Haunted House + AI image generation = potential for a marginally more spooky experience?? Prepare for terror.

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Background:

Haunted houses are a Halloween experience that can range from extremely cheap and homemade (“this bowl of grapes is… human eyeballs!!!”) to extremely expensive and professional (e.g. Disney’s Haunted Mansion, although that’s not technically a “Halloween” experience).

Fig. 1: For whatever reason, the standard haunted house is a Victorian mansion, and not like, a 1970s suburban split-level family house.

The goal of a haunted house is to evoke a feeling in the attendees that may range from “mildly unsettling” to “blood-chillingly terrifying.”

Proposal:

Thanks to modern computers and the unsettlingly fast development of Orwellian surveillance technology, it is now possible to create a new type of haunted house attraction: inserting the face of the actual haunted house attendees in props in the haunted house.

The system is simple: at the entrance to the haunted house, a camera gets a good look at the incoming visitors.

Then, a computer uses modern deepfake technology to create a digital version of each visitor, but with a slight twist: “as a vampire in a gothic portrait” or “as an engraving on a tombstone.” (This can almost certainly be done in less than 15 seconds.) These haunted images are then projected onto props in the haunted house (Figure 2).

Fig. 2: The camera (left) figures out what the visitors look like, and then a computer generates suitably-haunted versions of the visitors for the props in the haunted house (right). Here, we have a “vampire portrait” (which is actually an OLED display screen) and a tombstone (which is a piece of foam board with an image projected onto it).

You could even do some sort of really fancy 3D mapping and match the visitor’s own face onto a vaguely similar mannequin, although this is probably out of the range of the budget of a neighborhood haunted house.

Conclusion:

Compute costs could be kept low by running the image generation locally. This is probably totally feasible!

PROS: Increases the unsettling-ness factor of a haunted house, with no moving parts required!

CONS: Furthers the day when humans are obsolete, replaced entirely by AI?? Maybe that’s the TRUE horror of this AI-enabled haunted house.

Originally published 2026-02-02.