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How do you make a dark ride that scares adults?

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Altonadvocate1

TS Member
I remember going on various ghost trains and other dark rides as a kid and being scared half to death. Scaring younger children is easy. A few loud noises and jump scares in the dark and it's done.

As a more rational adult however, as much as I enjoy the art of the dark ride, they don't instill any fear any more.

Don't get me wrong, I used to get some anxiety on Sub Terra, but that was more in anticipation of when the drop in the dark would occur and it only worked the first couple of times until I had the timing sussed.

In any event, I don't consider it a true dark ride, due to the physical drop and the same applies to indoor rollercoaster hybrids.

So how do you scare adults on a slow moving transit dark ride?

One of the problems is that adults don't have the same suspension of belief as kids. When I was seven, I was always scared of the proverbial monster under the bed, but as an adult, I know such things do not exist. No matter how good the special effects for the ghosts, zombies, monsters are, as an adult I know they are not real, so they can be interesting and fun, but not scary.

So what other options are there?

Blood and guts... This makes the ride unsuitable for younger riders, whilst not scaring the adults as they know it's just tomato sauce, etc.

Jump scares... These can be very effective when not overused. On several occasions on various dungeon attractions around the country the lights have gone down for 20 seconds only to come back on with a scare actor literally an inch from my face. Can be really unnerving, but only works in very close proximity to the extent of invading my personal space. It's also very hard to implement to every rider on a transit based dark ride, and becomes less effective with use.

Sudden and unexpected loud noises together with strobe lighting can also provide a decent jump scare, but are usually associated with older, lower budget amusement parks (implemented quite well on Botton Bros Ghost Train in Skeg Vegas) and once again become predictable.

The slow build up... Start the ride with something very mundane to lull riders into a false sense of security then increase the isolation, unease and foreboding in small increments. This can reduce the "I know it's not real" defense, but also make a large part of the ride boring (or in the case of DBGT, all the ride boring).

Vary the timing of the effects and which ones are used.... Can result in sparse scenery and still becomes predictable with repeated rides.

Use common phobias as a weapon... The dark, Spiders, isolation etc... Can be effective, but don't effect everyone (I'm not scared of spiders (terrified of eye drops though)). Also the same issue crops up with adults... They know it's not real.

The problem is compounded when a dark ride has to apply to all demographics. Can you scare the adults without utterly terrifying the kids? I've seen movies with jokes than make the kids laugh, but also have jokes that go right over their heads to entertain the adults. How do you do this with scares on a dark ride? Is it even possible?

I think that making a traditional dark ride that scares the adults, particularly without terrifying the kids is a much harder thing to do than I previously realised.

I remember that John Wardley once said that scaring people is easy, but entertaining them is difficult.

Any ideas on how to proper scare adults on a traditional slow moving no drop dark ride, or recommendations from your travels?

Mods... Not sure I have put this in the right section, so apologies if it is in the wrong place and feel free to move it :)

BOO - Did I scare you?... No...?
 
Lots of adults ARE probably scared of ghost trains I imagine....well at least until they have one go on them and realise it's really not that bad. That's kind of how fear works. You convince yourself you're terrified of something you don't know much about. It's the not knowing as they say. Some will be so terrified they will never go on them.

Obviously there are lots of adults who aren't scared and have no issue with them and that's to be expected too.

Fear effects people in different ways too. For instance for some folk it's blood n heights and for others it's spiders and snakes. My brother is 35 and absolutely hates clowns. He's not really scared of anything really and he's jumped out of a plane at 10,000 feet. However you'd never catch him near a clown. He'd have a panic attack.
 
I agree with @Benjsh. I think more adults are scared of ghost trains than you would expect, so perhaps scaring them isn’t so hard after all.

My mum always tells me about how she was so scared that she never opened her eyes in the original Haunted House at Alton Towers. She was 17 when it opened, so she never rode it as a child.

When we went to Alton Towers last summer, my nan refused to ride Duel, saying that she “[didn’t] want to be scared to death”.

Heck, I get scared to a degree on some horror dark rides. I’m ashamed to admit that I go around many ghost trains somewhat scared, and while brilliantly done, I actually found The Haunting at Drayton Manor quite unnerving on a first time ride last year… I am a complete wimp when it comes to horror, though. I’ve never done anything like a scare maze for that precise reason.
 
I think that as essential part of creating a dark ride that’s scares adults is to create the right feeling and atmosphere before the ride even starts.

The station building and theming of the queue line can be an integral part of the experience and creating an unnerving or creepy atmosphere through simple things darkness, sound, lighting, use of perspective and even smell pods can get really enhance the experience and get the guests in the right frame of mind to be scared by before the ride vehicle has even started moving. From watching some TPWW Vlogs it seems that there are some really good Ghost Trains out there at European parks that really do the creepy atmosphere well using quite modest props.
 
Different adults have massively different fear tolerances and different phobias. What scares one adult might not scare another.
I don't think it's that hard to scare adults on dark rides as I've seen many adults come out of Dreamland's Ghost Train looking terrified, despite the fact that it is very 'meta', with many loud noises and cheap props.
 
I’m not great with the dark so for me it’s the anticipation of what’s coming, even if it’s not scary it’s the unknown so I think a ride which can be different on different rides works well, for example although not a dark ride tower of terror at DLP alway for me as they varied the ride cycles so it was slightly unpredictable
 
The best way is to make it as close to real as possible. The riders have suspended their disbelief being at a theme park, might as well make it close to believable and then the mind fills in the rest. The large spider in Duel looked like an actual big spider in the correct lighting and being around a corner and a phobia of many plays well.

Then you get things like Shed Terra, which fell down as the acting was too much, unbelievable and was funny rather than scary. It destroyed the foreboding atmosphere. Imagine it being solemn but welcoming instead because you've come to visit.

As said above, something very wrong for an effect also works well. Natural reaction is to try and escape a natural threat like fire.
 
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