Darkness Tour / Thanks

[voodoo willy]

Let down

Okay I've lurked on here for sometime and just now started posting..I'm new so please bare with me.

First off let me say that some of the details and room designs were the best I have seen. The que line was excellent and rivals most theme parks that I've been to. Now with that said lets move on.

The lights on tour was very disappointing. First off lights on in my opinion means lights on...not show lights on. That should be reserved for the show. People paid a fare amount of money to see what made the Darkness tick. The show on Saturday had more lights than the lights on tour on Thursday. This was taken straight from The transworld web site describing this event. This will be your only opportunity to tour The Darkness with the lights on! I toured the Darkness on Saturday with brighter lights ...hell I seen things on Saturday that I walked right pass on Thursday because it was so dark.

I know your a salesman Larry...Hell I used to sell used cars too!!! There is a thing called perceived value and actual value. I think this event was priced for as a perceived value, people said wow 125 bucks it must be good. Even tho my spidey senses went off after you kept raising the number of tickets I still told myself that this was going to be awesome, hell this is Larry and the Darkness.

There is a point where karma will come back and bite you in the ass. And I hope this wasn't done on purpose. This event wasn't supposed to be about the money but to help Transworld draw more buyers and to share in your expertise. By the amount of people you signed up you should be well on your way to covering the expenses for the Darkness upgrade.

Hope you have a great Haunt this year.

[Grimley]

I also heard several people in line complaining the lights on tour was not lights on and was the same as Sat but with actors.

[Front Yard Fright]

True... The show was hyped on this board (as well as being advertised on thedarkness.com) as a lights-on, BEHIND THE SCENES TOUR, yet that was not the case. The lights were NOT ON. And there was NOTHING "behind the scenes" about it.

The tour was under regular show lighting, without the actors. I was told by a reliable source that there was one patron who tried to check out a "behind the scenes" area, but was scolded by one of the Darkness staff and told to go back the main walking path with the rest of his group. "Behind the scenes tour"? NOT! What a joke!

I thought the same thing. And it wasn't only The Darkness. I thought the Columbia Haunt TOUR was going to be just that, a tour! But instead it was just open.

People need to be more clearer and choose their words they use carefully!

[N2SPOOKINU]

Front, the Columbia haunt Tour was a tour of two haunted houses in Columbia Missouri. As far as a tour, we turned our lights on at 1AM and gave a complete light on tour of our attraction to those who stayed to ask questions. We were there until 2:30 touring and answering questions anyone had. Sorry you were confused about what we had to offer but we thought we made it clear that we were turning the lights on after the show.

[Front Yard Fright]

Front, the Columbia haunt Tour was a tour of two haunted houses in Columbia Missouri. As far as a tour, we turned our lights on at 1AM and gave a complete light on tour of our attraction to those who stayed to ask questions. We were there until 2:30 touring and answering questions anyone had. Sorry you were confused about what we had to offer but we thought we made it clear that we were turning the lights on after the show.

Yeah but for me, I couldn't stick around that late as I had car pooled with people from TW.

No worries though. It was still great to come out there and check your place out.
.

[N2SPOOKINU]

Front, sorry you had to leave early. We met alot of GREAT haunters AND actors and had a fantastic time sharing our haunt. We hope all of you had an enjoyable time.

[DollFacexHorror]

Honestly, I had a good time there were a few good scares as I'm not jaded 100% yet on haunts. I was with good company as well. There were a few things about the event that didn't go as I thought it would be but I had a great time.
________
ultimate fighter

[Jim Warfield]

I Wood Have Acted

I wood have portrayed the guy from The Wizard Of OZ who sticks his head through the curtain and says:"Ignore the man behind the curtain, the Great and Powerfull Oz has spoken! And while you are at it ignore the curtain too, if you look behind this curtain, you will see my bare behind, sorry there was some miscommunication it was to have been an obscenes be-hind the curtain look with tights off! I don't usually wear them.

[damon carson]

Whats that Jim about wood behind the curtain? LOL! Or did you mean would? Ha ha! Sounds more like a peep show to me. Sorry I dont care to see the man behind the curtain. Thankyou!
Damon

[DollFacexHorror]

I went through, expecting an entire haunted house. Had their been ANY indication that the acting was secondary, I would have saved my money. I thought that was what the lights on tour was all about.

I feel for the actors, since they were up against haunters. I guarantee noone told them to be prepared to not get scares, and timing, etc... which larry explained, after the fact.

As a cast manager, I did expect at least more than heavy breathing and stalking, and being pushed out of the way so they could take a break. There were a few great actors, and some decent dialogue, but it was rare.

Don't get me going on makeup and costume...

On a positive note, there were some great looking scenes, scary or not is a whole nother question.

