Haunted
Attractions
Imagine you are standing in the crisp cold of the night waiting your turn in
line to get into the scariest haunted house in the state. The atmosphere just screams to you: ‘you wont come out alive’. You are getting close to the front of the line. The butterflies in your stomach start to flutter more and more. In the distance you can hear people screaming. It is finally your turn, you think about turning back but you know deep down that you want this. You get gathered in the group you will be traveling with. You are so nervous but yet so excited. The group slowly descends into the dark. Then you think, “Why am I here?” You are here because it looked fun, the advertisements dragged you in! In this essay I will be deciphering the different advertisement concepts they use to reel in the bate.
Not everyone likes haunted attractions, but the people that do want the best
of the best. The 13th ward haunted attraction is know for sending grown men screaming out of the nearest exit and having kids begging for mercy. Their advertisements target people who crave fear and adrenaline; people that want to be scared out of their wits. The different ways they advertise this is by website, Facebook, online ads, and word of mouth. Through their websites, Facebook and online ads they show creepy deranged actors portraying helpless psychiatric patients. The wording they use is eroded and distorted looking to make you think of
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death and disease. So of course, people who are looking for good haunted attractions through the internet are unintentionally looking for creepy pictures and wording that catches your attention, and their advertisements sure do please the eye of the mentally deranged customers.
The Sanctuary grabs people’s attention through their advertisements by a
true story behind their haunted attraction. People love scares, but when the scares are based on a true event, that is when they get panic-‐stricken. The Sanctuary is based on a psychiatric hospital in the early 1900s that was founded by Charles Labrie. He was only looking for the best people to work at his hospital when he came across a very renowned doctor with very impressive experiments. The patients were improving very well at first, but he started to see things take a turn later on. He went to investigate only to be taken in as a patient himself to suffer the cruel experiments. Besides the disturbing story background it uses the same imaging concepts as the 13th Ward: gruesome, fearful,
