Field of Screams in Mountville, Pennsylvania (Lancaster County) is one of the most popular haunted attractions in America, and for the fourth time, the Schopf family trusted Needs More Fog to produce the high-impact video that opens their season.
Why Field of Screams matters: America’s #1 Haunted Attraction by the numbers
Brothers Gene and Jim Schopf opened Field of Screams in 1993 with a single haunted hayride on their family farm at 191 College Avenue in Mountville, about 10 minutes west of Lancaster. The 2026 season is their 34th. What started as one wagon ride is now a 35-acre Halloween destination spanning two farms, with more than 1.5 million guests through the gates over its history and roughly 75,000 visitors in a typical season, many of them driving in from Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Jersey and New York.
The recognition backs up the “America’s #1 Haunted Attraction” tagline. USA Today readers voted Field of Screams the nation’s number one haunted attraction in 2015 and ranked it number two in the country in the 2023 USA Today 10Best Readers’ Choice awards. The Travel Channel featured it in “America’s Scariest Halloween Attractions II,” HauntWorld magazine named the Haunted Hayride one of the top five attractions in America, and in 2022 the property served as the primary filming location for the Lionsgate horror feature “Where the Scary Things Are.” BuzzFeed, Cosmopolitan and dozens of regional outlets have covered it, and it is a perennial fixture on national top-ten haunted house lists.
Four haunted attractions on one massive property
A single “Scream Pass” covers all four attractions, and each one is a full-scale haunt in its own right. The Haunted Hayride (1993) is the original: tractor-pulled wagons carrying up to 80 riders through roughly 10 scene stops in the cornfields, with new scenes added every season. The Den of Darkness (1995) is a three-and-a-half-story Victorian haunted mansion built out of an 1840 barn, one of the original haunted houses in the country. Frightmare Asylum (2002) turns the property into an abandoned hospital of surgeons, patients and basement research labs. Nocturnal Wasteland (2013) is a 20-minute outdoor trail through wrecked vehicles, toxic swamps and a 3.5-million-volt Tesla coil. Add the midway, escape games, the once-a-year Extreme Blackout, the Zombie Fun Run, and offseason events at Christmas, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day and Halfway to Halloween, and you have an attraction that never really closes.
Nearly all of it is built in-house. The Schopfs’ team designs and fabricates its own animatronics, sets, sound design and costumes on the farm, and many crew members have been with the attraction for more than a decade. The same family also owns and operates Corn Cob Acres, the daytime fall family attraction on the same property, which Needs More Fog also produced the 2026 promo for.
Capturing the whole attraction in 60 seconds
The brief for 2026 was different from a single-haunt trailer. Field of Screams is not one scare; it is a night out that moves from the hayride wagons to the barn to the asylum to the trail, with thousands of guests filling the midway in between. The promo had to sell that scale. Our team shot across the property to capture every attraction and the energy of the crowd, then cut it into a fast, cinematic 60 seconds designed to run on social, pre-roll and the Field of Screams website through the season. It is the kind of high-impact piece an attraction with 75,000 guests a year needs to stay at the top of the list.
Four projects in, with more on the way
This is the fourth video Needs More Fog has produced for Field of Screams, following the cinematic trailers and social content from previous seasons, and more work with the Schopf family is already in motion. When one of the most popular haunted attractions in America keeps coming back to the same production team, it says something about the fit: we have designed, built and marketed nationally ranked haunts ourselves, so we understand what a haunt owner needs a trailer to do, where the best scares live, and how to shoot an actor-driven attraction without giving the show away.
Haunted attraction video production for Pennsylvania haunts and beyond
Needs More Fog produces cinematic promotional videos, trailers, behind-the-scenes features and social content for haunted attractions, haunted hayrides, scream parks and themed entertainment brands across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland and the Mid-Atlantic, including Field of Screams, Corn Cob Acres, Factory of Terror, Legends of the Fog and Shocktoberfest. If your attraction needs a season-opening video that sells the whole experience, production dates for the 2027 season are filling now. Tap below to start the conversation.