I loved the atrwork in the 3-D house, in fact I removed my glasses to really appreciate the talent! The "treehouse" room where the floor moved was very nicely put together as well! (Just naming a few )

But, as a member of the "actors AND animatronics" school of thought, I was dissappointed in the amount of animatronics that were there, just because.

I also like haunted houses that are dim and disturbing, and the lighting was so bright in some rooms, it ruined the illussions. (i.e. room with the cannibal statues, they were lit from behind, which totally betrayed them as props not possible live actors.)

With the price that was charged, all of the elements should have been 100%.
Because of the expense out of your fellow haunters, your haunt will be judged with a more harsh eye... simple fact.

Larry - I really hope you appreciate the honesty that your "peers" are giving you, because it can only make your haunt stronger. Noone knows absolutley everything there is about this industry.
Take the good, bad and ugly posts (as we haunters are VERY passionate creatures) and grow!

.... aside from this I never saw you at the show... sigh we had drinks waiting LOL :P
________
Yamaha QY10

[Haunting Copy]

. . . we turned our lights on at 1AM and gave a complete light on tour of our attraction to those who stayed to ask questions. We were there until 2:30 touring and answering questions anyone had. Sorry you were confused about what we had to offer but we thought we made it clear that we were turning the lights on after the show.

This is a fact. Brad and I stayed after closing and was generously escorted through a VERY thorough walk-through.

Thanks again, guys and ladies of FearFest. Y'all rock.

[Haunting Copy]

.... aside from this I never saw you at the show... sigh we had drinks waiting LOL :P

That is for damn sure, LOL!

[drfrightner]

Let me make a few comments here... some people are without words! Some people just love to cause problems no matter what you do good or great or when you make mistakes.

Let me elaborate...

1) I had someone climb over one of my ropes and tear apart my TIME MACHINE which we are going to rehab into a truck. Yes they tore things open to see how it works, broke BOTH arms on the thing and took a really cool handle on top of the stick shift to boot.

2) Someone SMASHED my COBRA facade... 5 years ago this was re-hard coated, and the thing has been uder the stress of tens of thousands of people never even a crack but some jerk smashed it to bits not one side but both sides.

3) Another jerk stuffed a whole role of paper towels down my super nice bathroom and flooded it during the tour. A bathroom I was nice enough to tell people we had.

4) I could go on and on about the props people broke, skulls that where torn off the walls, someone actually ran up to me and reported the torn off skull but I couldn't find the person. I was walking through the attraction today and I could NOT believe the amount of stuff people BROKE, RIPPED UP, or simply whatever to be a jerk or I guess wanted a sample of our rocks so they broke pieces off I don't know what else.

5) Here is another one... someone came in with the same radios we used and started making up stuff saying "The Impailer head fell off'. So then we scrambled over there to check it and no it hadn't fallen off, but someone RIPPED off the Impailers hand just ripped it right off the animation.

People threw trash all over the haunt it was just a mess.

Aside from these handfull of issues, 99.9% of the people I talked to where nice as peaches, thanking us up and down for opening, people coming up to us at the show telling us it was the best haunted house they have ever seen, praising the 3D, making comments about how we painted the floors, or endless amounts of talk about our swamp house. I think I must have heard 500 plus people make comments to me about the swamp house.

I want to THANK YOU ALL for the comments you made, the endless thank yous we received over and over and over again. Again 99.9% of you I thank and you made all the hard work worth every inch of time we spent over the last 4 months worth it.

Larry

[drfrightner]

Let me address all concerns with one post... and understand we are not going to get into some month long debate on this. If you have an issue email me darkrides@sbcglobal.net or feel free to call me directly 314 504 3970 and I will be happy to addres your concerns directly with YOU and listen to any complaints you may have.

1) Lights on tour: My take on the lights on tour is show lights on so you can see what the attracion looks like if you walked though just with NO FOG! I posted on these boards several times this is exactly how we planned to showcase the that event. If I would have done it the other way people would have complained they wanted to see the lighting. One or a half dozen of the other... I'm sure everyones photos came out perfect with your flash. People took so many photos the lines never moved, people left the attraction to get new batteries and wanted back in. I thought this was the best presentation.

If you thought otherwise I'm sorry, but I heard nothing but rave reviews of the attraction during the lights on tour. One point I will make some area's where dark because a fuse kept breaking. All the power was NEW... not until everyone tried to step on pressure pads and set off millions of things at one time did this happen. First night issues... sorry. We got our electrican over and he fixed it by Saturday. We did however place someone at the breakbox and flip it back on every time it went off once realized the issue. Outside of that one problme everything seemed to go great.

