Evil Visions Haunted House is a terror attraction located on 2670 Garrett Rd in Monroe, Louisiana. In an interview conducted with Jeremy Lucky, he shared insight on his experience as the owner of Evil Visions.

Question: How did you first start up Evil Visions?

Answer: As a kid I worked in a couple of haunted house attractions, and later I worked at Edge of Madness in Calhoun. It was a cool attraction and made me fall in love with everything. I have had Evil Visions now for eight years. We love what we do, so we want to keep growing, building and making this bigger and better every year.

Q: What made you decide to open a haunted house in Monroe?

A: I am from the area and this community means a lot to me. This area does not have a lot for the youth to do, so they stay in trouble. We want to make it a safe place where people can hang out and have entertainment and stuff for everybody to do .

Q: As for design and construction, how does that work? Do you handle a lot of that yourself?

A: I oversee most of it, but it is a group effort. It takes a lot of us, and everybody has an individual role when it comes to the building. This is a year-round thing; it does not just take one person. Each person is a gear that keeps things moving forward. If we are doing a full-on build, it takes several months. It depends on what we are adding or doing that determines how long it really takes.

Q: What’s the most challenging part of bringing the concepts to life?

A: The whole thing is a big production, so you have got anywhere from 30 to 40 actors, security detail, food vendors and regular vendors, you have a lot of things going into motion. Since I have to oversee most of that, it does get quite challenging. I try to put people in positions such as managers to help take some off of what I have to do. I delegate some, and that helps out a lot, but it takes all of us to keep everything running.

Q: How has the Monroe community responded to the haunted house?

A: Some of the other businesses… weren’t into it, so that is why we moved from downtown. We ran out of space. We did everything we could there. We only had that one building, and we couldn’t add to it because I did not have any more property to expand to. Everybody was there, there were big, massive groups of people and certain individuals did not always like big groups of people. To which I am like, we are bringing community and fun, what is not to love? We just decided this would be a better fit for us because we have 20 acres of land here. We can build, we can expand and we can watch everybody coming in and out and make it even safer.

Q: Have you faced any backlash or issues within this profession?

A: We got kicked out of art alley for dressing up a couple actors, they were not gory or bloody, but they were walking around and taking pictures with kids. I remember walking into one of the head people that did the art crawl at the time… she looked at me and said, “Your kind is not welcome here.” I said, ‘What are you talking about? It is an art crawl.’ She’s like, ‘This is not art.’

This is performance art, this is theatrical art, this is airbrush art, every scene that we do. Putting it all together takes a lot. We can not go to Spirit Halloween and buy something. It breaks. We make our own animatronics, and to build those, you have to have engineering backgrounds to understand the dynamics of the pneumatics and the pneumatic system, because it all runs off big compressors.

Q: Do you have an engineering background, or do you bring in someone else?

A: I am self-taught at pretty much everything. At the end of the day, I’m a high school dropout, so I have just done decent for myself by just staying on top of things. The biggest part to me has always been community. That is the huge part of this.

Q: Evil Visions has been running for years now—what keeps the same perople returing to be part of it, and what makes it special for them?

A: We have a lot of veteran actors, so they have been with us. I have got some people that have been with me since I started. They have been here for all eight years we have been open, and that is what keeps people coming back. It is not that anybody makes a lot of money doing this. I do not make a lot of money doing this, and any money that I do acquire from it, I put right back into it for expansions and other things. We do it for the love of this whole thing, because this is truly local art. Every part of this from the scene set up to the makeup, the effects, the lighting, everything we do is all artwork. It is all 100% art driven.

Q: What advice would you give to anyone wanting to do this in the future?

A: I encourage everybody, with anything they are doing, to just try. I have two, semi-successful small businesses, but I have opened about 10 businesses. Eight of those 10 did not work but two did, you just have to try… The thing is, to get into this it is very expensive. I got lucky in different ways, like when I acquired my items, that I was able to buy some stuff from other people. I got into the right groups, found the right items, found good clothes and things like that, which really helped me out.

Q: What feeling do you hope people leave with after they have completed the haunted house?

A: I want them to be as terrified as possible. When you come through the haunt, this takes you out of your normal walk of life. It takes you out of your element and gives you that feeling of danger, without ever actually being in danger. So, when you walk away, we want you happy and thrilled to say, ‘Hey, I survived this.’  We want you to leave with a good feeling about yourself. That is what we want. We want everybody to have a good time and just feel welcome. This is a place where everybody can be themselves and act weird if they want.

Q: Where did the name ‘Evil Visions’ come from?

A: I purchased this haunt from a different individual. He had already had it named—I thought it was a pretty good name. Now, I probably would have gone with something different because I do have people that protest every once in a while, saying that we are evil. It just kind of stuck, so we rolled with it—it was good. We wanted to keep that name alive and pay tribute to the original guy that had the idea. We just happened to come here and make it bigger, and we are trying to keep it going.

Q: What three words would you use to describe Evil Visions Haunted House?

A: Fun, scary and exhilarating.