As a nearly full moon hung over Holyoke on a recent Sunday, 7-year-old Beckham Osman lurked outside the DementedFX haunted house in elaborate zombie makeup to scare patrons headed toward the entrance.
“He got to be a part of the entire experience,” said his mom, Jennie Lussier, who stood near Beckham outside the attraction — an old downtown warehouse retrofitted for ultimate frights every October.
Each Halloween season, DementedFX opens its elaborate high-tech haunted house attraction on Main Street. The chamber of horrors guides participants through a fictional medical laboratory, BioMedCorp, with jump scares to greet them as soon as they enter the waiting room. Beyond the entrance, guarded by armed soldiers wearing gas masks, blood-soaked zombies hiding around corners, animated monsters with murderous intent, and dizzying optical illusion tunnels are a few of many frights that participants will encounter.
Specific lighting, sound design, smells and temperature are used together to make this nightmare seem more like reality. “We kind of overload the senses,” Lapointe said.
DementedFX’s haunted house is the brainchild of owners Jeremie Lapointe and David Spear, who started the business in Easthampton in 2014 and moved to Holyoke two years later.
Lapointe said the attraction is like “walking through a movie,” highlighting the frightening set design, props, costumes and storyline that combine to bring the experience to life. At BioMedCorp, Lapointe said, patrons assume the role of retrieving a cure to the company’s “zombie virus” as they are drawn into the madness caused by the laboratory’s failed cross genetics, infected lab staff, and “creation of gigantic bloodthirsty creatures.”
“We try to pull off Disney if Disney was poor,” Lapointe joked.
Much like the rides at Disney World, he said the attraction’s goal is to “give everybody the exact same experience.” Lapointe said the incorporation of automated scares and video elements into each tour help replicate the walk-through for everyone and are what set them apart from other haunted houses.
Sage King, who recently toured DementedFX’s BioMedCorp with his girlfriend, Lexi Pelchat, said the automation lent itself to “a good variety of scaring techniques.”
Now in its eighth year of business, Lapointe said he and Spear’s DementedFX is “constantly evolving.”
Between scrapping old rooms and investing in new ones, Lapointe said they reinvest all their money from sales into the project yearly. This year, that meant pouring an additional $50,000 into rigging out the 21,000-square-foot BioMedCorp facility at 530 Main St.
“There’s a serious lack of entertainment in western Massachusetts right now,” Lapointe said, hoping to attract “anyone that’s looking for a good time.”
Lapointe said the haunted house attracts people from “12 years old all the way up to people in their 70s.”
A general admission ticket costs $30 and a VIP ticket costs $55, which includes an hour of access to the VIP lounge, the option to skip the general admission line, and a free beverage and snack.
The haunted house will be open from 7 to 11 p.m. every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday through the end of the month. Lapointe said that it takes at least 60 people to run the attraction each night, including staff and many of an estimated 75 actors who were hired to help with scares.
Lapointe said he initially attended UMass Amherst with the intention of becoming an art teacher, but graduated with a passion for special effects and the desire to “do” rather than teach.
After trying to make it in the cutthroat film industry, Lapointe said he realized that a haunted house could be “the only way I’d really ever be able to do movie magic.”
He had known Spear as “kind of a master mechanic” since his early 20s and together they dreamed up BioMedCorp in 2014. In the years since, the tour has been highly rated by websites including The Scare Factor and Buzzfeed.
Catherine Sanderson, professor and chair of Amherst College’s psychology department, explained why some people enjoy haunted houses and others don’t based on the “sensation-seeking scale.”
She said this personality scale labels people as high-sensation seekers when they gravitate toward feelings of high physiological arousal, including tensed muscles, rapid breathing and elevated heartbeat. These people tend to experience pleasurable associations with adrenaline rushes.
Haunted houses do a good job of provoking such rushes associated with danger in an environment that is, in reality, safe and controlled. “Nobody thinks that they’ll actually get stabbed with a knife at a haunted house,” she said.
This sentiment rings true with attendees such as Casey McNamara, who went to DementedFX last Sunday. “Who doesn’t love being scared knowing you’ll be completely safe at the end of the night?” she asked.
McNamara, a high sensation-seeker, explained that she’s “been desensitized by watching scary movies” and that haunted houses are the best way to experience that adrenaline rush.
Since haunted houses are group activities, Sanderson explained that “feeling this arousal with a group of friends can be very supportive” and “can create feelings of bonding,” which people find pleasurable.
This bonding is sometimes actually fear mistaken for intimacy because humans are “very bad at identifying the particular emotion we’re feeling,” she said.
This fear-based bonding is exactly what’s being used by reality dating shows when they have couples participate in bungee jumping or skydiving, she said. Such high-sensation activities serve as an easy way to build attachment between two people.
Seven-year-old Beckham is one of those people who has a love for scary things. So when his mother decided she’d be too scared to go through the haunt with him, she asked on Facebook if anyone would take him through it. DementedFX staff agreed to do it, and went a step further. The company’s head of make-up made Osman a full zombie, gave him a costume and let him scare folks in line before walking him hand in hand through the haunt.
“What’s the best job in the whole world?” Lussier asked her son.
“This one!” he said.