Courtesy photoThe job is to scare people. Wichita State University students Reese Willbanks and Izzie Licata take the responsibility to frighten seriously. They know the sound of success on a dark October night.
“Any time you make anybody scream and run away from you or jump away,” Licata, a sophomore from Memphis, Tennessee, said. “Teenage boys especially. When they’re with their girlfriends and they’re trying to act all bad. When you get them – that’s how you know.”
Willbanks and Licata are among the roughly 100 actors at Field of Screams Kansas, a long-running haunted attraction at Prairie Pines in Maize that counts several Wichita State students and alumni on its cast and crew. The lore of the murderous Spurlock family, the attraction’s theme, started with a class paper at WSU by Kip Scott, owner/operator of the attraction.
Kip and Jody Scott are Wichita State alums, as is marketing manager Dave Lyon. The Scotts opened Field of Screams in 2004 on the family’s three-acre sorghum field and learned better scare tactics from that debut. Business tripled in 2005, Kip Scott said. On an average night, around 1,600 people start with a hay-rack ride before meeting the Spurlock family and the cast of frightening characters lurking throughout 20 scenes.
“We realized four or five years into it that it was a solid business model,” Scott said. “We have a loyal fan base. When it’s Halloween in Kansas, people are talking about Field of Screams.”
The actors attend auditions in August. Those who survive go to Scare School. Imagination, enthusiasm and an outgoing nature are part of the audition. The actors create a character that can make its unsettling point in a few seconds before the customer moves on.
When the show opens in late September, around the corner or lurking in the sorghum may be an actor with a chain saw (no blade, of course), pyrotechnics or a make-believe corpse. Creepy members of the fictitious Spurlock family – accused of serial killings in 1966 in the Maize area – are abundant.
Courtesy photo“I love scaring people,” said Willbanks a sophomore from Overland Park. “It’s so fun to see the different ways people react to the same scare.”
Also important is the personality who can handle pushback from a customer who is frazzled and testy after a good scare.
Around 75 actors work each night. Scott said the retention rate from year to year is around 60 percent. Field of Screams changes or updates roughly eight scenes each year, with construction and preparations starting in early July.
“The biggest asset that I’ve seen over the years is our actors and their commitment to bringing it to life every year,” Lyon said. “You can have the coolest special effects and scenes, but if you don’t have good actors, I think the whole thing falls apart.”
The most important lesson is “scare forward.” The enjoyment lessens if customers retreat and bump into another group. Actors are charged with startling people in a way that continues progress to the next scene.
“We try to keep them all at the same pace,” Scott said. “If you’ve had a really successful scare in one area that’s intense, then we pace it down. The next scene is not quite as intense.”
Licata, a psychology major, and Willbanks, who majors in social work, enjoy acting and Halloween movies. Licata created two characters for Field of Screams: Debra Spurlock, a member of the family, and a clown named Ditzy.
“I have grown up going to haunted houses – my dad would always drag me,” Licata said. “Halloween was a big part of my life.”
Willbanks created Susan, possessed as a teenager and doomed to live life as a mannequin, Zoey Spurlock and a clown named ZoZo. She is in an improv troupe at Wichita State, which she says is good preparation for Field of Screams.
“It helps me a lot with being on my toes out in the field and knowing how to reply quickly,” she said.
In 2001, the Scott family returned to Wichita and the family business from Los Angeles. Prairie Pines featured a Christmas tree farm and dinner theater. It needed a new money-maker. They made a brief attempt at the haunted attraction and returned more experienced and committed in 2004. Now Field of Screams accounts for, Scott said, around 80 percent of the family business.
“It’s unique – with the indoor-outdoor elements,” Lyon said. “You’re walking through the sorghum fields, and you get that eerie ambiance of being outside and, ‘What’s around the corner?’”
Kip (a 1997 theater major) and Jody Scott (a 1996 music education major) studied in WSU’s fine arts program. Lyon, who started at Field of Screams in 2013 after working as a commercial producer at KWCH, is a 2007 WSU graduate with a major in communications.
Running a haunted attraction isn’t a typical career path, but classes and performances at WSU help them create and organize at Field of Screams. Writing scripts, developing themes and stories, building out characters are all part of classes and performances in fine arts. Kip Scott took theater business classes and learned to build sets while at WSU.
“No. 1, having experience with storytelling,” Kip Scott said. “Writing scripts that an audience is going to engage with. You don’t have a show if you don’t have an audience, so we have to do things to bring in an audience.”
Field of Screams and the Spurlock family bring in an audience, frighten them and send them home with spooky memories each fall.
About Wichita State University
Wichita State University is Kansas' only urban public research university, enrolling more than 24,000 students between its main campus and the WSU Campus of Applied Sciences and Technology (WSU Tech), including students from every state in the U.S. and more than 100 countries. Wichita State and WSU Tech are recognized for being student-centered and innovation-driven.
Located in the largest city in the state with one of the highest concentrations in the United States of jobs involving science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), Wichita State University provides uniquely distinctive and innovative pathways of applied learning, applied research and career opportunities for all of our students. The National Science Foundation ranked WSU No. 1 in the nation for aerospace engineering R&D, No. 2 for industry- and defense-funded engineering R&D and No. 9 overall for engineering R&D.
The Innovation Campus, which is a physical extension of the Wichita State University main campus, is one of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing research/innovation parks, encompassing over 120 acres and is home to a number of global companies and organizations.
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