Greg DeFatta and I just bonded over making people pee their pants.
“I do get a little satisfaction if somebody pees in their pants,” DeFatta said. “Call me weird. But yeah, that's the ultimate tip of the hat.”
Now before you call the cops or plan to cancel us on social media understand that the context of this bonding is we both run haunted houses. I’m a home haunter and DeFatta has been running the epic Haunted Trail at Balboa Park for 25 terrifying years.
“Sometimes I'll be in my office at the trail, and I'm just listening,” DeFatta wistfully noted. “And you can hear groups screaming, and then laughter. So there's this combination of horror, and exhilaration and laughter. When you get that, there's this satisfaction that comes from being able to get an emotion so strong from somebody. It’s very rewarding and satisfying.”
DeFatta has been hooked on haunted houses since he was 12.
"We built a little haunted house in our home in Shreveport, Louisiana, and it wasn't very good, but it was clever,” DeFatta recalled. “We used refrigerator boxes as walls. And I still have nightmares today that we don't have enough refrigerator boxes to open up our events. It's weird what comes back to your mind. But that was my first entry.”
Haunted houses are addictive. I know. Once you hear the sound of children running screaming from your home, you just want more. That might sound sadistic but really it stems from a love of horror and from the thrill you get from being scared. It’s why you play peek-a-boo with a baby or why some of us watched “Scooby-Doo” as a kid — there’s a place for recreational fear.
“The first haunted house I ever went through was at my school,” De Fatta remembered. “It was 35 cents and that was a lot at the time. But I just went scrounging for money just to keep going through it. I knew where the scares were, and I was wildly disappointed if I didn't get scared at that same spot every time. But it was so much fun, and I don't know what that is. It's just this exhilaration you get from being scared but knowing that you're safe, you're not going to get hurt, that's an adrenaline rush.”
De Fatta had what you could call a “real” job as an agent in Los Angeles. He was successful but he wasn’t happy.
So he partnered with Robert Bruce in 1990 and they opened their first haunted attraction in Louisville, Kentucky.
“Robert basically built everything, and I held his ladder to make sure he didn't get hurt,” DeFatta said.
Over the years he’s probably created more than 2,000 rooms to scare people at the Haunted Hotel and Haunted Trail. The Haunted Hotel used to be a claustrophobic lower level of a building on Market St. and visitors had to move through narrow, often dark corridors to go from room to room passing by a man in an electric chair, scenes of demonic possession, and assorted ghostly figures and jump scares. After the building was sold, the Haunted Hotel tried relocating to the parking lot in Mission Valley but is currently on hiatus.
This just means more time for the Haunted Trail, a sprawling 3,500-square-foot expanse where you can find chainsaw wielding maniacs, clowns, nuns and zombies running free or contained in rooms that you have to walk through and survive. People may think that DeFatta only works a few months out of the year but as any good haunter knows, Halloween is a 365-day commitment.
The Haunted Trail may shut down the day after Halloween, but then it takes a month to break everything down and store it away, then there’s bookkeeping to do, and on Jan. 1, he starts planning and building the next haunt. The planning begins with just a design or concept for a room.
“Just physically, what do we want it to look like? And then we'll build in scares,” DeFatta explained. “Hitchcock said, 'Show them what's going to happen, and that will create suspense and uneasiness.' That works really well. So in a lot of rooms, I'll go 'Let's just show them what's going to happen,' but they don't know where it's going to come from exactly. If there are 10 statues in a room, one or two of those is probably going to be real. You just don't know which one it is. And what you're doing is trying to distract them in one area and then pop out in another area. And that is really the genesis. But there's just so many different ways of scaring people. So we come up with a room idea, and then build in what would be the natural way of scaring somebody in this environment.”
Sometimes DeFatta doesn’t want to go for the big scare but rather just wants to make people feel uncomfortable. That can be done by making something abnormally big or by making the space confining like an old school bus that’s narrow and you can't escape the nuns on either side.
Over the years DeFatta has grown fond of particular rooms.
“One room we've been using over and over, but that I just love is we have a bank of lasers, and you walk through,” DeFatta described. “So you can't really see below you, but you feel this push on your legs, directing you in a certain direction. And then we'll have people below the line of the lasers, and they'll pop up. And it is just so cool visually, and we have this amazing soundtrack that goes in there, and I just love it.”
