5 Horror Scenario Hooks That Start In an Escape Room

If your town is anything like mine, escape rooms are springing up all over. This new fad gives us a ready-made reason for a group of ordinary people to be thrown together into a horror situation. Here are five Fear Itself scenario hooks that all start with the characters working their way out of an escape room. You can either spend a little time having the group solve the puzzles of the escape room, or start at the moment they open the door and find something awful waiting on the other side.

1. Trap horror. To start with the obvious, the trap the group paid for could turn out to be deadlier, bigger and more sadistic than the brochure said. When the door opens, it leads to a lethal labyrinth laid out for the pleasure of sicko customers watching via closed circuit TV.
2. Zombie apocalypse. The group gets out of the room only to find the attendant being feasted upon by a ravenous reanimated corpse. While they were locked in, the outbreak spread to the doorstep of the escape mystery parlor. Cue the survival horror.
3. Goop / contagion horror. To get one of the keys that unlocks the room door, the group must open a can full of slime. Usually this is just a colored gelatin of some sort but here the unlucky vector character cuts her hand on the can and gets some of it in her bloodstream. It then starts to infect her. As the group tries to find out what was in the can and how it can be countered, they discover that cans of the goop have been placed in escape rooms throughout the area, in a bid to trigger a weird outbreak.
4. Slasher. The door opens to reveal that the attendant has been brutally murdered. The killer leaves a message warning them that they’re next. This could be the work of a non-paranormal killer doing the most dangerous sport thing, or a sorcerer completing a death ritual to summon the devil / Outer Dark Entity.
5. Door to hell. The door opens and the group isn’t where they went in. They’ve been transported to a demon dimension. The real escape game has only begun.