guests, who come through the haunts in small groups, and tailor their performances accordingly. If children become too petrified to keep moving, an actor might break character to give them a piece of candy.
“We’ve had 40-, 50-year-old people running out of there crying because they can’t make it all the way through. And we’ve had 7-year-olds who just laugh all the way,” Greeley-Roberts said. “It’s really about finding what people can handle and are reacting to what we’re doing.”
And sometimes they can’t handle it at all. The men recalled the time two teenage girls got so freaked out by an actor outside the haunt in the Delta Park, they peed their pants.
“They had to get new clothes,” Paradis said.
Fortunately, incidents where frightened audience members reflexively punch menacing actors have been rare, and if it happens, it’s usually accidental, they said.
As for Paradis and Greeley-Roberts, after so many years in the business, they’ve become desensitized to the horrors in their haunts or anyone else’s. They’ve told cast members if anyone can make them jump, they’ll give them $20.
“We rarely pay out,” Paradis said.
But they still relish making monsters — even when it’s two days till opening night and they’re running on five hours’ sleep.
“It sounds awful,” Greeley-Roberts said, “but I still wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
When the first person screams, it creates “a wave of euphoria,” he said. “The reward is well worth the battle. Maybe just because we’re weird — I don’t know.”