2) Darkness Opening Late: Again it probably wouldn't have been a big deal had it not been cold and raining but it was... I don't control the weather, however I do appologize for not opening on time. I didn't want to open when where not ready. We had some actor issues... many of the people who promised to show (REGULAR actors did not show). Maybe because of the snow, or rain or whatever I do not know. Over half of the people had never worked in the Darkness before. I did not expect this but it happens and with the weather being so bad I don't know. We had issues explaining where scenes where to all these people who never worked there before. All of our radios we charged but most of them would NOT take a charge since they sat idle since October. It was an oversight, so this made getting people ready very tough!

For all of this I apoogize. This was not our normal crew, we did have many people who did a great job and tried very hard.

No matter first and foremost I wanted to do my best so we opened late. It was the first time we've tried to open since October, and we just didn't do a good enough job planning for the operation because we kept working on the haunt itself.

3) The Focus: The focus of our tour was always to build the best haunted house or one of the best haunted houses you've ever seen... I posted months ago that it was impossible to finish, we bit off more than we could chew, and it would be tough getting ready. I feel we did the best we could to finish the haunt on time, we worked on it all the way up to Friday. The focus was always on the haunted houses.

All of the comments I heard from fellow haunt owners was 'amazing' 'awesome' 'stunnng' 'just like Disney' all weekend long. This was our focus it was always our focus, and yes we should have put more focus on the actors but we just kept trying to build the haunted house, on top of everything else we where doing.

I understand these complaints, and since the show is coming back to St. Louis I can tell you this one thing...

NEXT YEAR... I will just open up and charge $20 or $25 bucks and we'll just open one night and we will focus on the show, the actors, and just scary the HELL OUT OF YOU PEOPLE!

I thought and I think I was right, the focus was people wanted to see the HAUNT and that was the focus from day one!

Anyone who thought the haunt wasn't good well I don't know what to say because I heard nothing but WOW's all weekend.

We have built many projects in our day and done some near impossible things but this was the hardest thing we've ever done just because of the short time frame, and because of all the other factors involved.

Next year we won't have to build a new building, two new attractions and put so much time and energy into helping promote a show for the industry and all of that. We'll focus more on the production and less on renovation and showcasing the HAUNT!

So yes I understand some peoples concerns and comments but I know we had a lot of actors in there that did awesome and got a lot of scares... I KNOW ROSS FROM HOUSE OF SHOCK GOT IT FROM OUR BABY ROOM!!!! C'mon Ross I heard all about it... LOL.

Again thanks for coming out, thanks for all the awesome, wonderfull, glowing comments everyone made about OUR HAUNTED HOUSE and next year I will do everything I can to simply put on a SHOW at the normal cost of going through Darkness, and not some big major over the top build everything, detail down to the bone, effect and scene!

Again anything else on this subject just email me directly or call me I'll be happy to hear your comments and feedback!

Now onto the future... you have roughly FIVE months to get ready to open your haunted houses!

Now the heat is on you guys! I hope the show gave you all the inspiration you could handle!

Good luck and again thanks for coming to the tour!


NOW DIRECT RESPONSES:

Grimly: No the weather wasn't terrible for the whole show it was great on Friday and Sunday it just sucked when I opened my haunt... what an Omen! LOL I agree with you I would NOT do timed ticketing for my haunt now or in the future. Sorry we didn't have any que line entertainment outside however we did have it inside. Lastly you said you didn't pick up on a theme... yes there was a theme.

Downstairs was all lost temple type theme. Upstairs was a mansion starts with a swamp/graveyard to a mansion facade and finally out the backyard, garage, green house, blah, blah.

KEVIN: Next time let me know I'd love to have you work here that would have helped out a lot I know that!!!! Here is the truth of the matter we have AWSOME actos, in fact the tv guy for the America Haunts show said we had the best actors of all that he saw last year. We just didn't do a good enough job recruiting them or something... we had a walk through like 10 days before the show. Over 100 people showed up all said they wanted to work, I told everyone we'd pay them that night, I brought $6,000.00 but they just didn't show up. Maybe because of the weather, maybe because everyone wanted to watch the Missouri vs. UCON game. Remeber Missouri made the elite 8, so this must have had an impact I don't know. We will fix this next year I promise. But yes you are right we focused more on the haunt for this tour than the performance.

Voodoo: I think I explained that we had a power problem. We fixed that on Saturday. We didn't turn the overhead lights on because honestly we thought peopele would rather have the house so they could see the lighting just NO FOG for pictures. I think most wanted it that way but obviously some didn't... I apologize for the confusion but glad you liked the attraction.

Larry

[xxxdirk]

Even though some of you do not care for Larry, I really hope you can learn to handle your hatred in a different way. The damage that you haunters did is not excusable and I really hope you never have a customer at your haunt act that way....