Scare actors primarily aim to draw a frightened reaction from their audience. This unique approach to performance art has led to many of the mostfascinating storiesfrom these professionals behind the masks andghoulish make-up.These people collectively shared their firsthand experiences answering this Redditquestion: “What’s something a guest did that almost or completely made you break character?”While most of these accounts are hilariously foolish, a few got quite scary and out of hand. These anecdotes give us all a peek into this interesting profession that is more than just playing dress-up forHalloween night.This post may includeaffiliate links.
Scare actors primarily aim to draw a frightened reaction from their audience. This unique approach to performance art has led to many of the mostfascinating storiesfrom these professionals behind the masks andghoulish make-up.
These people collectively shared their firsthand experiences answering this Redditquestion: “What’s something a guest did that almost or completely made you break character?”
While most of these accounts are hilariously foolish, a few got quite scary and out of hand. These anecdotes give us all a peek into this interesting profession that is more than just playing dress-up forHalloween night.
This post may includeaffiliate links.
We had a group of teenagers come through with a little kid about 4 or 5 years old. My haunt was scripted, so the group stopped at my station and I could tell the little one was ready to lose it. I toned it way down for the little guy. His older brother was an absolute s**t squirrel. He kept telling the kid I’d be coming to their house to [end] him later. I stopped completely, broke character and got down on the kid’s level. As loudly as I could, I told the little one that nobody from my haunt would be coming to his house to [end] him and that his brother sucked. Told the kid he was braver than all of the teenagers who thought it was fun to scare a little kid. I promised him that he would make it through just fine and nobody would get him. We had tour guides at our haunt, so the guide went ahead of the group and put the word out. The rest of the cast made things as fun as hell for the kid.
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Not an actor but made an actor lose their st giggling. When I was 18, my best friend and I took dates to a haunted house. In one room, there was a mannequin dressed up as an asylum patient laying on a surgical table. Being a teenage moron, I go up to the mannequin and proceed to dry hump it’s hand for humorous effect. As I’m humping this hand, I say out loud, “Huh. Weird. This hand is so warm. “It was a dude. He proceeds to give me a little squeeze and cackles maniacally. I holler, jump a couple feet in the air, and everyone else loses their st.I flee the room, and ole boy is just laying there laughing til he cries saying “it’s so warm” and then breaking into more fits of laughter.It’s been 20 years and I still haven’t lived it down 😅.
Not an actor but a participant - we (a group of late 30s women) were running from this massive tall actor weilding a chainsaw. I went straight into panic mode and now know that chainsaws are not for me. We ended up huddled in a corner like deer in the headlights. He eventually lowered the chainsaw and muttered quietly “you’re supposed to run out the exit”. We were like “BUT WHEEEERE WE DON’T SEE IT”. He gave us a pitying look and pointed. We ran.
I work at a haunted cornmaze. Countless crazy stories. One that I always laugh at is when I jumped out to scare a father and his son, they both fell to the ground and when they hit the ground one of them ripped a giant fart. All three of us couldn’t control the laughter.
From the other side: I was about 6-7, loved Halloween and scarey stuff, but still pretty young. Local park district had “Haunted Trails,” through the nature walk we would always go to. I did pretty good with the whole thing until we got to the end where it was scarey, un-dead Disney characters, bloody zombie Mickey and Minnie, Goofy, Donald Duck ect. I lost my s**t, small child screaming and melting down crying.I’ll never forget Minnie Mouse kneeling down beside me, pulled up her bloody dress and in her normal voice said: “hey don’t be scared! This is all make-believe. I’m a real girl just like you!!! Look.” And showed me her Converse Chuck Taylor’s. Broke character to comfort a little girl. Bless her, lol, I go to haunted houses every year.
Participant here, I was at the IT escape room or SAW in Vegas, I can’t remember which one.At one point, you’re in this barn looking setting and one of the actors pops in with a chainsaw (I think, he was behind me so I didn’t see very well what he was holding) to scare you. I was crawling in all fours at that point to get through a tunnel. When the door swung open and the guy came in screaming, I just decided to twerk at him while on all fours telling him “I’m so scared daddy"This is the first time I’ve seen one of the actors burst out in laughter. He quickly ran back out and closed the door behind him. You can hear him cackling behind the hidden room.
I was the guest but a scare actor I guess must have had an odd vantage point because he leaps around the corner to scare me and is head level with the bottom of my chest and in full normal a*s voice goes, ‘holy s**t you’re big’.
