fun house

Lost City - a large traveling funhouse that unpacks from two articulated trailers.

A funhouse and fun house is an amusement facility found on amusement park and carnival midways in which patrons can have a number of unusual and hopefully amusing experiences, both physical or psychological. Unlike thrill rides, it is a participatory attraction, where patrons enter and move around under their own power. It can be thought of as a slightly insane or even sadistic obstacle course, or as a place where people can briefly experience a world very different from the normal, because, for example, the floor doesn’t stay put under their feet, they can’t always trust their senses and even gravity is not completely reliable.

Common features

The fun house is so called because in its initial form it was just that: a house - or at least a building - containing a number of amusement devices. At first these were mainly mechanical devices. Some could be described as enlarged, motorized versions of what might be found on a children's playground. The most common were:

• A slide, usually much taller and steeper than you would find on a playground. Some were as much as two stories high. Slides of comparable size can be seen today on carnival midways as separate attractions. Most were made of polished hardwood, and riders would sit on burlap mats to protect themselves from friction burns and to ensure that rubber-soled shoes didn't slow the slider down.
• A large spinning disk. While the disk was stationary patrons would get on and sit in the center, then the operator would start the disk spinning, and people would be thrown off by centrifugal force, ending up against a padded wall. A variation was a disk with a raised center, shaped much like a Bundt cake mold; as the device sped up, people would slide downhill as well as outward.
• A horizontal revolving cylinder or "barrel" to try to walk through without falling down.
• Sections of floor that undulated up and down, tipped from side to side or moved forward and back, either motorized or activated by the person's weight. Stairs that moved up and down, tipped from side to side, or slid side-to-side alternating directions between steps. The industry refers to these and similar devices as “floor tricks.”
• Compressed air jets shooting up from the floor, originally designed to blow up women's skirts, but effective at startling almost anyone and making them jump and scream.
• An array of distorting mirrors.
• A really large ball pit

Notwithstanding the images in movies and comic books, fun houses did not drop patrons through trapdoors, which would be far too dangerous. One type of floor trick plays on this image: it consists of a section of floor that suddenly drops just a few inches, making victims think they are falling into a trapdoor.

Some fun houses would bring new arrivals through a short series of dark corridors or a mirror maze, often leading onto a small stage where they had to negotiate a series of rocking floors, airjets and other obstacles while people already inside the funhouse could watch and laugh at them. A few places even provided bench seats for the watchers. Once patrons were inside they could stay as long as they wanted, moving from one attraction to another and repeating each one as many times as they chose.

This type of fun house was a sort of miniature version of Steeplechase Park in Coney Island, whose “Pavilion of Fun” — a building resembling a huge airplane hangar — included, in between the rides, a gigantic slide, a spinning disk probably 50 feet (15 m) across, and a large stage where patrons emerging from one of the most popular rides were harassed by clowns carrying paddles and an electric prod and women in skirts were helpfully guided over airjets. It is not clear whether fun houses were created in emulation of Steeplechase, or Steeplechase emulated an already existing fun house somewhere. There may be a clue in the fact that the traditional fun house was sometimes referred to as “European-style.”

Through the first half of the 20th century most amusement parks had this type of fun house, but its free-form design was its undoing. It was labor-intensive, needing an attendant at almost every device, and when people spent two hours in the fun house they weren’t out on the midway buying tickets to other rides and attractions. Traditional fun houses gave way to “walk-throughs,” where patrons followed a set path all the way through and emerged back on the midway a few minutes later. These preserved some of the traditional fun house features, including various kinds of moving floors, sometimes a revolving barrel and a small slide. They added such things as “crooked rooms” where a combination of tilt and optical illusion made it hard to know which way was up, and dark corridors with various popup and jumpout surprises, optical illusions and sound effects.

Although some walkthroughs were given unique names, like “Aladdin’s Castle” (Riverview Park in Chicago), “Magic Carpet” (Crystal Beach, Ontario) or “Riverboat” (Palisades Park, New Jersey), many were still labeled “Fun House,” and regardless of the official name the public generally referred to them that way.

Many traditional fun houses were removed after parks created walk-throughs. Some became dilapidated and were torn down. A few burned down; they were nearly all wood-frame buildings with extensive electrical wiring. Those that remained were all at traditional local amusement parks and died when those parks closed due to competition from new theme parks. No theme park ever created a traditional free-form stay-all-day fun house, but theme parks sometimes developed the walk-through attraction to new, high-tech heights. A few traditional fun houses are still operating in Europe and Australia.

Related, but with somewhat different history, are walk-through haunted houses and mirror mazes, although the latter are sometimes labeled fun houses.

Fun houses in the movies

Scenes in traditional fun houses can be seen in the silent films “It,” “The Crowd” and “Speedy.” The Judy Canova film “Carolina Cannonball” (Republic, 1955) concludes with an elaborate chase scene filmed at a large fun house in Venice, California. “I Love a Soldier” (Paramount, 1944), has a brief scene shot in the fun house at Playland-at-the-Beach in San Francisco. Hollywood sometimes built elaborate fun house sets with devices never seen in a real fun house, as in the 1939 Joe E. Brown film “Beware Spooks!” or the 1937 Fred Astaire musical “A Damsel in Distress.”

Film Noir classic "Lady from Shanghai" (1948): Orson Welles's famous final shootout takes place in the fun house's hall of mirrors, as O'Hara learns the truth in a place that trades on deception.

A funhouse is used by the villain Francisco Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man With The Golden Gun, where a series of animatronics, obstacles and illuminated mannequins are used to distract and frighten the victim before being shot by Scaramanga.

In Grease the end number You're the One That I Want takes place in a real carnival funhouse built by the Hollingsworth company of Florida. The performers actually move through the funhouse backwards, entering at what should be the exit and emerging at the entrance.

Carnival fun houses

Traveling carnivals have long included small walk-through fun houses in between their thrill rides. The typical carnival fun house is built entirely in a semi-trailer, usually about 40 feet (12 m) long by 8 feet (2.4 m) wide, so it seldom contains anything elaborate: At best, a few dark corridors, a light-up skull, a couple of gravity-powered tipping floors and an airjet at the exit. A few include motorized devices like moving floors and stairways. Some have revolving barrels, but since the barrel has to fit inside the width of a semi-trailer it is very short and not much of a challenge. A few attractions traveling on two or more trailers are more elaborate.

Beginning in the late 1980s a few American operators acquired European-built attractions that unfold into multi-storied walkthroughs with dozens of tricks. Such funhouses are ubiquitous in Europe, but the falling value of the U.S. dollar and the high cost of fuel to transport multiple trailers over the long distances carnivals travel in the United States has made them expensive to buy and operate, so they are seen only at the largest American fairs.

See also

• Mystery Fun House

External links

• Laff In The Dark Information and history of the dark ride and funhouse amusement industry
• The Darkride and Funhouse Enthusiasts (DAFE)