Dwayne Sanburn’s favorite emotion is fear.
Nothing sordid or morose, just a good healthy spook-out every now and again. The “nows” just happen to fall in late October, when his company, Midnight Productions, unveils its annual haunted house. This year’s presentation, “The 13th Gate,” is the culmination of a year’s preparation and a slew of changes since last year’s show.
For starters, LSU’s Livestock Show Arena on Highland Road housed the event for the past four years. After last year, Sanburn decided to move the production to a sturdier location. The crew landed at a giant warehouse on St. Philip Street downtown where Sanburn felt they could better organize a top-flight haunted house.
Sanburn describes “The 13th Gate” as his biggest and most ambitious project to date. While overseeing an eventful night at the downtown location, he explained his impetus for abandoning the Livestock Show Arena for greener pastures.
“It was a portable show, this is more permanent,” he said. “We have more time to set it up. To change things, to add things. Our quality is higher now. It’s a bigger show. I wanted to do a bigger show. It’s about three times the size of last year.”
That’s saying something. This year, Sanburn and his troops outdid themselves. In its entirety, “The 13th Gate” demands a full half-hour from start to finish. In his own estimation, this year’s production is the South’s largest haunted house, bar none. Sanburn and his crew have been preparing this haunted house since November. With its intricate design and elaborate detail, “The 13th Gate” reflects months of concentrated work, and now it’s time for the payoff.
“‘The 13th Gate’ has 13 different themes,” Sanburn said. “At LSU we had one theme every year. Each theme has three full rooms. So we change out themes instead of changing out the whole house. It’s too big to change out the whole house. We have an insane asylum as the first theme you go into. Then we have a slaughter house, voodoo bayou in the back, big graveyard mausoleum. Big mummies theme, live rats, live snakes.”
Every turn is packed full of creepy masked men wielding chainsaws, pickaxes and bloody daggers. Every boarded up window slams open as a screaming wench cackles at the top of her lungs. Sanburn has perfected the art of forcing a flinch and a shriek into a calculable science.
“The scare is number one, you gotta scare ’em,” Sanburn said, describing the nuts and bolts of a successful haunt. “To scare people, it’s harder and harder each year. You gotta have distractions, or surprises. You gotta have good actors, incredible actors. I’ve got 42 actors and every one has a theater background. Details are everything.”
By the looks of Thursday night’s crowd, all his hard work is paying off. Even a full week before All Hallow’s Eve, this year’s crowd turned out in record numbers.
“We had more time to put into the show, so this is a much better haunted house. Everything’s better,” Sanburn said. “When I walk in and hear about fifty, sixty people screaming, then I know it’s working.”