aquariums) by the State Health Depart-
ment. They are permitted to operate, pro-
vided they do so at 25 percent of maximum
occupancy, and with mandatory face cover-
ings and social distancing between patrons
and employees.
To make this season work, Blood Manor’s
owner, Jim Lorenzo, brought on a pandemic
consultant, Nick Perrotta, in August. To-
gether, they put in place wide-ranging
safety protocols, including Covid-19 screen-
ing questionnaires and temperature checks
at the door, frequent disinfection of sur-
faces, designated half-hour time slots for
ticket sales, and a strict limit of one group
per room within the haunt.
According to Mr. Lorenzo, the attraction’s
ventilation system now benefits from germ-
killing UVC lights within the ducts and in-
creased airflow. The air within Blood Man-
or, he said, will be entirely replaced with
fresh outdoor air every 15 minutes.
“It’s going to be as safe,” he said, “or safer,
than being on an airplane or in a school.”
But these front-of-house and behind-the-
scenes changes are only the beginning:
How do you protect customers while simul-
taneously encouraging them to believe, if
only for a moment, that their lives are in
grave danger? That’s what they’re paying
for.
Blood Manor this season has fewer live
actors but plenty of fog, atmospherically
unpleasant smells (there’s a robust market
in the industry for “eau de vomit”), “over-
the-top” sound effects (some as loud, Mr.
Lorenzo said, as a fire engine’s siren) and 25
percent more animatronics than usual.
“I have two experts that do nothing but
make things move, jump, spit,” Mr. Lorenzo
said. (The spit is really “just water,” he add-
ed.) He is especially proud of a 10-foot-tall
werewolf, which roars through a 350-watt
speaker: “He comes out of the darkness and
people just wet their pants.” (That is not a
metaphor. In years past, guests who
claimed to have lost control of their blad-
ders at Blood Manor were awarded free T-
shirts advertising that they had, well, lost
control of their bladders at Blood Manor.)
There is hardly an area of the haunt that
the new socially distant horror paradigm
hasn’t touched. During a press preview in
early October, among the jugs of fake blood
in the makeup station were just as many
spray bottles of bright-blue disinfectant.
Janelle Mercado marshaled performers to
their assigned posts — in the black-light
maze, perhaps, or the morgue — and helped
ensure compliance with health regulations.
After more than five years in the cast, Ms.
Mercado has been promoted to assistant di-
rector. She is well prepared, as evidenced by
the contents of the full pockets of her Blood
Manor hoodie: Band-Aids, hand sanitizer,
an infrared thermometer gun.
This season is certainly not what she ex-
pected. “But honestly, you’ve got to make
ends meet, you know?” she said. “You’ve
got to work, especially because the city
might be shutting down again.”
Ms. Mercado’s mother was hospitalized
with Covid-19 for two weeks in late March
and April, but has recovered. Ms. Mercado
is anxious about the possibility of exposing
her own 5-year-old daughter to the virus,
but she trusts that her co-workers will do
their part to keep one another safe. Blood
Manor asks its employees to get tested for
Covid-19 once a week. “We’ve always had
each other’s backs,” said Ms. Mercado, as
she dispatched a monster-in-progress into
the glow-in-the-dark airbrushing room.
“We know that we’re a family.”
Across the cluttered, cavernous base-
ment that serves as Blood Manor’s back-
stage, an escaped prisoner, a ghost bride
and other miscellaneous ghouls waited pa-
tiently in line — stickers on the floor at six-
foot intervals — to be fitted for custom sili-
cone half-masks. Each set of fangs or mon-
strous grin contained a piece of fabric, co-
vertly attached with Velcro inside, to cover
the wearer’s mouth and nose. A few per-
formers wore familiar paper surgical
masks, albeit spattered with blood flicked
off a red-dipped paint brush. (It should be
noted that there will be no pandemic-
themed scares at Blood Manor. “We don’t
want anybody to think about the actual hor-
rors that have been going on,” said Angie
Hansen, the creative director.)
Though it was never a full-contact
haunted house, Blood Manor nevertheless
trafficked in plenty of reliably effective
close-up scares in previous seasons. For ex-
ample, Mr. Mena, the blood-soaked clown,
used to relish gibbering softly into an un-
suspecting victim’s ear, or inviting a guest
to prod his prosthetic eye with the fork Mr.
Mena wears on a chain around his neck.
Violating visitors’ personal space is no
longer an option. Blood Manor’s actors may
come within six feet of guests, but only in
passing, Mr. Lorenzo said. So Ms. Hansen
has coached the cast to develop new scare
tactics that are effective at a distance, by
delving deeper into character development,or exploring strange and unexpected
movements.
“I just hired this one new actor who crab-
walks backwards,” Ms. Hansen said. “I’m
like, ‘Can you do that for eight hours?’ And
she’s like, ‘Yeah.’ It was like, ‘OK!’ As soon
as some girl crab-walks at you, you’re prob-
ably going to get out of the way pretty
quick.”
