Germany’s Heide Park has a new addition, with the Merlin-operated resort and theme park recently celebrating the launch of Dämonen Gruft - a brand-new horror-themed dark ride experience.
A retrofit of an existing space, the ride, which translates into English as ‘Demon’s Crypt’, is built into a space of just 380sq m (4,090sq ft), which provided a significant challenge for the suppliers and creative minds behind the ride.
Featuring eight cars, each capable of carrying up to four people, the ride moves through seven scenes and takes around three-and-a-half minutes, with a maximum capacity of 380 riders per hour.
Set inside “ancient catacombs discovered during excavations”, visitors are invited on the “Katakomben Tour” as they get a chance to explore the crypt. Once on board the dark ride, they are plunged into darkness, with a combination of sound, audio and visual effects keeping them on the edge of their seats ahead of a hair-raising and spectacular finale.
For the attraction, Alterface worked alongside Merlin’s Magic Making team to oversee show production, including artistic direction, lighting, sound, media and special effects. Also working on the project were Pachinko Media, which managed audio production, JP Show Systems, which provided show control and technical design, and Preston & Barbieri, which provided the ride system. Theming came from TAA Group while Oddities provided support in art direction and 400 Coups worked on media production.
Alterface’s Stéphane Battaille spoke to Planet Attractions about what went into the ride’s creation.
“Merlin asked us to help provide the ride on time and on budget. We had both a very tight schedule and an extremely tight budget. They arrived at the point where they had no solution, so they reached out to us and we found a way to assemble a team that was able to, produce the ride for them.”
“It was an intimate exchange with Merlin. They took it upon themselves to manage the ride system and the theming, as well as the design concept. We worked with them to adapt that concept design to fit their budget. There was a lot of discussion back and forth to manage to find a concept that fitted all the necessary requirements.”
“One of the biggest constraints was the size of the ride itself. We did a lot of simulations to see how we could manage the motion of the vehicle without too much immersion breaking - seeing the other vehicle, for example.
Knowing that it's a scary dark ride, you really need to have proper momentum in the dark and you need to feel alone. As soon as you see another vehicle exiting or entering it can kill the immersion, so with things like timing, we had to be really, really careful.”
“We really wanted it to be scary. We wanted to build the anxiety, so that's why we played a lot with the audio, which is a prime feature of the ride. All the other effects are built on this audio, so we created a quiet space with moments designed to calm you down in order to build up some momentum and build up to the ride’s bigger moments.”
“In certain places, the only element was the audio. We created a 360-degree ambience, where you don't really know what's going on, making it feel really creepy and giving that feeling of ‘what's going to happen next?’ We worked with industry specialists on the genre of horror environments to deliver these effects.
“This was a challenging piece. How do you create an effect that's a surprise and delivers an emotional response? We designed the head together with Merlin, who wanted to make it as massive as possible to create an impressive ending. We added projection mapping to make it look alive. We didn’t want it to be just a scare jump, we wanted to immerse you. We also worked on different practical effects and added big audio at the end.”
“At the beginning, you know that something bad is going to happen, but you don't really know what. I really love how we managed to create this feeling of uncertainty. I'm quite happy to have been able to build that feeling through the ride experience.”
Germany’s Heide Park has a new addition, with the Merlin-operated resort and theme park recently celebrating the launch of Dämonen Gruft - a brand-new horror-themed dark ride experience.
A retrofit of an existing space, the ride, which translates into English as ‘Demon’s Crypt’, is built into a space of just 380sq m (4,090sq ft), which provided a significant challenge for the suppliers and creative minds behind the ride.
Featuring eight cars, each capable of carrying up to four people, the ride moves through seven scenes and takes around three-and-a-half minutes, with a maximum capacity of 380 riders per hour.
Set inside “ancient catacombs discovered during excavations”, visitors are invited on the “Katakomben Tour” as they get a chance to explore the crypt. Once on board the dark ride, they are plunged into darkness, with a combination of sound, audio and visual effects keeping them on the edge of their seats ahead of a hair-raising and spectacular finale.
For the attraction, Alterface worked alongside Merlin’s Magic Making team to oversee show production, including artistic direction, lighting, sound, media and special effects. Also working on the project were Pachinko Media, which managed audio production, JP Show Systems, which provided show control and technical design, and Preston & Barbieri, which provided the ride system. Theming came from TAA Group while Oddities provided support in art direction and 400 Coups worked on media production.
Alterface’s Stéphane Battaille spoke to Planet Attractions about what went into the ride’s creation.
“Merlin asked us to help provide the ride on time and on budget. We had both a very tight schedule and an extremely tight budget. They arrived at the point where they had no solution, so they reached out to us and we found a way to assemble a team that was able to, produce the ride for them.”
“It was an intimate exchange with Merlin. They took it upon themselves to manage the ride system and the theming, as well as the design concept. We worked with them to adapt that concept design to fit their budget. There was a lot of discussion back and forth to manage to find a concept that fitted all the necessary requirements.”
“One of the biggest constraints was the size of the ride itself. We did a lot of simulations to see how we could manage the motion of the vehicle without too much immersion breaking - seeing the other vehicle, for example.
Knowing that it's a scary dark ride, you really need to have proper momentum in the dark and you need to feel alone. As soon as you see another vehicle exiting or entering it can kill the immersion, so with things like timing, we had to be really, really careful.”
“We really wanted it to be scary. We wanted to build the anxiety, so that's why we played a lot with the audio, which is a prime feature of the ride. All the other effects are built on this audio, so we created a quiet space with moments designed to calm you down in order to build up some momentum and build up to the ride’s bigger moments.”
“In certain places, the only element was the audio. We created a 360-degree ambience, where you don't really know what's going on, making it feel really creepy and giving that feeling of ‘what's going to happen next?’ We worked with industry specialists on the genre of horror environments to deliver these effects.
“This was a challenging piece. How do you create an effect that's a surprise and delivers an emotional response? We designed the head together with Merlin, who wanted to make it as massive as possible to create an impressive ending. We added projection mapping to make it look alive. We didn’t want it to be just a scare jump, we wanted to immerse you. We also worked on different practical effects and added big audio at the end.”
“At the beginning, you know that something bad is going to happen, but you don't really know what. I really love how we managed to create this feeling of uncertainty. I'm quite happy to have been able to build that feeling through the ride experience.”
