Feeling is Believing

"To see is to be deceived. To hear is to be lied to. To feel is to believe."
~ Bruce Lee

When I made my first "dark haunt", where most rooms were completely lightless, I spent a lot of time on the sounds.  Makes sense, right?  After sight, hearing seems to be the most dominant sense.

I definitely believe in sound design, but when there are no lights, people also feel their way through.

To make the experience of being underground feel real, I needed more than darkness and cave sounds.  The walls had to feel like stone, or at least like something you would expect to find underground.

This was probably the biggest challenge.  To make things dark, I made all the walls and ceiling out of black plastic.  That same plastic had to be covered in something that would not pull people out of the experience when they touched it.

I ultimately used sheets of foam insulation covered with DryLok.  It gave the walls a rough texture that was not easy to identify in the dark.  I also used spray foam and two-part foam to create other textures.  One wall was covered with fur.

As the patrons made their way through the dark, they had to push through shredded burlap hanging from the ceiling, or plastic sheet barriers meant to disorient them and block ambient light.  Leaves and branches from an old silk plant brushed their legs.  Something was touching them almost all the time, and if they reached out to find their way, hopefully they encountered textures that told them they were deep in unfamiliar territory.

Something interesting I had not considered was that people who are actually blind and walk with canes do very little feeling around with their hands.  The cane finds the way for them, and their hands are often used to protect their head and face.  As one blind man told me, their biggest fear is that there will be something at about head level that they will run into without warning.  Something to think about.

Happy Halloween!