From its modest beginnings as a railroad link to Los Angeles, CA and Salt Lake City, UT in 1905 to its mob-led urbanization in the 1930s as a gambling mecca (and later a family-friendly mega resort with the arrival of Howard Hughes in the 1960s), Las Vegas, Nevada has long served as a draw to those with an entrepreneurial spirit and a keen sense of showmanship. Enter “hauntreprenuer” Jason Egan, a man whose own spirit of enterprise would take him from his nascent origins as a home haunter to that of transforming Sin City into a worldwide destination for horror fans.
Having recently visited Egan, a creative multi-hyphenate and horror fan himself, B-D got a chance to discuss the evolution of his horror empire, as we traversed his top-notch and rather terrifying escape room experience Escape IT “The Funhouse,” one of four mind blowing escape attractions which he currently operates (the others being Escape IT Chapter “The Sewers,” Escape Blair Witch and The Official SAW Escape, the latter ranked the ‘Number #1 Escape Room in the Nation’ by USA Today).
“I’ve always loved scaring people,” Egan related, as we made our way through the painstakingly recreated sewers of Derry, merely one section of the jaw-dropping, thirty-one thousand square feet which comprise the Escape IT experiences. “When I was a boy, I’d turn my parent’s backyard and basement into haunted houses just to freak out my brother and friends. They were such a hit that later in high school, I decided to start my own party planning service, creating haunted house parties for the kids I went to school with. Soon enough, other parents started calling to ask if I could stage haunted houses for their own children’s parties, and that’s when I knew I was onto something.”
From there, Egan’s passion for the art of home haunts continued to grow, first during his college years at the University of Nebraska (where he rented a fifteen thousand square foot abandoned manufacturing plant and transformed it into a successful spook house for Halloween), and then later in Las Vegas, with his first Nevada attraction.
“I noticed Vegas was seriously lacking in the Halloween department,” Egan recalled. “All they had were these cheesy haunted trailers in grocery store lots. So, I set up my own haunted house in an old vintage ballroom – which incidentally had a dark history of actual murders which took place within it. The attraction, which was called “Tomb of Darkness,” was something Vegas had never seen, and people loved it.”
“One night during the run,” he continued of his career evolution, “the marketing director from Circus Circus came by and left her card with my mom, who was working the ticket booth at the time. So, I called her up, and the next thing I knew, they offered me their Adventuredome theme park to turn into a haunted attraction! My only condition was that I could make it as scary as I wanted, and they were cool with that. That led to a fifteen-year partnership, and we created one of the top-ranked haunted attractions in the country. And that’s how Fright Dome was born!”
The massively successful seasonal fright attraction would run for fifteen years, engulfing the static indoor theme park which adjoins the Circus Circus Hotel & Casino, and would grow into one of the top Halloween attractions in the world (Egan took it international in 2014 with the opening of Fright Dome Hong Kong).
Part of his success came from his strategic partnership with film studios and rights holders including Lionsgate, Twisted Pictures, Compass Films, Fortress Features and Warner Bros., which assisted him in creating memorably frightful walk-through attractions within Fright Dome that were based on popular horror titles, including Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Collector, Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine, and more. One of those partnerships included a collaboration with the late great George A. Romero. Together they created the attraction “Ward of the Dead,” the only haunted attraction on which the master of horror ever endeavored.
“Working with George was remarkable,” said Egan. “He’s essentially the inventor of the zombie genre. I’d long been a fan of his work, particularly Dawn of the Dead. So, the opportunity to collaborate with him was something I seized immediately. George even came to Las Vegas on the attraction’s opening night, and we made our grand entrance together. It was a truly surreal moment for me.”
Not one to rest on his laurels, in 2016 Egan teamed up with Scott Cawthon, the video game mastermind behind “Five Nights at Freddy’s” to create the world’s first interactive theme park attraction based on that game, and then in 2017, he partnered once again with Lionsgate. This time his aim was to to bring to life, in escape room format, the world’s first immersive experience based on one of the highest grossing horror franchises of all time: SAW.
“I realized that if you keep doing the same thing, you’ll get the same results,” offered Egan of his expansion into the realm of immersive entertainment. “Fright Dome had its limits; there’s only so many tickets you can sell without overcharging people and we wanted to keep prices fair for Las Vegas. So, I talked to financial professionals and other business owners and figured out the key is to scale, and to grow. That’s what led us to create the Official SAW Escape, and then Escape Blair Witch, followed by Escape IT “The Sewers” and Escape IT “The Funhouse” in 2023. But we’re being really picky about which intellectual properties to take on. We don’t want to spread ourselves too thin or to ever lower the quality of the attractions.”
All together the four attractions comprise sixty-one thousand awe-inspiring square feet just off the Vegas strip, with each featuring multiple interactive rooms, state of the art special FX, live actors, animatronics, and exhaustive attention to detail, all which serve to fully immerse visitors into the frightful world which they’ve selected to enter, and to hopefully escape from (although given the unrivaled attention to detail, deep-cut Easter eggs and exhilarating game play throughout, die-hard horror fans may just not want to).
Of that attention to detail, Egan remarked (as we entered the Derry Canal Days section of Escape IT “The Funhouse,” which is replete with sinister carnival games and a lurking Pennywise), “It’s a big deal for us. We want visitors to feel completely absorbed in the world we’ve created, and that means three hundred and sixty degrees of immersion, and no cutting corners. Unlike in movies, where they can cheat a bit with camera angles, we can’t. Every inch of our rooms must be spot on to make you feel like you are in an actual space. We study the films we’re recreating relentlessly, sometimes having to fill in gaps the filmmakers maybe never showed or even filmed. The team have gotten so good at this that film companies are now coming to us for other projects, which for me feels like a big win.”
Having survived Escape IT “The Funhouse,” Egan and I ventured over to his horror-themed pizza shop Sliced, which occupies the same footprint inhabited by both the Official SAW Escape and Escape Blair Witch, for a slice of the parlor’s signature “Murder Pie” (New York-style pizza with a black crust) and to smash some bumpers on horror-themed pinball. As scary flicks played on the restaurant’s multiple flat screens, Egan reflected on his career, and on his journey in growing his passion from his early backyard haunts to taking that same passion to the world stage.
“I love picking apart and listening to great minds and motivational speakers,” he offered. “Like Mark Cuban says, ‘Effort isn’t just simply turning up on time, its proactively problem solving and going above and beyond your role requirements. So, it’s all about putting your best foot forward. Whether that be in customer service, in production, operations, or design, so that we can continue to build these exciting attractions that seem to bring so much joy. And though it is consistently a huge amount of work, as a horror fan, I feel just like a kid in a candy store.”
Up next? Egan’s John Wick Experience, opening in Las Vegas later this year.