This year’s cast is almost exclusively
composed of veteran actors, like Mr. Mena,
who still wears the fork — only now he does
the eye-prodding himself. “Once we got the
email that we’re going to open, I was like,
‘Hell, yeah,’ ” Mr. Mena said, adding, “I’m
smiling under this mask.”
Despite coronavirus concerns, the
Haunted Attraction Association says ap-
proximately 80 percent of haunted attrac-
tions are operating this season. Surpris-
ingly strong ticket sales in the first days of
autumn in much of the industry suggest
Americans are eager for an escapist scare.
“Early numbers are astounding,” said Brett
Hays, president of the Haunted Attraction
Association and owner of the Fear Fair in
southern Indiana.
“Our guests are saying, ‘We can’t go to a
high school football game, we can’t go to the
movies; there’s nothing else out there,’ ”
said Patrick Konopelski, past president of
the Haunted Attraction Association andowner of Shocktoberfest near Reading, Pa.
“It’s like we’re providing a community
service.”
Despite these promising beginnings,
haunters are bracing for ultimately disap-
pointing returns. Haunted attractions typi-
cally earn most of their revenue over four
days, thanks to a spike in attendance the
last two weekends before Halloween. But
this year, they’re necessarily operating at a
lower capacity to maintain social distanc-
ing. “We simply won’t be able to entertain
the number of people that will want to come
on those days,” Mr. Konopelski said. “We
can’t.”
Take Blood Manor: This season, the
10,000-square-foot attraction will limit en-
trance to 100 guests per hour. In a normal
year, as many as 2,500 guests might come
through Blood Manor’s doors on a busy Sat-
urday. This Halloween (also a Saturday),
Mr. Lorenzo hopes to attract 700 visitors in
the seven hours it will be open.
Some New York haunts, like Gateway’s
Haunted Playhouse in Bellport and Head-
less Horseman Hayrides and Haunted
Houses in Ulster Park, are offering drive-
through haunted experiences, in which
patrons will be tormented from within the
relative safety of their cars. Others have
opted not to operate at all.
The Gravesend Inn, staged annually at
CUNY’s New York City College of Technol-
ogy in Downtown Brooklyn, attracted more
than 5,000 visitors last year. Styled as a
haunted 19th-century hotel populated by
the lost souls of bellhops and chamber-
maids, the Gravesend Inn is a high-tech,
low-gore walk-through experience put
together for course credit by City Tech stu-
dents, who operate its many motion-
triggered animatronics, light and sound
effects, props and scare-capturing video
cameras, and also work the box office and
act as the resident spirits.
Several students have told Susan Brandt,
associate professor of production manage-
ment in entertainment technology at City
Tech and general manager for its resident
Theatreworks company, that visiting the
Gravesend Inn was what inspired them to
attend City Tech in the first place.
The Voorhees Theater, the campus facili-
ty where Gravesend Inn is staged, remains
closed this semester. There will be no
haunted hotel this year.
“We don’t want to be on the map as some-
where that a lot of contagion went out, espe-
cially being in Brooklyn,” Ms. Brandt said.
Some of her students have been ill; others
lost family members to Covid-19. To run the
Gravesend Inn during a pandemic, she said,
would be “reckless and irresponsible.”
And yet Blood Manor will give it a try. Mr.
Lorenzo said he would consider himself
“lucky” if Blood Manor can do half its nor-
mal business. “We need people to come out.
We need people to support us,” he said. “We
have 18 days to do 365 days of business. We
pay rent all year.”
But will it still be frightening? There’s
reason to think so. Back out on Broadway, a
group of maskless teenagers riding their
bikes on the sidewalk paused in front of Mr.
Mena. “Halloween’s not here yet,” the bold-
est young man teased.
Just then, Mr. Mena’s colleague Roy
Womble, costumed as a zombie in a security
guard’s jumpsuit, lumbered into the teen-
ager’s sightline with an expertly timed
groan from between his rotten teeth.
“Oh, my God!” the teenager screamed, as
Mr. Mena cackled maniacally.
“I don’t know how many people we’re go-
ing to get this year,” Mr. Womble said. “But
whoever we get, they’re going to get
scared.”In 2020, Are Killer Clowns So Scary?
PHOTOGRAPHS BY AMR ALFIKY/THE NEW YORK TIMESCONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
Top, final touches get added to
actors’ costumes behind the
scenes at Blood Manor, a
haunted house attraction in
Lower Manhattan. Blood
Manor’s staff has an unusual
mission this year: making
visitors feel safe while
simultaneously terrified. Some
actors wear pandemic masks,
though they may be speckled
with “blood” as part of their
costumes; others have
coverings hidden under fangs
or monstrous grins.There is hardly an
area of Blood Manor
that the new socially
distant horror paradigm
hasn’t touched.6 MB THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2020.