Dan Barner, Booo365, Ballston Spa – Outlook 2025

He might even be able to make you scream.

The Ballston Spa native, who owns and operates his own digital marketing firm, has worked part time as a “scare actor” during the Halloween season for the past two decades. Now he’s parlaying those years of experience — along with his marketing skills — into a new endeavor, Booo365.

Booo365 seeks to fill a business niche need no one else has noticed. Along with business partner Anne Kenkel, Barner will be offering training, community connections and marketing services to haunt-themed attractions across the Northeast and perhaps beyond.

Halloween has bloomed into one of the most popular commercial holidays of the year, which has planted the seed for a number of attractions — haunted hayrides, spooky houses, bloody manors, zombie zones — that are now growing and expanding into holding events outside the traditional season.

“Creepy Christmas is a big thing,” Barner said, noting there are also spring events to commemorate “Halfway to Halloween.” (That would be April 30, if you want to mark your calendar now.)

There are also plenty of scare actors who post their own short videos on social media platforms such as TikTok, bringing additional attention to a growing industry, a multimillion-dollar field that includes the design, operation and ownership of haunted attractions.

An industry organization, America Haunts, estimates there are 1,200 haunted attractions in the United States drawing thousands of customers. Industry revenue is estimated at more than $300 million annually.

Barner and Kenkel formed Booo365 roughly a year ago after meeting while both worked at the Double M Haunted Hayrides in Malta. They spent much of 2024 traveling to haunters’ conventions and visiting about two dozen established attractions such as Blood Manor in New York City and Field of Screams in Pennsylvania. They were learning how other spooky businesses operate and also networking. Wherever they went, they would explain that they planned to offer training podcasts and marketing services for those attractions.

“People were really excited about it. They wanted to stay in touch,” Barner said. “It gave us confidence that we were doing something the industry wanted.”

This year they plan to move forward with initiatives such as podcasts, in which they interview talented actors and attraction owners or share tips on the best ways to promote standing attractions and special events.

“We know the industry, which most marketing companies don’t necessarily know,” Barner said.

As one might expect, there’s no traditional background for becoming someone who wants to be a vampire, goblin, ghost, ghoul or zombie. Those jobs draw people from all kinds of backgrounds.

Barner, 34, is a graduate of Ballston Spa High School. He attended The College of Saint Rose in Albany, completing a four-year degree in business with a concentration in marketing in just three years, and was named an outstanding student. He graduated in 2011, when the fallout from the Great Recession was still impacting the job market.

“There were no jobs except in sales, and I said I’m not doing sales,” he recounted in an interview at his home office in Milton.

Working part time on a local horse farm in return for rent, and putting in part-time hours at the local Agway, he took a chance on opening his own marketing company, Prolific Marketing, specializing in digital media. It has succeeded, and today he has roughly 30 clients, most of them small businesses and nonprofit organizations.

“We’re mostly focused locally,” Barner said.

But ever since his mid-teens, Barner has also worked during October at Double M, first as a scare actor and then as a zone manager, and finally as the operation’s general manager and publicist.

So he’s learned a thing or two about how to freak people out.

Each year Double M employs roughly 100 people part time during the haunted hayride season. Since there are new actors hired every year, Barner has spent lots of time training people how to act, given the special techniques of haunting.

Kenkel, 29, is a graduate of Saratoga Springs High School who has a four-year degree in animal behavior from SUNY Cobleskill.

While she has always had a talent for working out behavioral issues with horses, she ended up working as a bank manager. With that job, she was looking for something less straight-laced to do at night.

“I was looking for a night job to blow off steam,” she said. “I answered an ad that I now know was placed by Prolific Marketing.”

She worked at Double M as an actor in 2022, and the next season was promoted to manager. She and Barner organized several off-season events that proved successful. They started visiting other attractions, with Kenkel documenting the places they would visit on Instagram and other social media.

The idea wasn’t to criticize the acting of people who perform for just a few hours during a few weeks each year — not surprisingly, there are plenty of people writing negative reviews of hauntings — but to share a little of an attraction’s flavor, keeping the approach positive and fun.

“We’d take photos and videos, and just kind of show people what the experience was like,” Kenkel said.

The response to those postings was positive.

“We had been going to haunts for a little while and then started to think this might be more than a hobby,” Barner said.

Sometimes they would surprise the actors trying to scare them by talking back.

“Some are really good at improvising and some really don’t know what to do,” he said.

“It’s fun,” Kenkel said. “When it’s not good it’s almost better. It’s hilarious. … They keep trying to scare you even when they know you’re also a haunter.”

In general, Barner and Kenkel said, the haunted-attraction industry is becoming more sophisticated — these days it’s not jumping out of the dark and yelling “Boo!” so much as creating characters, then letting scenarios play out.

“We create character sheets so the actors know mood, motivation. So there’s some structure they can work with,” Kenkel said. “My favorite thing is when they’re not experienced and you can work with them. The best performers are people who are comfortable being weird.”

Barner added, “I tell people, ‘You’re not playing a vampire, you’re being a vampire.’ ”

Booo365’s planned podcasts will also bring attention to the complex efforts that take place behind the scenes — the people who make masks, do makeup, create costumes or offer ticketing and event management services.

“There’s so much behind the scenes that you don’t see,” Barner said.

Booo365 also hopes to offer its own one-time special events, though no plans are firm.

“We can bring in our own team of scare actors,” Barner said. “We’ve made a lot of connections with a lot of actors. A lot of people want to act but may not want to commit to a month of that.”

Booo365 — there are three o’s, Barner said, “because two is not enough” — has a website, Booo365.com, and is also on Facebook and other social media.