Scary season: Performers at Michigan haunted house learn tricks of the terrifying trade

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PONTIAC, Mich. (AP) — Grotesque makeup, menacing props and intimidating costumes are just one part of a Michigan haunted house's 25-year-old formula to terrify guests.

It starts by educating the actors looking to provide the most horrifying experience to its visitors. At Scare School, they learn all the tricks of the trade.

Lessons begin weeks before the four-level walk-through scream factory opens to visitors, introducing fresh talent to the get-ups, face paint and unnatural body movements proven to petrify thousands of customers since the turn of the century.

The actors' report card of sorts is the “Wimp Out Score Board” in Erebus Haunted Attraction's ground-level lobby, tallying the numbers of visitors who flee before making it through all four levels or who join the “wetters, pukers & fainters” total.

And, yes, they really tally it.

The one-time abandoned parking structure in Pontiac consistently lands on lists of the scariest haunted houses in America. Operations managers and brothers Zac and Brad Terebus said the coaching and training performers receive isn’t just about what they wear or how loud they can shout.

“Scare School really comes down to the psychology of fear,” Zac Terebus said. “Fear is not an accident. Fear is an art.”

In the weeks before Erebus opened for the Sept. 19-Nov. 2 Halloween season, managers auditioned and hired dozens of scare actors, then coached them to be as frightening as humanly — or rather, supernaturally — possible.

In an upstairs room in early September, Erebus veterans schooled the newbies on the finer points of zombie shuffling and demon shrieking, walking on stilts and wielding a spiked (plastic) club. The new hires also learned about make-up application, costuming, how to get into their roles and personas as well as rules about interacting with the guests.

It’s all part of an effort to bring out their inner fiend, Brad Terebus said.

“Let’s say they’re a lawyer by day,” he said. “They can come here, break their shell off and just release this monster within them.”

Alan Tucker, who portrays a bloodthirsty clown, said scare acting is “therapeutic.”

“You never really think that you can be something else for a couple hours and scare people. But then when you really actually get to do that, it’s so entertaining. It’s so fulfilling,” said Tucker, who is in his second year as a scare actor.

Renee Piehl is in her third year, this time around playing Nyx, based on the Greek goddess of night, who frightens guests waiting in line to enter the haunt.

“They come here to be scared. It’s Halloween. It’s fun,” she said. “We are to be ugly and scary and bloody.”

Plus, the scarier the actors are, the bigger the numbers will get on the Wimp Out Score Board.

The board currently lists 10,711 “wimps” and 1,246 “wetters, pukers & fainters” both cumulative totals since the Terebuses’ father and uncle opened the attraction.

“What we have throughout the haunted house, we call them ‘chicken exits.’ They’re actually fire exits,” Zac Terebus said. “But, at any point in the show, if you say, ‘I want out,’ we take you out, we escort you down, you end up here in the exit lobby, you can wait for your group to come on out.

“It's a competition among our monsters to see who can really scare the pee out of somebody."