- Hello, I'm Beth Macmillan, and welcome to "ARTEFFECTS."

In our featured segment, we take you to Carson City for a night of scares at the Dark Prison Haunted House.

Thanks to a partnership with the Nevada State Prison Preservation Society, the Dark Prison Haunted House team has breathed new life into the historic prison, all while contributing to the site's preservation and rehabilitation.

(tense music) - Dark Prison Haunted House is a walkthrough experience at the historic Nevada State Prison where you'll encounter three haunted houses, which is immersive sets designed and built to depict a storyline.

I work on our haunted attraction from a creative, décor and build perspective, making all of the props for our haunted house and planning the production.

I spend the whole year making everything spooky.

The Nevada State Prison Preservation Society is the board of directors that oversees this amazing historic location.

We are one of their vendors that is here for the Halloween season.

- My name's Lucia Maloney.

I'm here as the General Manager for the Nevada State Prison Preservation Society.

We do historic tours, paranormal programming, special events.

Virtually all of that revenue goes back into the preservation work.

We do a lot of capital projects, improving stairs and ADA ramps so we can bring people in and share the history.

Our Board President, "Mo" White, the story goes, he was up in Reno at the Bowling Stadium, which is where the Haunt was before.

He thought that it would be very cool if both Dark Corner Creative, the company behind the Haunt, and our board worked through this idea of bringing in something completely different from the historic tours and that more historic focus that our board had.

Dark Prison brings an opportunity to think about the space differently in a fun and creative way while still respecting the space where I think visitors who wouldn't necessarily come for a historic tour can become aware that the prison's even here.

- Dark Corner Creative and the Preservation Society have the same goals.

We want this location to thrive.

- They've really been partners in identifying needs and helping us fix them.

And then they do things in their infrastructure of the Haunt itself to honor the history like this year we've expanded outside in the handball court.

They have matched the art of the new building to the historic sandstone, which is really fantastic.

- The Nevada State Prison is an exceptional venue for a haunted house.

I mean, just the site itself before we build any of our haunted attraction inside has this weight, the textures, the old pipes, the sandstone bricks that were quarried right here on the site, the iron bars, the site itself is phenomenal.

We start with a storyline.

The storyline drives everything.

And from there, we create the Hollywood-style temporary walls that we move in.

We paint them, we make the environments, we bring in the set decoration.

And my favorite part about the art here are the high quality horror props.

It's really once you get the prop in its environment that the fun starts as well because all of that small detailing tells the story of the room you're walking through.

It's funny when you think about set detailing because it's like, oh, you're going to put all this work into all these little details and then you're going to turn the lights off?

Well, it matters.

People can just feel the environment.

- To be in these sets that we've been able to give time to add details to, it just allows you as an actor to be able to expand your character based off those details that are in the set, to explore the space and to use it to its full potential.

In any haunted house, when you are assigned a character, you want to find like your version of that character, and you want to explore that.

And even the characters that don't even have a story, like Scary Shrub Number 1, give yourself a name and give yourself a little bit of a backstory.

Why am I scary?

How am I scary?

What is it about this character that is actually scary or entertaining?

- What I like to tell the actors is you have so many different chances to try new things because a haunted house is not like a theatrical play where you perform once and then the lights go out.

- You get hundreds of opportunities to try your character out and be like, okay, that really worked well.

I'm going to continue to do that because I got a big scare, I got a reaction, versus that did not work, I did not get a scare.

Maybe I need to change it to this way.

So, you're always growing that character.

You're always exploring it.

(Actor laughing) (bright music) It starts in a real cell block that you get to walk through.

You meet some of the inmates and then there's a jail break that you're all of a sudden roped into.

You have escaped prison.

It continues on into our second haunted house, Unit 15.

We named it Unit 15 because it says Unit 15 on the door.

You are going through different areas of the prison that the inmates have kind of taken back for themselves.

And our third haunted house is a more hospital medical kind of scare.

(gentle music) It's so cool to be able to see just how many artists put their heart and soul into this place to build these sets, to build these props, and I'm in awe of it all the time.

- There are so many different reactions from our guests at the haunted house.

You get the screams, right?

And the excitement, but also all of the laughter.

You really feel something, this is immersive art.

You leave all the scream and the terror behind, but you also leave with a newfound respect for this historical property.

- When you come to the prison yard and you look around and you're like, "This is incredible," and then you experience these actors that are terrifying, terrifying, but really genuinely great humans, the experience that we have built here and continue to grow is just something I'm really proud of.

(bright music)