If you took a trip through Riverside Parks and Recreation’s haunted house on Saturday, Oct. 26, you were in for a ride of thrills and chills, especially in the final stretch, which featured a crazed killer wielding a chainsaw.
That crazed killer, also known as Parks and Recreation Director Ron Malchiodi, said the community embraced the haunted house more than the department was expecting.
“We thought, overall, it was successful, especially for a first-year venture,” he said in a phone interview Oct. 28. “We’re excited about next year already.”
This year’s haunted house was Riverside’s first attempt at putting on the real deal, but Malchiodi said the department wasn’t totally in uncharted territory. Starting in 2020 through last year, parks and rec staffers had put on a drive-thru haunted house in town, initially as a way to keep the spooky spirit of Halloween alive during lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But this year, it was time to up the ante.
“We saw, while the outdoor drive-thru was still popular, numbers had gone down a little bit,” Malchiodi said of the department’s decision to change formats. “We were really taking a chance with the weather when it was outside. It was a ton of set-up because, basically, the entire block on Fairbank [Road], we would set up with decorations and scenes, [which] required a little more personnel and time to set up. If it would have rained on any of those days, it would have canceled the event.”
He said the Scout Cabin, to the west of Fairbank Road near Indian Gardens, was an obvious choice to host the haunted house.
“We figured we had the perfect setting with the cabin tucked in the woods. It gets kind of dark back there, so we said, why don’t we just move this inside and create a legitimate haunted house?”
Malchiodi said parks and recreation staff had some experience already from putting on the drive-thru haunted houses in the previous four years.
“We knew that some of the characters worked. We knew what got the reaction out of people outside, so now when you’re putting that inside [with a] darker atmosphere, a little more unknown, chopped up into rooms, we knew those elements would be more scary in a contained environment,” he said. “As you’re driving down the street, you can kind of see what’s coming next, whereas you can’t once you’re inside.”
He said they knew they needed to have a clown room and a chainsaw-wielding scare actor at the end and that the indoor space allowed them to set up other themed rooms, including one with creepy dolls and another featuring a mad scientist.
“As far as props and lighting and atmosphere, we were able to do a lot more inside.”
The department’s largest hurdle, Malchiodi said, was splitting up the relatively small cabin so each room had enough space to breathe.
“Every member of staff has been to a haunted house, so we knew the elements we wanted to incorporate, but it’s not the biggest of buildings,” he said. “Obviously, we want it to be scary and entertaining, but it also needs to be safe. That was probably the biggest challenge, trying to figure out all these elements of a traditional haunted house into a limited area.”
The money earned from the sale of tickets at $5 a pop will go toward deferring the village’s costs to put the haunted house on, Malchiodi said.
The department ran two versions of the haunted house: a less scary one, which emphasized the scary atmosphere of the rooms and characters, and a scarier one, where the actors did their best to spook guests.
While Riversiders surely felt the scare factor, Malchiodi said the haunted house’s scare actors were comprised of parks and recreation staff and resident volunteers rather than professionals. While some cast members rotated in or out of the four-and-a-half-hour attraction, Malchiodi said there were 11 scare actors roaming the house at its peak, including himself.
Malchiodi said the department has already started discussing next year’s haunted house. While it’s only on for one night of terror each year, he said planning for this year’s attraction started in full in March. He said seeing all of that work come to fruition was his favorite part of the experience.
“There’s so many months of logistics, and meetings, and the creativity that goes into it, and the research and making sure that safety is a priority. Night of, when you’ve gone through and you see the reactions, that’s really the payoff for us,” he said. “I was the last person you encountered as you went through the haunted house. For me, I really got the culmination of [seeing] people go through, and they just had the relief, they were done with it, [or] they were laughing, they liked it, ‘I want to go again’ … I think, in general, for us, any special event takes so much work on the front end that people don’t see, that the end result is really the reward.”
