Halloween Experience - North Baddesley's haunted walkthrough!



	> INTRODUCTION a fascination with imagination
	> THEME PARK MAGIC inspirational rides and attractions
	> A PHANTOM PLOT UNFOLDS a 2003 test from Disneyland ideas
	> THE HAUNTING BEGINS five years of Halloween, 2004-2008
	> BACK FROM THE GRAVE 2010-2011 with new technology
	> A 2013 RESURRECTION a mix of new and age-old effects
	> DAWN OF THE UNDEAD 2014 show, part one
	> THE ZOMBIES EMERGE 2014 show, part two
	> A CHANGING CONCEPT 2015 show, part one
	> BUILDING PNEUMATIC FIGURES 2015 show, part two
	> ROLL UP, ROLL UP! 2015 show, part three
	> INTO THE TUNNEL... 2016 show, part one
	> MAKING MONSTERS MOVE 2016 show, part two
	> TO HELL AND BACK 2016 show, part three
	> SHARPENING THE SENSES 2017 show, part one
	> A MAGNETIC ATTRACTION 2017 show, part two
	> THE BIG EXECUTION 2017 show, part three

Into the tunnel...

Turning the Halloween Experience into a full-scale, enclosed walkthrough has been my ultimate dream ever since I started doing it, and in 2016, it happened!

The original idea actually goes back several years, where we’d considered covering over the front of the display with a big black sheet or curtain or similar, so that visitors wouldn’t know what was coming until they entered the garden. But this proved impractical as there was nowhere to hang such a curtain, and also I’d been concerned that if we covered it over in some way, it might actually prevent people from noticing that it was even there!

Standing outside the 2015 display, Sam suggested to me “you know what you should do?…you should cover over the path and make a tunnel.” Hmm. Now there was an idea…

I gave this some thought, and it presented two main issues. Firstly, the path was at the left-hand edge of the garden, so the space for any effects on the left-hand side of the tunnel would be severely restricted, and these would also be visible to the arriving visitors, unless they were covered over in some way. Secondly and more crucially, as the path was in a straight line, it would be easy to see right through the tunnel, all the way to the end, without going in. Clearly, if visitors could see everything that was coming up, there’d be little opportunity for shocks or surprises - surely the whole point of having a tunnel?!

So I came up with a new idea - what about snaking the tunnel around the garden?

It would be an ambitious task, not least because it would need to be built on a fairly undulating lawn, instead of flat concrete. As well as this, there would be the need to protect the lawn from loads of people walking around on it, so it would need a floor of some kind. But it would also offer several excellent advantages.

The fact that it would follow a big U shape right around the garden meant that the effective length of the tunnel would be increased to over twice that of the path, allowing for a much bigger and better show! Not only that, but its shape would mean that visitors would now have corners to negotiate, with no idea what was coming up. In fact, only the very first section would be visible from the entrance. Finally it would become a real journey into the unknown!

With this layout, the tunnel would release its victims back onto the path near the house, meaning that visitors yet to go through would see these people in a (hopefully!) animated and excited state, having just been subjected to the horrors inside. With a well designed show, these exiting visitors would be my best advert for encouraging others to go in.

Of course, if I was to go ahead with the tunnel idea, it would add a lot of extra work to the whole process. Up until now, I’d already had a very nice, ready-made garden in which to install everything. The whole project was based around creating effects to put into an already-existing environment. Now, the environment that would house the display also needed to be created; a show building, if you will! The effects and figures would still do the entertaining, and hopefully the tunnel itself would heighten the atmosphere, but I now needed to design a way of getting the visitors through the show too.

Design and construction begins...

The tunnel design went through quite significant changes in terms of what materials I thought best to build it from. The first idea I had was to create a sort of polytunnel-type job, a bit like a tent, with fabric stretching from the floor at one side, up over curved pipes to form a roof, and down to the floor on the other side. But the fact it would look like a tent was a bit off-putting; I fancied something a bit more grand and imposing. (The Tent of Hell doesn’t sound terribly scary either does it?!)

I had also imagined the whole thing having ‘windows’ in the walls through which visitors could see different scenes. These scenes would need to be located outside of the walkthrough space, in their own enclosed sections. What the tunnel needed was a series of sturdy walls to divide the scene areas from the walkthrough route. In the end, a wooden construction seemed the best choice.

In order to work out the dimensions of the tunnel, I used string to mark out the proposed footprint on the lawn itself. This would help me to create pieces of floor to the exact dimensions and shapes required.

