A look behind the scenes at LI's Halloween haunts

Whether he’s exercising them or exorcising them, Oscar Gonzalez has a genius for making customers’ hearts race, blood run and sweat break out.

Gonzalez, 49, of Hampton Bays, is a licensed Zumba instructor and fitness coach whose clients dance for their health in a Hamptons spa. But they’re just as likely to run for their lives, or at least the chicken exits, when they encounter his handiwork at Chambers of Hell, the annual haunted attraction in Hauppauge where Gonzalez is a set designer.

For this season’s attractions, Gonzalez created sets that raise hairs literally, as in air cannons that blast visitors’ hairdos, and psychologically, when visitors crawl into a hollow tree in a nightmarish version of “Alice in Wonderland.”

“The younger generation is much harder to scare nowadays because of what they see in movies and on the internet,” said Gonzalez, who’s worked for more than a decade at haunted attractions. “One way of making it scarier is to make them interact with claustrophobic sets as well as encountering the actors.”

Gonzalez, who has a degree in graphic design from Veritas University in his native San Jose, Costa Rica, has been known to put fresh flesh on horror tropes by drawing on the eerie folk tales his Central American parents told to kids to keep them in line.

“They used to tell us about El Cadejo, a dog with fiery eyes that followed you when you were drunk and walking back to your house, and La Mica, a woman whose face looked like a monkey, who was in the trees,” Gonzalez said. “We grew up on those tales. There were many, many different ways to scare the kids.”

Gonzalez is among the masterminds behind the macabre effects that entertain and terrify at Long Island haunted attractions, which once again have pried open their creaky doors for Halloween season. With day jobs like dental assistant and village code enforcer, these moonlighters let their freaks fly in the run-up to Halloween, dreaming up horrific story lines, creepy sets and makeup for ghoulish characters. The process can take up to a year from conception to, er, execution. To satisfy the annual demand for goose bumps, they draw on Hollywood and Hong Kong horror movies, ethnic folklore and their own childhood Halloween memories.

“Building a haunted house sort of brings your childhood back,” said veteran Long Island haunt designer Joe Persampiere, 69, of Deer Park. “You have to be very creative and definitely have to like Halloween,” said Persampiere, whose most recent effort was last year’s Legend of Goatman Haunted Farm at Glover Farms in Brookhaven.

Makeup of a monster

Bayville Scream Park

Long Island’s haunted houses are put together less like Frankenstein’s monster and more like a Broadway show involving directors, special effects, makeup artists, set designers, artists, auditions and classically trained actors.

Hiring actors to convincingly play hideous ax murderers, killer clowns and other nasty characters is the monster-size task this year of Michael Ruggiere, 32, of Brightwaters. Ruggiere, a Garden City code enforcer, has a slightly more fearsome job auditioning and coaching scare actors as supervisor of the haunted attractions at Bayville Scream Park.

“A lot of people dismiss it [being a scare actor], that it’s not really acting,” said Ruggiere. But, he said, in scare acting “there are a lot of psychological factors involved because people scare differently, and they [the actors] need more physical endurance than a regular actor.”

“You’re constantly performing for different groups of people, who may have already visited two other haunted-house attractions,” Ruggiere explained. “You have to do improvisation and interact with the guests within your character, who may be a zombie or some type of ghoul, which is not in a typical actor’s repertoire.”

Ruggiere made his own scare acting debut at 18, spooking visitors at a West Islip charity’s haunted house. He went on to get a bachelor of fine arts from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and studied Method acting for three years at HB Studio in Manhattan.

Nowadays he’s a busy Long Island community theater performer; he played Tybalt in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” last summer at county parks and is rehearsing as a tap-dancing sailor in Theatre Guild of Oceanside’s “Dames at Sea.” Plus, he’s a trouper, always ready to fill in as a demon or a hapless butler lost in the Bayville Scream Park’s woods.

Scare acting is what lured Jimmy Louie, 32, of Syosset to join Bayville Scream Park’s troupe as a teen in 2010. He started out playing Bloodworth Manor’s haunted chef, wearing white face makeup to stand out under the strobe lights and an apron stained with red-tinted corn syrup.

But after a director showed Louie how to apply his own prosthetics and makeup, and special effects artists gave him pointers on putting on a mask, his mind was made up. “I was like, ‘hey I want to get into the makeup field, too,’ ” he said. This fall, the full-time dental assistant is spending his off hours happily airbrushing bruises and affixing latex ears and putty scars in Bayville Scream Park’s makeup tent.

Inspiration for his designs comes from movies like “The Era of Vampires” (2002), a Hong Kong martial-arts horror film he first saw with his Chinese immigrant grandparents, and Sandra Bullock’s hit Netflix horror, “Birdbox” (2018).

Still, Louie can’t get scare acting out of his blood. He applies his own makeup to join the haunt, where he’s been getting a big reaction by covering his eyes with a blue surgical mask like the one Bullock wore and hiding in a row of zombie mannequins. “I let them examine the room,” he said of visitors, “then I go after them, and they just freak out.”

