Hallowscream: The Yorkshire scare event that attracts 36,000 visitors with over 100 actors and owner has invested over £500,000 on new scare attractions 'Necropolis' and 'Redneck's Revenge'

Hallowscream is an attraction designed to make people scared and laugh.

Over the last 15 years, the brains behind the event, Tom Pearcy, has transformed the popular event into an elaborate production with five haunted houses, 150 actors, 50 makeup artists, more than 20 dancers and many maintenance and food and beverage teams.

“We have a big stage where a dance act performs for 3 to 10 minutes, Halloween tunes, street theatre, and lots of actors that walk around the event, greeting people,” Mr Pearcy said.

“Some of them deliver scare, some of them deliver laughs. So what we're trying to do is to get a mixture of fear and laughter. 

“It's really about getting people together for Halloween and having a great time, they can have a few drinks with five haunted houses all themed completely differently.

“We have one house based around clowns; it's actually a fun house. We use it in the summer as part of summer attraction. But we change the music and dim the lights down and fill it with scary clowns.

“We have another one that is a human slaughterhouse, inviting people to come in and get chopped up and turned into pies. It's quite dark and gruesome called the Flesh Pot. 

“We have another one called The Singularity, which is kind of a bit futuristic and scientific, with an AI and robots feel to it.”

Mr Pearcy has invested more than £500,000 on two new attractions over the last two years and the 18-day event has attracted 2,000 visitors a night.

“Necropolis is based on an Egyptian temple, so it's as if you're walking into a pyramid and other Egyptian spaces. 

“We have another one which we just built this year, called Redneck’s Revenge, which is an American Hillbilly Farm that you enter and meet all the characters within that.

“They’re all indoor except for Redneck’s Revenge which has some outdoor areas. The whole area between attractions is covered, so you're out of the wind and out of the rain. Then we have another area separate where we do food and three fairground rides.

“We try to make the actual houses themselves feel quite immersive, so you forget where you are. 

“You do actually start to believe a bit of this, the story where you are happening. Halloween is an event, and has become sort of a big festival party. I think everyone wants to do something for Halloween.

“We tend to sell out pretty much every night, that’s generally about 2,000 [visitors] every night. We sell around 36,000 tickets across the event. On the bigger days, through Halloween half term, we can be hosting 4,000 people a day.”

The actors hired for the event go through an audition process and a training programme. They have a mix of professional and amateur, enthusiastic actors.

“It's a real mixture and the street theatre [actors] and the more visible roles are professional but the scare actors are just very enthusiastic people that love doing it,” he said.

“We had about 80 per cent of last year's actors come back to work again because the people that do it really enjoy it. 

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“It's also really hard work, exhausting and taxing. We give them breaks throughout the evening and each haunted house has its own manager that looks after the team and looks after the welfare [of the actors].

“Everyone has to audition for their part every year, even if they have been here before. We get a lot of students; it’s quite a young crowd but also we get quite a lot of older actors.

“We put them through a training programme every year so that they can jump out people safely. There's a lot more to scaring people that meets the eye.

Hallowscream was originally located on a field of corn near to the centre of York and before it was established, teenagers often trespassed and committed vandalism.

In 2009, while he was out patrolling at night looking for the vandals, Tom Pearcy, the brains behind the event, was inspired to host these spooky nights due to the eerie atmosphere.

“It already felt quite scary. So I had this great idea that we would [host] spooky nights in a marquee in early September time,” Mr Pearcy said.

“It was really successful, but a disaster in terms of trying to organise it, because the same kids were coming in at night and causing mayhem were also inside joining my team, scaring people but without any of my rules. It was like semi organised chaos.

“People really enjoyed it, but there were a lot of people jumping out on people that shouldn't have been there and whacking people over the head with corn plants.”

The attraction, which is aimed at people 16 years or older, has received positive feedback from visitors over the years.

“Everyone seems to be loving it,” Mr Pearcy said.

“Every time we build an attraction we’ve learned something from the ones we’ve built before and tend to get better each time we do one. 

“The reaction to our new [attractions] seems to be really good, everyone is saying how much they enjoy it and how much fun it is which is nice.

“The semi secret thing is that the actors normally keep a chart in their dressing room of how many people weed themselves.

“They have a code yellow and code brown [column] and it’s not unusual, especially when people have had a few drinks and they’re laughing and screaming, for there to be a minor accident, which creates great entertainment. They wear it like a medal.”