Scary season: Performers at Michigan haunted house learn tricks of the
terrifying trade
[October 08, 2025]
By MIKE HOUSEHOLDER
PONTIAC, Mich. (AP) — Grotesque makeup, menacing props and intimidating
costumes are just one part of a Michigan haunted house's 25-year-old
formula to terrify guests.
It starts by educating the actors looking to provide the most horrifying
experience to its visitors. At Scare School, they learn all the tricks
of the trade.
Lessons begin weeks before the four-level walk-through scream factory
opens to visitors, introducing fresh talent to the get-ups, face paint
and unnatural body movements proven to petrify thousands of customers
since the turn of the century.
The actors' report card of sorts is the “Wimp Out Score Board” in Erebus
Haunted Attraction's ground-level lobby, tallying the numbers of
visitors who flee before making it through all four levels or who join
the “wetters, pukers & fainters” total.
And, yes, they really tally it.
The one-time abandoned parking structure in Pontiac consistently lands
on lists of the scariest haunted houses in America. Operations managers
and brothers Zac and Brad Terebus said the coaching and training
performers receive isn’t just about what they wear or how loud they can
shout.
“Scare School really comes down to the psychology of fear,” Zac Terebus
said. “Fear is not an accident. Fear is an art.”
In the weeks before Erebus opened for the Sept. 19-Nov. 2 Halloween
season, managers auditioned and hired dozens of scare actors, then
coached them to be as frightening as humanly — or rather, supernaturally
— possible.
In an upstairs room in early September, Erebus veterans schooled the
newbies on the finer points of zombie shuffling and demon shrieking,
walking on stilts and wielding a spiked (plastic) club. The new hires
also learned about make-up application, costuming, how to get into their
roles and personas as well as rules about interacting with the guests.
It’s all part of an effort to bring out their inner fiend, Brad Terebus
said.
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Renee Piehl, right, interacts with people waiting in line at the
Erebus Haunted House, Oct. 2, 2025, in Pontiac, Mich. (AP Photo/Ryan
Sun)
 “Let’s say they’re a lawyer by day,”
he said. “They can come here, break their shell off and just release
this monster within them.”
Alan Tucker, who portrays a bloodthirsty clown, said scare acting is
“therapeutic.”
“You never really think that you can be something else for a couple
hours and scare people. But then when you really actually get to do
that, it’s so entertaining. It’s so fulfilling,” said Tucker, who is
in his second year as a scare actor.
Renee Piehl is in her third year, this time around playing Nyx,
based on the Greek goddess of night, who frightens guests waiting in
line to enter the haunt.
“They come here to be scared. It’s Halloween. It’s fun,” she said.
“We are to be ugly and scary and bloody.”
Plus, the scarier the actors are, the bigger the numbers will get on
the Wimp Out Score Board.
The board currently lists 10,711 “wimps” and 1,246 “wetters, pukers
& fainters” both cumulative totals since the Terebuses’ father and
uncle opened the attraction.
“What we have throughout the haunted house, we call them ‘chicken
exits.’ They’re actually fire exits,” Zac Terebus said. “But, at any
point in the show, if you say, ‘I want out,’ we take you out, we
escort you down, you end up here in the exit lobby, you can wait for
your group to come on out.
“It's a competition among our monsters to see who can really scare
the pee out of somebody."
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