Creating a scream-fest

Chambers of Hell

Growing up in 1990s Holbrook, Robert Frankenberg, creative director of Chambers of Hell in Hauppauge, said he “fell in love with cinema” and horror classics like “The Evil Dead” (1981), “Pumpkinhead” (1988) and “Frankenstein” (1931) as well as 1950s B movies.

“I always rooted for the bad guys,” said Frankenberg, 34, of Centereach. “They were so much more interesting and unpredictable than the main characters.”

A possessed nun, an undead pirate and the decapitation-obsessed Queen of Hearts are among the baddies played by a cast of 50 in three Chambers of Hell attractions. Planning started more than a year ago, with Frankenberg meeting with Gonzalez and Matt Guiliano, 50, of Oakdale, his Chambers of Hell business partner and owner of Matt Guiliano’s Play Like A Pro, a baseball training facility where the haunt sets up shop.

“We all bring different ideas to the table, and we decide, ‘OK, this is what we do for each haunt,’ ” Frankenberg said. “A lot comes from personal experience because if we could scare ourselves, imagine what we can do for the public.”

The initial sit-down spawns Google searches for “vampires,” “most ghoulish” and more, and downloads of Pinterest photos to flesh out story lines, sets and characters. The team returns to the table with picture boards for an “old-school presentation,” Frankenberg said.

After the picture boards are loaded on a Google Drive, Guiliana “Red” Werner, 29, of Bay Shore goes to work, calling on her theater and design background to create costumes.

Werner, who joined the crew four years ago after befriending Frankenberg and his wife, Lexi, said, “my job is to be realistic” about costuming. Werner recently squashed plans for a giant bug with six legs and a moving head. “We’d need four actors to operate the puppet, and it’s better to have those four people to interact with the people,” she said.

Frankenberg uses the story lines, photos and color palettes on picture boards to create room designs, providing layouts, blueprints and direction to the construction crew, which builds the haunts in the 30,000-square-foot space. Props are fabricated in a 16-by-30-foot workshop, “The Lab,” which resembles a mad scientist’s “makeshift laboratory with everything from animatronics to fake blood, plastic bones and latex heads,” Frankenberg said.

The construction phase can be “gross,” said set builder Jeremy Bixson, 29, of Hauppauge, whose regular job is front desk agent at a Marriott hotel. “I’ve hung up a [simulated] torso with no head,” Bixson said of this year’s Mangled attraction at the Hauppauge fright house inspired by the horror film series that began with “Hostel” (2005). But an occasional gross-out doesn’t stop Bixson from playing the “steampunk butler,” greeting guests at the Alice’s Nightmare haunt.

Frankenberg makes no bones about what he’s up to, both in front of and behind the scenes. If you’re one of the fainthearted who heads for the chicken exit, he said, “we’ll parade you through the lobby and put it on social media.” He added with an evil-genius laugh, “You bring your kids here, you pay us to scare them, we traumatize them. We’re not nice!”

Halloween haunt lite

Spooky Fest

A gentler crew of geniuses is behind the dinosaurs at the re-imagined Spooky Fest, returning for its 12th season at the Center for Science Teaching & Learning at Tanglewood Preserve in Rockville Centre.

“There’s so much out there that’s scary, but not a lot out there for Halloween for the really young ones other than pumpkin picking and hayrides,” said Ray Ann Havasy, 56, the center’s director. In a collaborative effort, Havasy and about a half-dozen staff came up with ideas that she said are “truly true to our demographic, which is kids 12 and under.”

“We’re all biologists and environmental science people, but we like Halloween, so this became a fun event to work on,” said Havasy, a zoologist who grew up trick-or-treating in Port Washington.

Gone is the maze where actors once jumped out at a mostly teenage crowd. It’s been replaced with a “little bit scary” walk in the woods featuring zombie animatronic dinosaurs. “There are scary scenes, but nobody jumps out at you,” Havasy promised of the haunt for children 9 to 12.

Younger kids can visit the “Enchanted Not-So-Spooky Walk,” featuring friendly ghosts, happy scarecrows, dinosaurs, aliens and Cinderella’s carriage.

“We always ask, ‘What would make a young child laugh with delight,’ ” said Michele Anselmo, the center’s lead teacher and a member of the creative team who put together a green alien, one of three in the not-so-spooky  walk.

Said Havasy of Spooky Fest’s new chapter: “It’s a wonderful family Halloween event.”

WHERE & WHEN

Chambers of Hell haunted attraction, Oct. 23 and Oct. 27-31, 1745 Expressway Dr. N., Hauppauge; 631-686-4424, chambersofhell.com; $35-$85.

Bayville Scream Park, Oct. 23-31 and Nov. 4-6, 8 Bayville Ave., Bayville, 516-624-4678, bayvillescreampark.com, $56.75.

Spooky Fest 2022, Oct. 23 and 28-30, Tanglewood Preserve, 1450 Tanglewood Rd., Rockville Centre; 516-764-0045, cstl.org; $20 for nonscary attraction, $25 for scary attraction.