What’s in! What’s out! What’s haunted! A visit to the Midwest Haunters Convention.

I don’t know if there’s anybody who still needs to hear this, but: It’s a bloodbath out there, people. Covens of faceless trolls snap at our heels. Charming vampires feed on our vulnerabilities. Living in the 21st century has become a horror show. Every day is a fresh hell.

But that doesn’t mean you have to be unfashionable.

Last weekend in Rosemont, about 140 days before Halloween, I attended the Midwest Haunters Convention, a long-running trade show for haunted-attraction professionals: mask sculptors, fake-blood distributors, creepy-contact-lens salespersons, would-be zombies looking for seasonal work, haunted house general managers. Unlike the much larger Halloween industry show held each February in St. Louis, Midwest Haunters (organized by Winnetka-based TransWorld Exhibits) is for mom-and-pop haunts, modest charity scares and even your annoying neighbors who transform their lawns into graveyards every October. They represent just a fraction of the estimated $500 million spent annually on haunted attractions (itself a fraction of the estimated $10 billion spent annually on Halloween), but they need inspiration, too. They need to know what’s horrible and now, what’s stomach-churning and what’s on-trend for the killing floor.

In: Evil nurses.

Out: Evil clowns.

What follows is a handful of the trends that smart ghouls and haunted mansion will be rocking this fall:

1. Burlap sacks

Midwest Haunters, as expected, was full of creatively nauseating, state-of-the-art, gore-encrusted masks. Rabid Grinches. Decomposing nuns. Vengeful roadkill. But the hottest looks — if cosplaying attendees are any indication — were simpler, rougher and makeshift, the kind of thing any cost-conscious maniac in a garage could scramble together. Think eye holes in cheap sheets and swaths of paint for mouths — and that’s it! P.J. Marinelli of Lifeless Creations in Pittsburgh said he wanted to make affordable masks that wouldn’t sacrifice impact. As Brent Wilson of the Haunted Attraction Association put it: “I think people understand today that there’s something much more incredibly unsettling about the idea that any weird Joe out there could throw a sack over their head and become a horror.”

2. Custom fog

Why stock up on dry ice when you could kick out 40,000-cubic feet per minute of premium swamp gas? The leading purveyor of unnerving weather systems is Froggy’s Fog of Tennessee, and among its newest technology is the Poseidon A2, designed to generate a fog layer that will hug the ground of any decent graveyard. Mix in one of Froggy’s 59 scents — including charred corpse, raw sewage, gasoline and pumpkin spice — and you are world-building! For something more endearing: The Fobbles F4 or F8 kick out a constant cascade of large bubbles containing small clouds of fog inside each bubble.

3. The cheerfully demonic

Let’s face it: The real sickos out there rarely snarl. Sometimes they’re smiling. Or sometimes they’re playthings. Call it Chucky Chic. One of the hottest trends is mixing gore with candy-colored innocence. The prop shop Pumpkin Pulp of Muncie, Indiana, is offering a mask of a homicidal pink-pigtailed female clown sporting cupcake horns. Owner Brian Blair said it’s partly a reaction to “how many women have gotten into the haunted attraction industry in recent years.” They also sell demonic barnyards of animal masks, from cows to catfish. Chad Smith of Unsub Masks outside Champaign had an even better idea: When a local costume shop closed, he bought its mascot costumes, distressed the fur and added fake blood. He narrowed the eyes on a bunny, and added a faux robotics panel to a Barney character. Chuck E. Cheese gone rogue, indeed.

4. Mad props

Last autumn, as the pandemic began to ease, haunted houses had one of their biggest years in recent memory. “But they also noticed wait times were so long, many had to come up with fresh ideas to keep visitors occupied,” said Wilson of the Haunted Attraction Association. Some created games for people to play in line. Others focused more attention on the often neglected rooms that visitors move through on the way to scares. This means more immersive atmospheres, more attention to the creatures that haunt the lines and more bloody props. Hence, the steady business in creepy teddy bears and devil babies to stick on a shelf. Sapien Studios of Pittsburgh was selling spider children that convulse with barely any effort and ragged $650 milky-eyed “cave kids.” Mason Lauster, of Indianapolis-based Slaughterhouse FX, said a lot of attractions are looking now for singular, ready-made objects that will tie a room together. The days of axes are gone. Now you need a wrench rigged to a large saw blade.

5. Rotting pumpkins

We’re talking specifically about sculpted, decaying gourds that last a season and beyond. Sometimes animatronic and growling, sometimes staring out dead-eyed, classic and static. This is the cottage industry for Toxic FX of South Carolina, which offers 10 variations on believably-moldering evil jack-o’-lanterns. “We just thought, in this business, you can’t go wrong with pumpkins,” said owner Blake Phillips. Judging by the steady stream of customers at the convention, business is booming. Among their squashes: Grumpkin, who looks grumpy, and Drunkin, whose long pinhead looks tipsy. Each is $85, or $125 with a lighting kit.

6. Hyper realism

We’re talking disturbing replicas of rotting feet, flayed torsos and worse. Michael Chaille of Ghost Ride Productions — which has made haunted-house props from casts of real people for 22 years — once heard from an attraction that its visitors got concerned for a woman curled into a fetal position on the floor. They didn’t know she was one of his props. “Audiences have seen it all before, but it doesn’t look real,” he said. So, on the table before him at the convention were heads (seemingly) frozen solid. He makes an urn with a melting face and several versions of bodies severed at the waist. Again, at a glance, it looks real. But then a glance is all this stuff gets. “We get six to 10 seconds to be impactful with a piece,” he said. “People move on. They’ve seen expensive animatronic monsters. They expect it now. The thing is, nothing beats clever.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com