Get your scare on at Terror 29

People love a good scare.

And now they can get it right here in Brandon at the seasonable business, “Terror 29.” Located at the corner of Cedar St. and Kirkwood Boulevard, Terror 29 owner Zac Tenneboe and his cast of spooks are ready to take you behind the doors for some Halloween time fun.

Tenneboe was literally “born” into the industry.

“It boils down to my parents did a home haunt way back in the day, like when I was in middle school, then when I turned into an adult, I wanted to do a haunt, and for some reason that just turned into getting a building. It was like, ‘go big or don’t go at all.’ Essentially, it’s turning a home haunt into a professional haunt,” Tenneboe said.

Tenneboe first opened Terror 29 in 2019. With a need for a new location, Tenneboe brought the business to Brandon. Terror 29 is open Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and will be open on Halloween, which is a Monday.

“Halloween is definitely the bread and butter of the season,” Tenneboe said.

But the scary business isn’t solely limited to October. Tenneboe hints to an “evil elves and a Krampus” event in December, a bloody Valentine’s pop-up in February and their annual ‘halfway to Halloween’ event in May. Along with the maze of scare tactics, Terror 29 also has a gift shop that Tenneboe said will be open at different times throughout the year. He also welcomes company parties and the like.

The draw to haunted houses, Tenneboe believes, is that people like to be scared “in a safe place.”

“And people love the thrill seeker adrenaline rush,” adds Aaron Krumholtz, whoserves as Tenneboe’s right-hand man. “It’s the ability to jump from a plane without a parachute, but be completely safe. And it’s getting to the point where people are getting conditioned to certain scares that they have to go bigger and bigger and bigger.”

In the opening weeks, Tenneboe said traffic through the haunted house has been steady. It takes between 10 and 15 minutes to inch your way through the darkened maze of terror, blood, chains and more.

“Some go through easy and some are so scared,” Tenneboe said.

The haunted house is geared to middle and high school age students, but Tenneboe assures that adults will love it, too.

“Then there’s little kids that come through that love it just as much, so we don’t have an age limit. We leave that up to the parent’s discretion,” he said.

“You have to love horror to be in this kind of thing,” Tenneboe said. “For me, the creativity is the fun part. We spent weeks and weeks and hours and hours coming up with ideas.”

Tenneboe enlists a cast of volunteer actors to bring on the scare. Typically, that number hovers around 16 volunteers

“They love it just as much as we do, and we’ve had almost the same crew since 2019,” he said.

But just not anybody can be a volunteer scare monger. Tenneboe said they hold auditions.

“There is some training and some of it is we just let them figure out what to do. We give them tips and give them guidance, and they just kind of run with it,” he said.

Tenneboe said part of the suspense is being in line waiting to go through Terror 29.

“I think that it’s like the ‘Psycho’ movie. You never see her get killed in the shower. You do that in your head, you fill in the blanks in your head, so, when you’re standing in line, you’re actually making it worse for yourself. But I think that anticipation is why you see people freaking out on line,” Tenneboe said.

“That’s also what helps us in the long run because the psychology of the scare is just as much as putting up walls, painting them up and going ‘boo,’” adds Krumholz.