We had our own code. When small children are present, you don’t scare. It’s not their fault their parents are jerks and brought them to an adult event. There were always some parents who would walk through with their small children and complain because nobody was scaring them.
On a trial walk through I scared one of our bosses and she said “you grabbed my boob” I immediately took off my gas mask and started apologizing. Couldn’t see s**t in that gas mask.
I scared the literal s**t out of a guy. My room smelled like human feces for at least 20 minutes (luckily he was able to contain it all in his pants). People kept coming in and complaining, I was so embarrassed, I was worried they would think I did it so I broke character a lot during those 20 minutes to explain what happened.
I worked the first year at a scare event in the UK, we had a stooge in the groups and my role was to grab the stooge out of the group and drag him in to a shed. There was a fairly quick turnaround and we’d gotten in to a routine, I’d drag him in to the shed the I’d take my mask off and we’d grab a couple of sweets from the tub I’d brought in then he’d head off through the back door to go join another group.One time there was a hero in the group, after I’d dragged him in to the shed I’d taken my mask off and grabbed the tub of sweets, the one of the customers from the group barged in to the room and stood there with a blank look in his face. I offered him some sweets but he just backed out of the room and closed the door.
I was playing a Samara/The Ring-type character and emerging from my well and some guy grabbed my hair in his fist and yanked really hard. I think he thought it was a wig - i lost it and told him to get the f**k out of my section.
When I was a little kid like 7 idk, i had a little fake knife that like sunk into the sheath so it looked like you where being stabbed, but the thing looked real, like shiny blade and whatnot. My parents took me to a haunted house and didn’t know i brought it, and a guy jumped out to scare me and I pulled the knife on him and he got real serious and backed off like “sorry bro, sorry”… My mom was horrified and took the knife right away and showed him it was fake, but yeah, sorry scary guy…..
Also not an actor but was the participant. I was walking through a section and saw a part that was slightly more dark than the rest. I kept looking at it walking out having a feeling someone was there but nothing happened, just as I was exiting to the new room someone jumped out, and i screamed “I knew it!” Some young girl in zombie makeup fell to her knees laughing.
I was working in a Chucky themed Haunted Maze and my boss was a tiny woman so she was dressed up as Chucky.This big 6 foot 3ish beefed up man got sie startled when ‘Chucky’ jumped out that he punched her in the face!He tried running off and a bunch of us either ran after him or tended to my boss.
While my fam was in a haunted house, one person broke character to ask me for my mother’s name, then proceeded to go to the end of our line and call out her name over and over, freaking her out.
Narrow indoor maze draped with lots of loose fabrics, faux spiderweb etc hanging from the ceilings. Very VERY dark. Guy decides it’s too dark for him and decides to illuminate his path with a LIGHTER. There was only so many zombie grunts I could muster before telling him to put it the f**k away before he [unalived] everyone there.
Last year, the horror show I worked for set me up with a cabin in the middle of a corn maze, and I did a back woods/hills have eye character. I’m 6'5 and was about 385 lbs at the time. These 4 teenage boys were talking tough as they were coming up the trail. I waited until the very last second to turn the corner out of my cabin and the lead kid screamed like a 4 year old girl and fell. He took 2 of his friends with him and the 4th one st his pants. I didn’t know what to do. I just froze. Then I lost it. I was laughing so hard. For a split second I thought about leading st pants through the back way out if the trail, but then I remembered that he had the biggest “I’m a Big Badass and none of this scares me” So he did the walk of shame out of the trail.
Not an actor:Going through a haunted house with my somewhat attention-seeking friends who would scream at anything, we came into one of those foggy rooms. This one had this super cool laser thing at about waist height that was mesmerising but also made it damn near impossible to see through.I went in the room first and the guy was probably waiting for me to either get mostly through or get more of the group in, for some reason the rest of the group was lingering “creeped out” in the hallway so I had time to really stare into this fog knowing full and well there had to be someone in there. I ended up making dead-stare eye contact with this guy hunched down wearing a spooky paintball mask. I probably smiled like the Prince and raised my finger to my lips in a whisper before holding up the two people with me “waiting” for the rest of the group to catch up.After he got his scare driving the whole group out of the room, he gave me a fist bump while I laughed my a*s off in the corner that still makes me feel awesome years later but would be completely out of character for his creepy evil ghoul ninja vibe.
Again, not an actor, but I’m pretty proud about getting them to break.Went to one and they had us crawling on our hands and knees as they walked beside us telling us to repent and yelling “what is your sin?”I said “bigamy”?They stared at me for a half beat and came back with “that’s awfully big of you to admit”Which I thought was hilarious.
