21 August 2023
Halloween may be months away but for Rich Perry and his Amazon series “Spooky Kisses Haunts” the holiday is celebrated every day.
“Spooky,” where first season episodes are $2.99 each, guides viewers to the history and locations of some of the country’s most venerable scare sites.
Halloween haunted attractions, it turns out, are a nationwide industry. “Spooky” is founded and run by Perry and his wife Beverly, who live in New Hampshire.
He explained, “We have a very unique story about how this show was created. My wife and I have both lost prior spouses to cancer. But we found a way to look death in the eye and are now producing a series about the Halloween haunted attraction industry.
“Just over a year ago, we were filming demo reels with an iPhone, and now we have a full blown series show streaming on Amazon Prime.
“I was working on video production,” he explained, when his first wife died in 2012. In 2022, remarried to Beverly (whose spouse had also died – the two couples were friends), Perry decided to slowly launch “Spooky.”
“I discovered,” Perry, 55, said, “that the ticket sales for these Halloween haunted attractions are like $500 million a year. That’s a smaller subset with a $10 billion Halloween industry in the United States where Halloween is the second-biggest holiday after Christmas.
“I was shocked when I saw that.”
He realized, “Nobody is competing in this space with this type of show other than travel. And travel? Quite frankly, what they put out is not very good.
“Our shows,” he believes, “are the first of this kind because I edit them all. Haunted house attractions are located all over the country. The last I checked there are 2,400 haunted attractions in the United States.”
The couple find that their spartan set-up — “Honestly,” Perry said, “it’s just me and Beverly, just a single camera shoot” – offers an unaffected intimacy. “The owners love it because there’s no show that ever really shows them.”
But just because it’s a two-person show doesn’t mean it’s simple. “I’ll be honest with you. In some of these places, we shoot three days straight. Normally that’s at least 12 hours of footage. And it boils down to 40 to 50 minutes for the show and probably 150 hours of editing.”
Among the current “Spooky” episodes are “Pennhurst Asylum” about the Pennhurst State School and Hospital, “Markoff’s Haunted Forest,” which opened in 1993 and covers 200 acres in rural Maryland, “Field of Screams,” which is run by two brothers who were born on this farm, and “Laurels House of Horrors,” an attraction built into a 50 year old abandoned movie theater.”
“Spooky Kisses Haunts” is available on Amazon Prime