“ThemeDream was able to bring our highly rated and very successful UNHINGED Halloween event to life in 2019 on an impressive scale.”

-Michael Taffe, Director of Operations, Winchester Mystery House

Client: Winchester Mystery House
Project: Unhinged: An Immersive Horror Walkthrough Experience
Location: San Jose, California
Event Type: Public / Halloween Theatrical Attraction
Attendees: 30,000+

The Challenge:
The world-famous haunted Winchester Mystery House hired ThemeDream to reinvent and redesign its annual Halloween-themed public attraction.

The Results:
ThemeDream creatively designed, produced, casted and directed a 45-minute immersive horror walkthrough experience titled “Unhinged” that spanned over 3 floors, 50 rooms of production, 25 costumed actors, and 28 activation nights. The production touted over 250 speakers and 150 different custom audio files of scary sound effects, eerie music, and creepy voice recordings. It also historically featured 6 areas of the Winchester property never before seen by the public, such as one of its forbidden basements. Notable experiential moments included dripping fog projections of apparitions, a haunted moving wheelchair, a speakeasy refrigerator entrance into a secret pantry of fly-swarming rotten food and a fingerless-food-cutting kitchen maid, a Narnia-inspired secret armoire closet with a clothing rack passageway, a frighteningly realistic fire simulation of the house in flames as a half-burned fireman escorted guests to safety, a ghostly 7 year-old girl who warned guests to not wake her angry “Mother” as she escorted you past her dead body to play in her creepy doll room, and a spirit-box pulsing, pitch-black bedroom where blinding flashes of light revealed a sinister paranormal entity quickly approaching to make face to face interaction. The production attracted tens of thousands of customers, tremendous positive press and significantly improved customer review ratings from previous years. And, yes, our staff had paranormal encounters! Cabinets mysteriously opened on their own and room doors startlingly slammed shut right in front of them!

Services Provided:
Creative Direction ◇ Experiential ◇ Fabrication ◇ Immersive Environments ◇ Set Design ◇ Audio/Visual ◇ Lighting ◇ Custom Sound Effects ◇ Custom Décor ◇ Pneumatics ◇ Costume Design ◇ Make-Up Design ◇ Storyline Development ◇ Script Writing ◇ Actor Casting ◇ Show Directing ◇ Talent Management ◇ Graphic Design ◇ Photography Services