PROJECT CASE STUDY
Luna Dark
festival.
Transforming Luna Park into Australia’s largest Halloween party through spatial design, technical systems, fabrication, and immersive storytelling.
Out the front of Luna Park during the Luna Dark Festival.
OVERVIEW
Scaring people in the 10s of thousands.
Project: Luna Dark Festival
Role: Experience Design / Engineering
Client: Luna Park Melbourne
Event Duration: 6 to 8 nights annually
Visitors: Thousands per event
Skills: spatial design, electronics, fabrication, VR previs
Luna Dark is Luna Park Melbourne’s annual Halloween takeover, transforming the historic amusement park into a series of immersive horror experiences. Each year the event introduces new haunted attractions, themed environments, and interactive scare experiences designed to move thousands of guests through the park over multiple nights.
I work as part of the creative team and as technical team lead, responsible for designing and building several of these attractions. My role focuses on the spatial design, technical systems, and physical fabrication that bring the experiences to life, from planning maze layouts and environmental storytelling through to developing custom hardware, lighting effects, and interactive scare mechanisms. The goal is to create environments that are both atmospheric and robust enough to operate reliably under the pressures of a live public event.
Luna Dark is an event that proudly celebrates and showcases human made art, having chosen to not use AI generation tools in any of the pre-production or production work.
Designing the Haunted Houses
The design of each haunted house begins as a series of hand-drawn layouts that map the overall structure of the experience. At this stage the focus is on guest flow, sightlines, and the placement of key scare moments. Corridors, turns, and small rooms are arranged to control how guests move through the space, ensuring that groups progress at a steady pace while maintaining the feeling of uncertainty and tension that makes the experience effective.
Once the initial concept is established, the haunted house is rebuilt as a VR previs environment. This allows the layout to be tested at full scale before construction begins. By walking through the haunted house in virtual reality, it becomes possible to evaluate how spaces feel, how quickly guests move through them, and whether sightlines reveal too much or too little. This stage also allows the team to test the timing and spacing of scare moments, ensuring that actors and effects have the right opportunities to surprise guests without interrupting the overall flow.
After the experience design is validated, the layout is digitally refined to ensure the structure can be built efficiently and safely on site. Wall systems, access points, and performer positions are checked to make sure the haunted house operates smoothly during the event, including safe pathways for actors and crew working inside the structure.
Once these stages are complete, the haunted house is constructed inside the park using modular wall sections, props, lighting, and practical effects. The final installation translates the planned experience into a physical environment that can operate reliably across multiple nights of the festival while maintaining the pacing, atmosphere, and story beats established during the design process.
Engineering the Effects
Beyond the spatial design of the haunted house, a significant part of the work involves engineering the technical systems that allow the experience to operate reliably during a live public event. These systems control lighting effects, sound cues, mechanical elements, and performer triggers throughout the attraction, ensuring that the environment behaves consistently while still allowing actors to respond dynamically to guests moving through the space.
To achieve this, I design and build custom control hardware to manage many of the effects used within the haunted houses. These purpose-built control boards coordinate lighting, sound, and mechanical triggers across the installation, allowing multiple effects to be synchronised or operated independently by performers and technical staff. Custom firmware is developed to manage these systems, ensuring they remain stable and responsive across long operating hours during the event.
Operational safety is also a major consideration in the design. The haunted houses include a communication and monitoring system that allows performers, technical crew, and management to remain connected while the attraction is running. This system supports performer safety inside the structure while also enabling real-time coordination with line management outside the attraction. A queue timing and tracking system helps staff monitor throughput and adjust pacing so that guests move smoothly through the experience without overcrowding the internal spaces.
The engineering of the haunted house also includes the mechanical and structural requirements needed to build a temporary installation within a working amusement park. Modular wall systems, concealed performer access points, structural supports, and service pathways are all designed to ensure the attraction can be constructed efficiently, operate safely during the event, and be removed again after the festival concludes. These considerations allow the haunted house to function as both an immersive environment for guests and a robust installation that meets the operational requirements of a large public activation.
