Thrill-seekers, beware: This isn't your neighborhood-variety haunted house

The doors to the House of Torment's renewed attraction, the theatrically themed Nightmare Mansion, burst open. Out slides a bespectacled, blood-splattered butler.

"Good evening!" He says in a low spooky voice. "The Doctor will see you now."

We step into a long dark hallway. The mutants of Dr. Incubus lurk behind trap doors and within crawl spaces. These cast-offs of experiments gone horribly wrong, including members of the Doctor's own family, babble incoherently and repeat the telling details of their horrific travails with wide-eyed lunacy.

"Such beautiful young things," a bonnet-wearing, bewitched woman tells me and my fiancée, Lindy, while ushering us onward. "The Doctor will be very pleased."

Upon entering a room where the floor tilts up at 30 degrees, which is like walking into a real-life gyroscope, a man with a melted face and Victorian-era suit lunges from the wall.

"Are you going to see Father?" he asks, forewarning us of the dangers ahead. Then, motioning to a chalkboard, which contains the scribbles of a mad man attempting to reverse his medical misfortune, he shouts, "I've almost finished the formula!"

Though we've no idea what other atrocities await us, our sense of fear urges us out of this room — and deeper into Nightmare Mansion.

Jon Love, 28, the vice president of the House of Torment, certainly loves his job. But "it's always hard explaining to people exactly what we do," he says.

Love clarifies: When people think of haunted houses, they imagine sticking their hand into a bowl of noodles pretending to be brains or grapes acting as eyeballs. Though that might work at the neighborhood spookfest, the House of Torment aspires to cause nightmares (or at least create memories) for people of all ages.

"Our primary market is teenagers and young adults," says Love. "But more and more we're drawing older people who appreciate the details and value the production of our attractions." The adults might not scare as easily, but they're certainly entertained.

Located in a 20,000-square-foot building on the north side of Highland Mall, the House of Torment has grass-roots origins that date back nearly a decade. Founder and current president Dan McCullough started the attraction as a Halloween trick in his Southwest Austin neighborhood. After just a few years, hundreds of visitors flocked to McCullough's home haunted house (and wreaked havoc on his lawn).

In 2002 McCullough went pro, turning his haunted house hobby into a business. At the time, Love, who'd previously dabbled in event promotion, was finishing a degree at the University of Texas McCombs School of Business. He started as an intern with the House of Torment (struggling to justify its legitimacy to his professors) and officially partnered with McCullough soon after.

Love realized Halloween was a big-business holiday, second only to Christmas in terms of revenue, and strived to provide a top-notch customer experience. In his first year overseeing operations and marketing, says Love, sales and attendance doubled.

In 2008, McCullough, Love and a small crew of essential employees went full time. Today, they work year-round preparing the House of Torment for just the six weeks it's open, starting in mid-September and ending at midnight on Halloween.

This year, McCullough's overseeing the development of a new haunted house, the 13th Floor, at a historic 40,000-square-foot building in downtown San Antonio.

"Every year, we strive to outdo ourselves," says Love.

In 2010, utilizing every last inch of the building, the staff expanded and redesigned 70 percent of the previous year's attractions. In addition to the creation of Nightmare Mansion, they added a 4D Haunted Theater that's akin to a virtual version of a horror roller coaster.

Referring to the closet-sized main office we're talking in, Love says, "This is the only room that isn't haunted."

During a brief wait in line to enter the second of the House of Torment's two main haunted attractions, the namesake House of Torment: Revenge of the Immortals, Lindy surreptitiously points out a pre-teen girl in front of us and whispers, "She's crying."