I know you said your haunt was small but can you give us an idea of a number to go with that ? 5,000sq feet ? 10,000 sq feet ?

size

Only about 2000 sq. ft. for the indoor attraction, then a walking trail as a seperate attraction. I only want a few rooms in the indoor attraction because a good bit of space will go to maze type construction and and walk through areas that arent "rooms" I just mainly wanted to know with a group of 8-10 people can they form a line in a 10ft. long room, 12 ft. long room, etc. I want everything to be tight and in your face but I dont want people to have to hug each other to fit. Thanks!

Woah that's small! But if your actors are awesome and the scares are top notch it will be a great hit! I think the best way for you to find out the answer to your question is to throw a pizza party and invite ten of your good friends over and have them stand in a line and have you measure them!

If you would like an example of an attraction layout, my friend Kyle has the details to one on his website. Www.kylepasciutti.com click projects and you'll see Fright Haven Haunted House for Charity towards the bottom of the page. You may find it to be a useful exemplar, it's closer to 10,000sq ft but you'll be able to atleast see how space is used fairly wisely.

"but in a 8-10 person single file line in a room, how big would it have to be so that all of the group could see what was going on in the room at the same time?"
Shoulder to shoulder against one wall your looking at 20ft if you want them comfortable I think 17ft would get them all in and a bit in each others space which is better for a haunt mentally.
In average haunt lighting they will put four feet between themselves (one ft if they are scared) so they will take up between 32ft and 40ft of hall on the move, and will take a full 9 seconds or more to all enter a room if the first person is stopped to view what happens in the room.
If you are not stopping the first person and allowing them to walk through while the room activates he will stop in the middle for the best view of the action.
This is a sliperry slope your asking about but its good that your asking. To help more we will need more info.
Are you stopping them to see the room or is the plan for the room to work as they are walking by/through? Your reset time for your actor is the reason you need to know this in the planning stage.
I hope this helped more than hindered you, and we can certainly delve deeper into it.
Allen H

Room size

Thanks for the input so far! The only room that they would be stopped completely in is the "holding room" where I am going to have them watch the safety video on a tv and a quick storyline of the haunt. (Try to keep it under 2 minutes to spread my groups out.) Being a first year I think I can get away with one group every 2 minutes but hopefully I have to change it all because of too many people! haha But for this room they can actually be standing in the middle of the floor because as long as they can see the tv they are good. Other rooms are more of a walk-by type but that is interesting about the hallways Allen, I had some hallways/maze type deals in my original sketch that I dont think will be long enough. Also, in this small of a haunt, do you think it would be more important to take the group size down to say 6 people so that there could be another room or two and try to cut my time down to 1 minute and a half between groups? The only problem about not stopping the groups in the rooms is that 2000 Sq. ft. will go QUICK and I don't want people to be disappointed because it did not take long to go through. Some of you guys and girls with experience help me weigh out my pros and cons.

This is a suggestion, after I heard you say "walk by type" rooms. What do you think about cutting group size down to 6 like you said, eliminating your holding room (use the queue line for the rules and haunt info) and make the scenes walk THRU. Not walk by, put them into the scene to get them completely emersed in the environment, have your actors interact with them (not touching) but they can insult them...like if it's a doctors office and a couple walks in the actor in the room could be like "oh glad you made it! Your girlfriend here called ahead for your weenie implant" (that happened to me and my girlfriend at a haunt before and I thought it was hysterical, the actor also thought my girlfriend needed a nose job....I refused to comment for my own personal safety..... Anyway. With interactive scenes and actors that do more than just scream at your customers, you'll stretch out the length of the haunt.

How's your location setup? Would it be possible to make this like a mini "test haunt" leading up to your trail? So you can have an original queue line infront of the indoor haunt, so it's almost more like line entertainment and then they immediately are in the next line to go into the trail? Or if it can just connect to the trail that would be even better so the entire experience feels longer and not broken up. Just my two cents.

Yeah, we are on the same page, when I say walk by i meant walk through, in my head that is what I was picturing, just didnt get it out right typing. haha Actually we are lucky to have 2 400ft. long by 20 wide turkey houses on the farm that we are making customers walk through after they buy their tickets with a few props, a couple of actors, etc. that will also serve as the que line and keep them under a roof on rainy nights so that we can operate rain or moon. However, they have open sides and we tried to build some walls to make another haunt in the turkey houses and the weather is too harsh on the wood (buckling etc.) But overall from the time they get out of their car and get their tickets they will be in a haunted setting. We already have another small building that starts the trail off. I may could move the waiting room outside, I was actually just leaving it indoors to make the customer feel like the haunt lasted longer because it is so small. haha The reason I don't want to connect them is just so we can have SOMETHING to do on rainy nights. Our trail will shut down in the rain, so we were going to offer a discounted ticket to just do this mini haunt to try to at least get a few dollars that night.

Even if they are connected, they can still be two separate attractions. You can have a redneck rampage, killbilly slaughterhouse, whatever you want to call it for the inside attraction, and your outdoor attraction can have another name. Even if they just lead into one another, it's all in the wording (there's a haunt in Baltic CT, Dark Manor, that does that, they have an indoor haunt, and a backyard outdoor haunt, and it's claimed as two attractions. And it's very successful)

Your idea of a reduced ticket is great, but is there a way to place tarps or roofing in the trees or build a large raised roof over major scenes outdoors so it can lessen the rainfall over your props and even if it's raining you can still send people through?

Also, for the walls you tried building but warped, brace them with 2x4s and they shouldn't warp.

My 1/2 roof=maze

The walls are old steel doors, the pattern twists and turns and it's outdoors. Since it is outdoors if I had a real and full roof over it I know that bees, bugs, birds and maybe even bats would be building their homes inside, whereas the half-roof sort of discourages those "guys" from nesting in there because it is half open and ferel cats can hunt them there or at least put a good scare into them.
If it rains over the customers they can walk on the side covered and stay mostly dry.
A half roof also allows light to enter and doesnot become a totally confining structure. The roofing material is corregated galvenised steel pieces 10 ft long.
Having light or even daylight illuminate the maze does tend to give the customers a false sense of security and it will be found by them to be just that, a false sense...of security.
(I have scared So Many in there!!)

Room size

Not having a location yet myself, I'm planning all of my rooms in different sizes so that when I do land a location, I can kinda arrange and modify as necessry. One thing to keep in mind is what each room is all about. How much space does each prop take? How much space is needed for any theatrics by your actors? I think a basic rule of thumb, and I could be wrong on this, is about 9 sq. ft. per person. Figure a 3x3+/- area. You may be able to shave that down a little but keep in mind that you'll have people of varying sizes going through.

Another thing you'll want to do is have each actor do at least 2 scares each. If you plan carefully, you could even get a third scare out of some of them but may be spreading your staff a little too thin. It depends on your layout and throughput. You don't want to have each actor assigned to doing 2 scares and missing 3 out of every 5 groups that come through on one of their scares.

A few small static scenes or downsized pop-ups and animatronics along the way (work best in corners at turns) can help set the customers up for the next scare or at least give them a startle scare in between actors or show animatronics. This can also provide the much needed distraction before a really good scare.

Another way of getting the most out of small spaces is through forced depth perception. Paint mural type scenes (2-dimensional) on the wall and then add 3-D elements out from the wall. This 'projects' the mural scene off of the wall. The props and other 3-D elements in this case are a continuation of the painted scene into the floor space.

Steve...