The new face of Halloween
Northglenn firm's ghouls haunt horror-show billboards
By Kelly Pate Dwyer , Denver Post Business Writer
A mummy. Elvira. A wrinkled, purpling corpse - its eyes glowing red and yellow, jagged teeth dripping with the blood of a fresh kill.
These are the sorts of gruesome images that advertise haunted houses all over town and across America. A good share of them originate from deep beneath a nondescript Northglenn house.
"It gets you in the mood working six feet under," said artist and Brainstorm Studios co-founder Doug Graham, who seldom gets to his basement office before noon. "I start at about 10 (p.m.) and go through 'til about five in the morning to get into that groove you can actually create."
Brainstorm is a grassroots illustration and marketing company now approaching a decade in business.
Almost by accident, the company now counts on the the macabre buzz surrounding Halloween - an increasingly lucrative adult holiday.
Halloween is a $7 billion holiday, and Americans who celebrate it will spend $42 on average decorating, partying and dressing up this year, according to a survey by the National Retail Federation.
Likewise, the haunt business, Brainstorm's lifeblood, has also proliferated.
Haunted houses have grown more sophisticated and diverse - they are more or less scary, more or less gory, more or less for adults and kids, said Greg Reinke, who owns Reinke Bros. costume shop and the Haunted Mansion in Littleton."I've got $1 million invested in this house," he said.
Each year Reinke, a Brainstorm client, spends another $50,000 on haunt technology and props for new surprises.
The payoff: 17,000 to 35,000 people come through his door each season, depending on weather and other factors, at $10 a head. Other haunted houses go for as much as $17 a haunt.
Brainstorm is behind the posters used by more than 80 haunted houses, including a half dozen in Denver and those at California's Paramount Studios and Knott's "Scary" Farm, New York's Madison Scare Gardens, and the company's latest haunt, the Fright Dome in Las Vegas' Circus Circus casino.
The secret to Brainstorm's designs is careful research mixed with photography and computer illustration.
Partner Chuck Svoboda has gone so far as to sneak into a local hospital morgue where he snapped pictures of a gurney and other equipment to get realistic proportions for one poster design.
Then he shot the bottoms of a friend's feet, which had been dipped in latex paint that was then ripped off in patches.
Graham transformed the paint into the peeling skin of a dead man.
Brainstorm does the occasional music and entertainment job, but now the firm is pushing into new depths of the fright business with Scare Shop, a web site that sells T-shirts, posters and bobbleheads they've designed as well as art that can be licensed for cheaper than buying original art.
Graham, Svoboda and Chuck Rains, who handles the business side of Brainstorm, started the company in 1994 with a shared love for heavy metal music and art and what they later discovered was a penchant for darkness.
They'd only made slight progress designing album covers and the like when a local company that makes Halloween masks asked for their help designing some products.
Those designs traveled to the Halloween industry's main trade show in Chicago.
"We basically showed our wares and we've been going full tilt since then," Rains said. Article Published In The Denver Post: Wednesday, October 29, 2003
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