Andrew Montoya with team Hauntarama with ScareFactor.com interviews the Terror In The Corn crew at Anderson Farms in Colorado to discuss changes, continuing policies, and what to expect from for 2021. Terror in the Corn earned an 8.86/10 for 2019; read the details here.
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What is Terror in the Corn?
“Terror in the Corn is Colorado’s only haunted hayride & ghost town experience. Our 30 minute three part haunt is one you won’t soon forget. Part one takes you on a hayride into the corn field. Part two drops you off into the middle of the cornfield. You must walk on a single path past scary scenes and hidden ghouls. The third and final part takes you through our haunted ghost town. The entire walking portion is on a single path. This is not in the maze and you will not get lost.”
Ticket Information
TERROR IN THE CORN (Purchase here)
- Maze: $33 Fri or Sat // $30 Thurs or Sun
- QUICK PASS – $48 Fri or Sat // $45 Thurs or Sun
- ZOMBIE PAINTBALL HUNT – $27 Fri or Sat // $25 Thurs or Sun
- QUICK PASS – $42 Fri or Sat // $40 Thurs or Sun
- PLATINUM PASS – $125 – The All New Platinum Pass gives you INSTANT ACCESS to Terror in the Corn & Zombie Paintball Hunt! It also includes: T-Shirt, Lanyard with your special Platinum Pass, Silicone Bracelet, Koozie, and your choice of a Pop-Socket or Phone Wallet!
Spirit Halloween Discount
Go to a Spirit Halloween and grab a coupon for $2.00 off the ticket price. “Every time you that code is used, for every ticket sold, then we’re going to donate a dollar to Spirit of Children. So, at the end of the year we’re hoping it’ll be several thousand dollars that we can pass along back to them and their charity,” commented the team.
Updates For 2021 At Terror In The Corn
Terror In The Corn: We redesigned and redid the whole zombie paintball hunt. We were allowed to put some permanent structures out there. So, the story that Greg had come up with for the backstory with the Snowbrier Containment Facility is now brought to life. I mean, we have a whole army facility out there with ammo dumps, bunkers, fuel depot, all this stuff, all of our riders on the trailers or drill sergeants, and it’s a lot more interactive than it was before.
Another thing we brought backward, was you have zombies out there, but we also have humans, so we made it more of an interactive thing of save the humans that’re running from the zombies. Of course, as long as it’s not the mother-in-law’s house of one of the trail riders where he will say, “shoot everybody.”
Andrew Montoya: It must be some brave human actors out there as well.
Terror In The Corn: It was a major change, I mean, a lot of people seem to really like it too. That was pretty much like 90% of our focus last year, rebuilding that from the ground up.
Andrew Montoya: Yeah, it’s wonderful, and I understand you’ve put similar efforts this year into the haunt itself.
Terror In The Corn: We went in with intentions that we take just this little chunk out and then the chunk got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Finally, it added into a whole new layout for the haunt. Everybody’s gonna be very surprised when they first, get off the trailer just going through just a very little bit of corn at the very start.
Yeah, we have some surprises that we probably shouldn’t share. We want you to be surprised too. For people who have been coming here for years it’s going to be a major major shock to them. Of course, start to finish it’s over a mile long. So, they get started with the Mile of Mayhem. We’ve done a lot, we’ve created a whole different part of the town. It looks like we put at least a million dollars into it when it was really closer to half a million.
The Terror In The Corn Crew Discusses Finding and Retaining Actors
Andrew Montoya: Speaking of the length of the haunt, I’d imagine you guys are hiring a lot more actors here. You guys had trouble finding folks to fill all those spots?
Terror In The Corn: No, not too bad. We were a little worried, but again we have a different type of job than your normal job, so we haven’t really had the problems that we thought we were going to.
Andrew Montoya: There you go, I guess it does kind of attract a certain breed.
Terror In The Corn: Yeah, yeah. We’ve had somebody in the office doing more of the numbers and getting all the hiring itself done, but I didn’t really realize how many people we had hired until we had our first orientation, and I was like, “OK, we don’t have enough room here to talk to everybody, we need to move.” It’s a lot more people that we’ve hired in the past, we’re excited to fill all these expanded roles.
Andrew Montoya: Yeah, absolutely. Did you have a lot of returning actors as well?
Terror In The Corn: Yeah, quite a few I’d say with 50-60% at least, and most of the ones that didn’t come back, it was mostly just handling the college now kind of thing. It wasn’t like, “yeah, I don’t want to work there anymore,” most of them want to come back that you know they got school to deal with. It was a pretty good number.
How Did 2020 Affect Terror In The Corn?
Andrew Montoya: Well, I know you guys also took a top spot in our 2019 ratings for the entire state of Colorado, so I’m kind of curious how those results translated into potential success last year in 2020.
Terror In The Corn: We did not skip a beat as far as attendance or anything like that. With COVID we actually did really well. Shockingly, we had a lot of sold-out nights. It just made it where we spread out the amount of people that we got instead of having it all in the last two weekends.
Andrew Montoya: There you go, there you go. So, were you guys kind of staggering folks going through things like that?
Terror In The Corn: Staggering people going through, we required everybody to wear masks, we had signage everywhere, we had hand sanitizer everywhere. Every time the trailer would run for the first part where they were taken to the haunt, it was basically sprayed down every time before we get another group to go on. We did just everything. I want to mention, I hope you guys don’t mind me mentioning Spencer Terry, because he was kind of at the forefront of putting together a lot of COVID plans, and a lot of haunts utilized his stuff. We utilized a lot of what he was doing, gave us a lot of great ideas on directions to go, and it went really, really well and really, really smooth.
Timed Ticketing Is One of the Biggest Things Coming Forward From 2020
Terror In The Corn: One of the biggest things we did last year was, you know, we always had time ticketing, but we cut down the limit of the number of tickets we would sell for half an hour, so we can keep our crowds more manageable, because that works so well spreading out our crowds so we didn’t end up with a really crazy couple last weekends, people were coming earlier, we’re still going to do that this year. Now, we’re bringing the numbers up a little bit more, because you know, things are hopefully better. But we’re hoping that will allow us to sell out more, just like we did last year. We were selling out a lot of nights and people were buying tickets earlier, earlier, earlier, and earlier because “if I can’t get tickets the last weekend, I guess I better buy some now.” So, we’re going to incorporate that quite a bit, just really for crowd control more than anything else.