Another favorite was a room that no one understood.
“They started calling it the 'What the F Room' because it made no sense,” DeFatta explained. “But people would come in and go, ‘What is happening in this room?’ So the room had people, bodies, fully dressed in nice clothes, and they were attached to the walls, hanging at different levels. And then we had the ‘scareactors,’ and in the center of the room were two chairs, and they were back to back. And then we had people dressed in suits with horse heads. And people just were so weirded out by the whole visual, they didn't want to go in. I just wanted to throw them off so much that when these people come out with these horse heads, they just would run into the walls. They just couldn't figure it out, and they would say, ‘Just stay away from me, just get away.’ So that was a really weird one, but people still talk about it. It just put them at such ill ease that you could do anything at that point and scare them.”
Every year, something surprises DeFatta by how well it works. But then there are other things that don't work. That’s when DeFatta has to go out in the field to observe what’s going on and why a scare is not hitting.
“Sometimes I can just stand outside of the room and see in enough where the patrons don't see me,” DeFatta said. “I just watch and see what the scareactors are doing, and maybe I have to give them some tools to up their game a little bit. Maybe something as simple as a shaker can, that you just come at the patrons differently. Maybe we need to build in an air blaster or something to just jolt them. A lot of times, you can just change the employees, and it'll change the whole dynamic of a room. But we can fix them 99% of the time. But it's always a work in progress. On the last night, we're still tweaking things just to make sure.”
Many people insist they can’t be scared, but they are often entertained not just by DeFatt’s theatrics but also by the people who are scared. For those poor souls, there are exit points all along the way for them to escape, and a number of them do flee. And sometimes the employees keep a tally of how many people tap out early. It’s like a badge of honor.
Scaring people for a living is sometimes difficult to explain. When DeFatta tells people what he does, most express surprise or disbelief that you can make a career out of haunting or think it’s cool. But there are others who step back and wonder if he’s dangerous or suspiciously ask how he comes up with his horror ideas. Running haunts has led to DeFatta doing a project in China that involved designing things for an amusement park. DeFatta didn’t travel to China but his son did because he has passed his love for haunting onto a new generation. Or maybe haunting was just in his blood.
“When he was 14, he and friends would come and work at the trail. They loved it,” DeFatta recalled. “And they were, quite honestly, the best actors because they just didn't care. They would crawl in the dirt and scare people from their feet up. And he's worked literally every year since. So he was a natural.”
And those are the types of people DeFatta looks to hire as his scareactors. I have sat in on audition sessions and felt that I was among kindred souls. The auditioners often expressed a love for horror, a delight in scaring people, and a desire to be part of the haunt family. Occasionally, someone will reveal that the Haunted Trail scared them, and now they want to try to do that to someone else and maybe become less fearful in the process.
At this year’s audition, people had to become rage-infected zombies and attack the interviewers then transform into a werewolf and finally become possessed or do a scary clown voice.
“You try and find people that can just abandon the normal interview,” DeFatta said with a laugh. “Let's be honest, when you come into our interview, at some point you're going to be screaming and maybe crawling on the ground. You don't do this at most interviews so it's like, can you just let it go and be your most ridiculous self in front of people you don't know? We're not doing Shakespeare. You don't have to memorize too much. We want you to have energy, some creativity, and we want you to be able to scream in a crowded room of people and not be self-conscious about it.”
Knowing CPR or being proficient with a chainsaw are definite pluses on your resume. Having made someone pee their pants might also win you favor. This year DeFatta had more people he wanted to hire than open slots because so many people were returning because it is a fun job. After the audition, I was ready to sign up. (See one of my haunts below.)
DeFatta noted that people on both sides of the scare have a good time because it’s like live, immersive, interactive theater. As DeFatta celebrates a quarter century in Balboa Park he expressed gratitude for the park’s openness to having the Haunted Trail there and gratitude that he gets to do something he enjoys.
“I don't think I'll ever stop running the trail because I just love it so much,” DeFatta enthused. “I still think I have a lot to offer as far as coming up with ideas. And that's what it is. It's coming up with crazy ideas and seeing if it works. And you never know if it's going to work until you're testing it live on people that have just paid you to come in and be terrified.”
Creating nightmares can be a dream job.
The Haunted Trail is open Sept. 27 through Nov. 2 in Balboa Park.