Someone proposed to their partner right in front of me while I was in full monster mode. I almost dropped my chainsaw prop in surprise. Love when this happens.
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When I was 16 I worked in a haunted house dressed as a swamp monster with a full mask on. I jumped up from behind a half wall and made monster noises at a guy who then punched me hard in the face. I started crying and the guy was apologizing over and over, saying that he didn’t mean to punch a girl. My nose was bleeding in my mask. He got kicked out and banned, while I got to go home early with a full night’s pay. I’m still mad when I think about it, what would he have done if I was a guy?
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I was hoping to see in this thread the actor who broke character while my friends and I were participating.We were going through a haunted corn maze and we were pretty scared, so we were in single file clinging onto the person in front of us. At one point, there was a haunted building with an actor in front of it. The actor goes, “you shouldn’t go in there!!” In a scary voice.But us being the good rule followers we are, started walking around the building lmao. He says, “wait, what are you doing? You’re supposed to go in there.”.
A girl was having a panic attack tonight so I dropped character to escort her out.Also to point out to people that they just came in the exit and had to go around to the front.
Participate, not the actor. But when my wife and I were dating in college we went with a group of friends to a haunted house. Now for some context, I am pretty hard to scare, but my wife is incredibly easy to scare. There was one part where we had to crawl through some stuff in a single final line, and I was at the end of the group. My wife was freaking out and was having me hold her hand in this crawl tunnel. Since we were pretty much single file, she couldn’t see me well and it was pretty dark. Well during it, a guy tried to come up behind and scare me but I saw it coming, so instead I told my wife I had to let go for a second and proceeded to have the dude take my wife’s hand. When they popped out of the tunnel everyone freaked out. The dude and I had a pretty good laugh about it.
We weren’t actors but my friend and I went to a haunted mansion last year where we live. My friend was very entertaining during it telling the actors they were so scary and asking them questions when they jumped out at us. But my favourite was when we were waiting for people to leave this tripping portal part and someone with a mask and an axe jumps out behind us. My friend looks at them and says “I love your axe”. The actor lowered the axe to the side and put their hand on their face like saying thank you.
Not an actor, but the guy who has to try and make jokes to keep from getting scared. I was at Knott’s Scary Farm a couple weeks ago going through a maze called “Eight Fingers Nine: The Boogeyman”(awesome maze btw) and towards the end there’s girl in a flowing dress and a dried flower wreath crown kinda thing moving very fluidly and kind of dance like, and I turned to my buddy right behind me and said something along the lines of “I bet she listens to a lot of Stevie Nicks” and then left the room.Apparently I said this loud enough for her to hear me and my buddy said she shot me a look that was a cross between “That’s a good one” and “You d**k, I’m trying to stay in character here”.
Not actor but participate. Walking through haunted house there was a vampire guy at the end of a corridor. I noticed it was a corner and a mirror.I said “oh its a mirror at the end"The guy steps around a corner and says “cheers mate. Ruined it didnt ya"I apologised, then he grumbled, “go on then, next room” he sounded so disappointed i felt guilty.
I was hiding behind a corner of the haunted barn and a very thin very pale Marilyn Manson fellow comes and my corner, contacts and all. I screamed at first to scare the group and it automatically turned into a real scream. We were just screaming at each other.
Not my story, but my brother got motion sick at fright fest at six flags and threw up in front of one of the scary clowns who just goes “dude are you good?”.
I was a rover at a HH when I was younger and I would find all the dark corners and places to hide in so I could jump scare folks. I was in a spot one time and this older guy (40-50 range) straight up dropped his pants and started to take a st. I stepped out of the dark and asked him wtf he thought he was doing and why wasn’t he using one of the port-o-potty’s. He yelped and fell backward onto his st. I completely broke and was crying laughing. He stood up and mumbled something before trying to run away before completely pulling his pants up. This all happened under one of the security cameras and the rest of the cast and crew had a good laugh after closing watching it.
I was 16 on a haunted hayride at night in a corn maze. We would stop at each station and actors would grab you, jump on the wagon, etc.We stopped at the " Hell” station and Satan came running up and was going thru the wagon messing with ppl.He saw me and grabbed me and took me off the wagon and pretended to throw me in a fire pit as the wagon took off. He said, no stay here. Lit up a cig, as did I. We talked for a few mins, made a few jokes about how he loved his job, gave me a king size snickers and said , “Run”. LolIt was kinda cool, but I missed 2 stations bc of it. Bastard.
