Fear factor keeps business booming at haunted houses

Thursday, Oct. 28, 2004 | 8:23 a.m.

Clouds moved across the wet sky as 21-year-old Roy Olaer, the Undertaker at the Black Box haunted house on Rainbow Boulevard and Sahara Avenue grabbed his bag of evening snacks: potato chips, a jumbo size Twix bar and a bottle of Gatorade.

For the next four hours, Olaer, in a dim room next to a closed casket, will intimidate his victims, moving through the nightmarish rooms and corridors.

"I prepare them for the final scare," said the surveillance technician who works the day shift at the Flamingo, but has been haunting for the Freakling Brothers for four years.

"I don't do this for money," Olaer said. "I do this for the sheer fun of it. I find it hilarious. I've heard noises that I've never thought people could make."

But, Olaer said, "You have to be really into scaring people. After the first three hours, most people will drop out. After three hours it gets old. It gets really lonely."

Nobody knows this more than Duke Mollner, owner of Freakling Brothers (and Olaer's boss) who has been scaring since the 1970s and sets up three haunted houses in Southern Nevada each year.

"It's not a very comfortable endeavor, but there's no thrill like it," Mollner said. "The startle scare is the most effective and there are 15 to 20 variations of that scare."

For Jay Anthony Franke, known in the Black Box as "The Sizzler," or more specifically, a prisoner being electrocuted, preparing for scares means a big meal and a couple of Alleves.

"When people come around I convulse," Franke said. "I'm in a metal chair and I actually have to shake it off the ground."

An actor who played Jake on the NBC television show "California Dreams" that aired in the 1990s, Franke came to Las Vegas to take it easy and get a regular job and wound up working the haunted house with friend Kyle Betterton, who creates the eerie music and sound effects for Freakling Brothers' houses.

"You really get to learn a lot about people and what fear does to them," Franke said. "A lot of people just don't know what to do when fear hits them. When people try to mask fear with bravado, it's really amusing. Some really not-so-thoughtful responses are thrown out there.

"People actually tell you, 'Please stop.' If it's small kids, I will. If they're 12 or 13 and they say 'Please don't,' I'm sorry, they're fair game. This is what they came here for."

Alan Loman, who operates tentacles that extend from a wall in the Black Box, says, "It's not just someone coming out from a corner and saying 'Boo.' There's a psychological factor."

Breaking it down even more, Dr. Michelle Carro, president-elect of the Nevada State Psychological Assication and associate director of doctoral training in clinical psychology at UNLV, says the mental and physical experience of being haunted in such an environment can be "cathartic."

"There's a rush of adrenaline that comes with that and when you know it's safe and you get through it and suspend your disbelief briefly, you get your adrenaline rush," Carro said.

"There's first a cognitive component. Then you get the biological piece of anxiety. Your major muscles and major organs get fed blood. You get pumped up. You allow yourself this being-on-the-edge experience that ends up being OK."

Also, Carro said, "It gives you an escape. Fear just completely shuts everything out in the moment. The ultimate relief is when you make it through unscathed."

The different constitutions were apparent last week at the Freakling Brothers' houses. Some ran out screaming, some whimpered with their eyes closed.

Others were merely "amused."

"I laughed most of the time," said Pam Rightmyer, who had just visited the Black Box with her husband, Bob. "It was fun."