Today I shall be showing you how to make a DIY horror escape room, using an example: Dead Silence, my own DIY escape room my cousin and I built in one day.

step 1: find a really creepy old room in your house somewhere

In our case, it was in our summer home. The old smoking parlour was the creepiest place in the world, covered in old musty spiderwebs and full of dust. At least, I think it was a smoking parlour because there was one of those old smoking parlour chairs in there. There were some very creepy family photos, along with some family photos and antique options. It was perfect to terrify our audience.

step 2: get inspired by any and all things in said room

For Dead Silence, we focused on the two portraits of young girls, probably in their 20s or so. We named these two girls Ruby and Rose, and put name tags under their portraits. This inspired a chain of events, where the perfect storyworld emerged and every puzzle made sense. Ruby and Rose were the two daughters of John and Emily Veil. After being enlisted in the army and stranded in the middle of nowhere with no food but his own dead fellow army, John developed an unquenchable thirst of human flesh with no boundaries. The horrifying story unfolds in front of you as you realize that John became a cannibal, convinced his daughter Ruby to become one too, and killed and ate both his wife and eventually Rose, his other daughter. We also managed to pull off a cannibalistic theme without one drop of fake or real blood in the entire room.

step 3: use any creepy objects in the room you can manage

We ended up using creepy old family photos, a globe covered in spiderwebs, a rotting book, a horn of some creature, a flashlight, a scale, a bookshelf, a window, the trees outside, an old CD player, a bicycle helmet, and even more.

step 4: progressively tell a story through your puzzles

The audience should be scared the whole time, but get progressively more scared as the room plays out. If you throw all the scariest stuff at them at once, they won't get more scared over time. A great way to ensure this doesn't happen is through diary entries. In Dead Silence, the diary entries focused on the father becoming progressively scarier and more violent. We also made them accidentally turn on creepy lullaby music partway through that they could not turn off. Also, make sure you pull out the scary things later. For example, 2/3 through the escape room we made participants walk out into a forest in the dead of night, looking for missing children posters. Just make sure you tell a story through the experience. Story is different from theme. You will know the theme as soon as you enter the room, and the puzzles don't have to be related to the theme. But you have to learn the story.

step 5: make your puzzles connected to the storyworld

Ah, the love/hate relationship I have with DIY escape room puzzle books. So much work put into them. So many hours spent browsing the book. So many awful puzzles.

See, this is the thing. This may sound weird, but the best puzzles aren't from books. They're from your own imagination. If you want your room to be immersive, try to think of what you would do if you were actually in that situation. For example, if the setting is a prison, you might try to lean away from the math puzzle that would unlock a box, and instead try to figure out the guard's shifts so you can plot when the best time is to escape. Instead of finding a code to the cell door on a piece of paper written in invisible ink, have players find a note with the week's codes, or even make a machine that generates the week's codes and the players must figure out how it works.

See, all I'm trying to say is make your own puzzles. Make them seem realistic. Make your audience forget that they're in an escape room.

step 6: scare the sh*t out of them