So I was playing a ghost who popped out fromBehind a very thin pole. Literally looks impossible due to mirrors and darkness so it’s a very effective scare. Well that night a group of maybe 6 teenage girls were all walking in a line holding hands. We had a couch in that room cause people tend to fall on their asses from the scare. Well I pop out swinging my axe and the first girl goes down, then the next… until all 6 are on the ground like dominos all screeching and giggling and I could barely contain myself and had to go back to my hiding spot to laugh and it took a solid 15 minutes at least to compose myself.
Participant not actor, but I have 2 stories of my friend group causing actors to break character. The first was in a haunted forest. This place did the chainsaw wielders in the middle of the haunt. However, people sprinting away from someone in a chainsaw would mess up distance and timing between groups. So this place had a second dude with a chainsaw that would jump out of the bushes in front of you about 15 feet after the first guy to stop the group from running too fast. One of my friends is super easily scared at this stuff. So she started sprinting away from the first guy. When the second guy jumped out, she went down like a fainting goat. The second guy was barely holding it together until she whispered “dang it, you made me pee”. He had to hide behind a tree for a minute because he was laughing so hard.At another haunted house with the same group of friends, we went into this room with a large coffin in the middle. The actor in the room was waiting in front of the door to the next room because the group in the next room was still there (had kids that were terrified and moving really slowly). When we got to the bottom of the coffin, it was triggered for the skeleton to pop out at us. However, it was rigged in such a way that the pelvis came out last but was flung out far further. It just ended up looking the the skeleton was doing a giant pelvic thrust. Since we couldn’t leave the room, the actor kept the skeleton thing going. My group of mid-late 20s friends couldn’t handle ourselves over the pelvic thrusting skeleton and the giggling got worse and worse. As we were leaving the room, the actor whispered “it’s not that bad. Everyone else was scared.” I’m pretty sure he was saying it to himself, but we all heard him which made half of us feel bad and the other half laugh more.
I volunteered for my high-schools haunted house for a few years after I graduated.I was usually a “dead body” in a chair in the waiting/initial staging area. I would be still until another character gave them the rules and began filing them out. I’d usually sneak behind the back of the group and then scare them to push them to the next area down the hall.There was a guy with this girl. Obviously, it’s a new relationship or first date. His friend helped him put his arm around her. They were both pretty nervous, it was very sweet.They were in the back and right at a quiet moment…he farted. Like, pretty loud. All the friends looked around, so I stood up and said “Sorry guys, stoner theatre tech kid brought taco bell. You’re gonna want to clear out.” They started the maze, he looked at me with wide eyes…I gave him a thumbs up.I hope they got married.
I volunteered once for a family friends haunted house, we made those classic black plastic sheet “hallways” for the guests to walk through with black lights above. We cut slits in the walls face height and painted our faces with black light reactive paint and were popping our faces through the darkness to scare people passing through.The school secretary was going through, when I popped out to scare her she clocked me with a fairly strong right hook to the jaw out of pure reaction, and I stepped back laughing from the shock saying “Nice one Mrs. VanMiddendorp!”.
I wasn’t the actor, but I was so scared and so uptight during a Glencoe Massacre experience, one of the actors broke character to mutter to me “For God’s, relax”.
I was the participant not the actor, but a Jack the Ripper actor scared me so bad I collapsed on the ground, it was so bad that the actor apologised to me after lol.
I once went through this “Walking Dead” maze and there was this room where you were told to line up and this huge guy in an army uniform starts screaming at you. It was the room before the zombies. I was a bit tipsy and I was wearing somebody else’s head piece with my costume. Cat ears maybe? I looked a mess I’m sure. He was screaming at everybody in full drill sergeant mode. When it was my turn he just looked me up and down and said “what in the hell are you supposed to be!?”. I just giggled and said “I dunno, a cat?” He broke character and let out a little laugh before screaming at the next person.Anyway, I proceeded to lose my s**t when the zombies came out. It was great.
2 times for me.Once there was this guy coming through the haunt that had a monster mask that he kept flapping in the actors faces while making noises, really took me out of it for a second because I was like “uh…I’m being paid to scare you, not the other way around"The other I was in the hall that guests exited the haunt from in the cells. I would run alongside the guests reaching through the bars and popping out of the gaps screaming at them not to leave me or to stay with me.One time some person just stopped and was like “okay.” And then started to ask me a question or start a conversation. I kinda just awkwardly stood there and waited for them to leave.
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