This took quite a bit of shuffling about, as it was important to me that not only was the width of the tunnel made wide enough to not feel small, but it was also necessary to ensure that there was enough space at appropriate points either side of the tunnel to be able to fit the planned scenes. Not easy when you’ve got a big camellia bush in the middle of the garden, and hedges and walls surrounding it!

Once I had the dimensions of the pathway sorted, I was able to create a scale model out of card that I used to work out the sizes of each of the wall pieces needed. I decided that the walls would have a height of 2.2m. Plenty high enough, even for me at 6ft 4”, and I figured that if I could walk through it without cracking my head on all the lights, everyone else should be fine!

With help from the little card model, I built up a complete list of pieces, and created a cutting list which I took to a local timber merchant, Totton Timber, who had the big task of cutting it all out for me. They did a top job, and a couple of weeks later half a ton of wood arrived on the back of a lorry, with Nigel the delivery driver immediately asking me what on earth I was planning to make out of it all! Fortunately, I’m used to looking a bit weird in these sorts of situations…

The tunnel, having now become a fully wooden design, had a 15mm thick MDF floor that sat on pressure-treated battens which raised it approximately 50mm from the ground. This protected the lawn underneath from being trampled, and allowed for a flat surface to walk over. This also made it simple for the sections of wall (sheets of 6mm MDF) to be screwed in at the base and secured. Struts fitted between each wall panel to fix them together, and then protruded above wall height, allowing more struts to run across the top of the tunnel and hold these in place, rather like a 3D grid layout. Click the image above to see the full plan.

It’s worth acknowledging at this point that of course MDF is quite unsuitable for use in permanent outdoor construction, in part due to its propensity to warp in damp environments...but as you’ll see later, it was only outside for a few days, it was covered over, and it was relatively cheap, so I used it!

The tunnel test build

To make sure I’d got all the dimensions of the tunnel pieces right, it was time for a test build. In September, I had a go at slotting together what I would describe as the most difficult sections of it! As the tunnel got nearer the house, the assembly became more straightforward, as the majority of the scene windows were in its first two thirds.

But this all looked promising - only a few tweaks and extra bits were required, and it also proved that the wooden floor would fit securely on the uneven ground beneath it. It was quite exciting seeing the tunnel (or at least parts of it!) in place for the first time!

See the tunnel at the testing stage with this short clip recorded from the perspective of walking through it
(.mp4, 7.0mb)

The next stage was to take it all away again and paint it. This was quite a long process as there were lots of sections. I had considered leaving the floor unpainted, to make it lighter and easier to see the route ahead, but I gave in eventually, thinking that a black floor would blend in a lot better! So this meant yet more painting, this time with a heavy-duty floor paint that wouldn’t come off on everyone’s shoes!
It did however form a nice shield from damp and dirt, and kept the floor in good condition.

< I wanted the walls to have some brickwork detail to them, to give a sort of dungeon feel. Originally I planned to use brick slips, which are imitation brick faces that are used in interior design and other applications. But it quite quickly became apparent that these would not only cost a fortune for the amount I needed, but also they had to be stuck on one by one! It would take forever! So I eventually found some great brick effect vinyl, which was cut out and glued onto the black painted walls.

> For the roof, I had originally considered using more wood, effectively made from identically sized pieces to the floor. But this added significant cost, so I decided to use a black waterproof nylon fabric instead, stretched across the roof space and stapled into the tops of the walls. This was perfectly adequate and did a good job of protecting the interior from moisture. At night, this roof vanished into the darkness too, so it mattered little what it looked like during the day.

Putting it all together!

In the last week of October, it was time to build the tunnel for real! The floor was first to go down, this time with its shiny new paint job. The photo below gives a good idea as to how the tunnel snaked around the garden. Directly before this, the air pipe for the pneumatic figures, plus all the necessary cables, for things such as power, lighting, speakers and motion sensors were laid down, then the floor was built over these.

Gradually the walls were added, and attached together with the overhead struts. Holes were cut into the bases of the walls to allow for speakers to be positioned just outside. For the scene windows, I used a mix of materials to cover them.

Most had one-inch wire mesh, but two of them used bars recycled from the cages of the 2015 display! As was necessary for the effect, the first scene window was also covered with scrim material behind the bars.

Battens extending outwards above each scene allowed for black drapes to be stapled in place to create little curtained-off areas that the figures could be housed in, preventing external light from bleeding in and lessening the effects.

The little area in the centre of the tunnel (under the bush in the big floor picture above!) was to be a useful space to localise power and also store the valves for the pneumatics. More about that on the next page.

The stage was set. Now it was time to add the cast for 2016!