The Four People in Every Horror Escape Room Group

Everybody Becomes Somebody Else When the Lights Go Down

Book an escape room experience with five friends and you will meet versions of them that you’ve never met before. Not bigger or worse versions – but more fundamental ones. Fear strips away the layers of social niceties that people maintain all week, and what’s beneath is usually funnier and weirder than you think. I’ve watched enough groups go into a horror escape room to say with some certainty that there are only about four types of people in the world, and every group is made up of all of them.

You will recognize your friends in this list. You’ll recognize yourself too, and you may not like which type you are.

The One Who Insists That They Are Fine

They booked it. They talked everyone else into it. They spent the car ride over telling everyone that these places aren’t scary and that it’s just all lighting and sound tricks.

Then the door shuts and suddenly this person seems really interested in staying close to the exit. Not in a panicked way – in a strategic way, they assure everyone, positioning themselves usefully. They will declare themselves fine about once every 90 seconds unbidden, which is how you’ll know they’re not. What’s interesting about this person is that they have the most fun of any of them in the room. The gap between expectations and experience is their joy. They will be the one who books the next one.

The One Who Is Just Plain Unbothered

It happens less often than you might imagine. Maybe one out of every four or five groups has one of these people, and they’re really useful.

They’re the one who walks into the room full of dread and starts pulling things out of drawers. The atmosphere leaves them untouched. They aren’t brave exactly – they’re just operating on a different wavelength from everyone else, and while the rest of the group is busy processing the lighting tricks this person has already found three or four clues and is wondering where everyone else is.

Your group could use one of these, and if you don’t have one, the whole process will be slower and louder but will also be more fun, except that you won’t escape.

Just so you know – this person is usually the quietest one of them all in regular life. It seems that something about being terrified by everyone else balances things out for them.

The One Who Screams and Then Succeeds Anyway

My favorite kind of person. This one is scared – really, truly scared – and functioning regardless.

They’ll scream when something scares them, and then without missing a beat, recite the four digit code they figured out. Fear and function apparently have nothing to do with each other, and this is the kind of thing that doesn’t become clear until you see it. Researchers who focus on recreational fear talk about a point of perfect fear, in which the body’s fear circuitry fires up while the brain remains certain of safety, and this person always exists in that state.
This person exits the room in a happy and slightly hoarse mood, ready to hear about the next room that’s scarier.
If you have one of these in your group, your whole hour-long experience is better. Their reaction gives everyone else permission to be scared, which is the point of paying for this.

The One Who Should Not Have Been Here

But there is the other friend who was talked into it and is having a truly unpleasant time, and this is what this article is really about.

Because the difference between good venues and bad ones is that the good venues solve this problem, and the bad ones do not. Good venues ask questions about your group ahead of time, direct you to the room which has the atmosphere and the elements without having the triggers that would set someone off, and reduce the elements on request without making everyone feel like a coward. Bad ones sell you the scariest thing that they have and hope for the best.

So the real advice here is that you shouldn’t talk someone into the scariest room if they don’t really want to go. Send them to the medium room instead. They will surprise themselves, and you won’t waste forty minutes dealing with someone’s true panic instead of solving puzzles.

In Los Angeles, the best horror venues will be very clear about this, offering a variety of levels, from “atmospheric” to “full on scare experience,” and asking and not guessing.

What Separates A Truly Scary Experience From A Simple Shock Factor

Now that we’re here, the thing which distinguishes a scary room experience from the startle experience. Startle is cheap – a sudden noise, a thing that jumps out and is done in a second. True horror is expensive to create and lasts.

Dread begins from an environment working its magic before anything really happens. Air that cools as you go down. Sound with no source apparent. Floor unevenly built so that your inner ear complains but your eyes cannot prove it. Props that make sense even in poor lighting. When the briefing ends in a properly designed room, your body already knows that something is wrong and nothing has happened yet.

The rooms that are worth booking are those that someone clearly obsessed over. You can tell within a minute of entering, and so can your friends, whichever of the four they turn out to be.

Now Get There And Figure Out Which One You Are

The real reason to book this with people that you know is the debrief afterwards. The ride home from a scary room is the better part, since everyone loudly rewrites history about how calm they actually were, and the film in everyone’s memory is against them.

The groups that emerge from a horror room experience are closer after it than they were before – shared fear brings people together every time, and that’s why stag parties and office teams and couples all end up in the same corridor for different stated reasons. Whatever the excuse in the calendar, that is what you are paying for. An hour where nobody performs, followed by a long discussion about it.

When your group runs out of things that actually get to them, that is the corner of the city worth exploring. Take a look at Maze Rooms for all the range available in LA, mild to merciless.

Photo Credit

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