I like the more intellectual types of horror….Things that ‘scare’ you instead of the ‘boo’ scare or gore scare. I enjoy a good splatter flick and can appreciate the whole anti-social aspect of gore films, but for me, I am into the films like "Rosemary’s Baby"…..Something more psychological that screws with your mind and frightens you.

What usually scares me is something that slaps the label on it saying that it’s “real”. In the back of mind, thinking that it might be real, freaks me out.

The most scared I have ever been because of a film, was "The Amityville Horror". It was because someone had said that this was real.

My dad would never take me to horror films. One year, he heard the hype about "The Amityville Horror" and knew that my mom took me to see horror films, so he asked if I wanted to go see the movie.

I freaked out. The pig….with the glowing red eyeballs in the window.

I think the character's name was Jody. That really, really scared me. I had seen these other horror movies before, but none of them were “real”! It was always Jason with the hockey mask…not real! [laughs] I freaked out because of "The Amityville Horror".

It all kind of started while I was at U.C. Irvine. I was part of this club that made a Halloween maze. It was just a college maze…nothing huge or eloborate. The walls were made out of trash bag liner….. And guests would be walked through with a host. I was the main monster because I really loved Halloween Haunt and I seemed to know what I was doing. I was like “Wow…I can be the monster”. I learned how to do it on the fly and and it was great fun.

From there I wanted to graduate to the big leagues. One year, I decided to do it.

This was when the auditions were going on in the Good Time Theatre. We got ushered onto the stage and they told me to act like there was a big spider chasing me. It was kind of goofy…everyone went nuts. The only ones I saw [Knott’s] not choose were the ones who were not vocal enough. They wanted to make sure you weren’t shy.

So, they told all of us on the stage that “you all are going to be in House of Maniacs. All of you”. House of Maniacs was in Camp Snoopy and was obviously based on films like "The Hills Have Eyes"/"Texas Chainsaw Massacre". I was a big fan of those films and sort of knew what they were going for.

My character was “Uncle Ernie”, which was a play off of the maze that was there before, Uncle Ernie’s Madhouse. The character was supposed to be this molesting-type of creep. The first day I was in the maze the room I was assigned to was so tight. There were two other people in the room. Hardly any room to breathe or say boo….I hated it!

The room was like a forced-perspective of a kitchen. Apparently a monster upstairs was already “removed” [let go]….and so I was moved up there….into this closet area, my own room. I remember loving it and the guests would file past me…..it was really hot up there. That was one of the creepiest mazes at night when all of the lights were turned off. It was pitch black and you would swear that the place was haunted.

I liked Uncle Ernie’s Madhouse. When we did Carnival of Carnivorous Clowns, I wanted to go more to Uncle Ernie’s Madhouse instead of a carnival theme, which was like Carnival of Death, which we did just a couple of years prior.

You can’t escape the fact that clowns are just plain scary. They’re terrifying. You can’t argue with the reaction that you get in a clown maze.

We know the iconic themes. For a while, I think we stayed away from those because they had been done. In fact, many other haunts have taken those themes over and are doing them to death.

So, we do sometimes go to the past for inspiration. Some of those ideas were wild. I loved Santa Claws Mountain. I wish we could do that again….I don’t know if that’s possible or not…but that was an awesome theme.

I know it’s not going to happen anytime soon, but I would love to see an alien maze again. I think that was an awesome scare. I think we could go much further [with that concept]. It’s a type of maze theme that is missing from the current menu of Haunt.

Sometimes the themes come from management. But most of the time, we just look around our surroundings.

There have been cases where I have gone on the Ultimate Haunt boards and think “maybe that would be a good idea!” I think that kind of happened with pirates…All these monsters directed poor, unsuspecting guests to “The Pirate Maze.”.I remember it stuck out in my mind and thought maybe we should do a pirate theme. Also, Pirates of Emerson up in Northern California is also very popular. And that’s how Red Beard’s Revenge came into fruition.

Like the Grudge 2, that was obviously where someone approached us for a particular theme. I liked "The Grudge". The current slew of Japanese horror films personally terrifies me. I understand that a lot of people are not afraid of those films, but I love them. I think it’s really creepy to have those girls that are contorted and bent out of shape attacking. "The Ring" also kept me on the edge of my seat.

Theme ideas can sometimes actually come out of any movie, in general. Sometimes themes just come out of the blue. For example, I have always just liked asylum-type of movies, like the remake of "House on Haunted Hill".

I ended up finding a movie called "Session 9" and I rented it….and it creeped me out so much! It was set in a real asylum in New Jersey. I just started doing research on abandoned buildings and it’s just the creepiest stuff.

I heard one story about how this lady was trapped in an old abandoned asylum and lived there for weeks on end eating animals This was a real story. The doctors didn’t know she was there. She was discovered a year later and survived as this wild thing, walking around in an abandoned asylum. I thought this was kind of creepy and this was a story I wanted to improve on. This was something we could do. Let the doctors abandon the asylum with only the crazy doctors left but the patients would take over. The nurses would be sadistic and wouldn’t care and just torture these poor patients. A bunch of crazy people in an abandoned hospital.