At an otherwise nondescript warehouse on Columbus’ east side, monsters gather. A trio of skeletal pirates shares a bottle of rum. A cluster of men in lab coats, the flesh melting off their faces, conspire in a corner. Frankenstein’s monster stalks amid gutted corpses. A deranged clown waits, mid-cackle, for someone to flip its switch.
It’s generally OK to walk among these creatures by day, but maybe don’t go in there after dark. “It’s a little creepy to turn out the lights when you’re the last one out the door at night,” admits Bo Bruns, founder and owner of Unit 70 Studios.
Unit 70, with Bruns at the helm, has spent more than 20 years designing and building the animatronic and static props that populate haunted houses and amusement parks around the country each Halloween. If you’ve crept through a professional haunted attraction anywhere in the U.S. lately — including Ohio favorites like Blood Prison in Mansfield — there’s a good chance you crossed paths with one of the studio’s spawn.
Unit 70, with Bo Bruns at the helm, has spent more than 20 years designing and building the animatronic and static props that populate haunted houses and amusement parks around the country
Bruns traces his fascination with the fantastical back to his 1970s childhood in front of the television, watching Leonard Nimoy host In Search Of..., the classic mystery documentary series that explored everything from UFOs to sea monsters. When he saw the original Star Wars — particularly the cantina scene, packed with alien faces unlike anything he’d ever seen — he was hooked.
“That ignited a fire in me,” Bruns says. “I’ve always had an interest in cryptids, UFOs, any kind of unexplained things. I guess it lends itself to this art form.”
His art was honed at the Columbus College of Art and Design, as well as at a job he took at ScareFactory, another Columbus-based haunted prop shop, while still a student. In 2003, fresh off helping install a haunted house at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, Bruns decided it was time to strike out on his own. Unit 70 Studios was born.
Over the next two decades, Unit 70 built a reputation as one of the industry’s go-to shops for realistic haunted-attraction props. Peruse the online catalog and find hundreds of different characters: aliens and mutants, demons and the possessed, vampires and werewolves, killers and their victims, scarecrows and skeletons — and clowns. “I’m always thinking of new clowns,” Bruns says, with a matter-of-fact tone that belies the terrifying whimsy of his vocation. “It never seems that we can have enough clowns in our product line.”
The studio’s artists work with clients to imagine ingenious and grotesque ways to tell a story that captures the theme of the haunted attraction. For a haunted house in St. Louis, the client asked for “Frankenstein’s victims.” The creative team came up with a meat locker of partially dismembered victims hanging from hooks.
“We wanted to make it so the limbs are still attached. Just kind of barely hanging,” he says, cocking his head to admire the macabre diorama. “We were almost thinking wind chimes when we were making these.”
The studio’s creations start with high-density polyurethane foam, formed in silicone or rubber molds and finished with painted latex or silicone skins. House-made blood and slime provides the gore, while realistic eyes purchased from a taxidermy supply house give each creature its creepy gaze.
What does it cost to walk away with a monstrosity? Prices range from about $1,000 for a “flatback” (fully sculpted on just one side) corpse that appears to have charred flesh, to $11,000 for a giant animated spider.
A career of making nightmares come to life has opened a revealing window into the human psyche, Bruns says, as fashions come and go. This year, for example, he’s had multiple requests for Frankenstein-styled monsters, perhaps at least partly due to the popularity of Guillermo del Toro’s critically acclaimed Netflix adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel in 2025.
Other themes persist from year to year.
“Definitely medical — anything with doctors or nurses or mental institutions,” he says. “Another popular one is anything that has to do with marriage or children. We’ll make a little kid zombie to go with an adult zombie, and that really resonates with people. I think it’s just any kind of nightmare version of day-to-day anxieties that people have.”
Not every horror experience is keyed to Halloween, though. Unit 70’s catalog includes an “evil Santa” carrying a bloody axe, an elf carrying a gift box of entrails, and a conga line of pajama-clad children, tethered together in a “child chain gang.”
Also, not every piece that comes from Unit 70 is horrific. The studio makes an occasional piece for a zoo or museum, and in recent years, Bruns has built a side gig creating detailed Bigfoot models, drawing on his own love of Ohio’s woods and his conversations with the state’s large community of cryptid enthusiasts. One of those models now greets visitors at the Eco-Discovery Center at Salt Fork State Park, while others have found homes in Bigfoot museums in Colorado, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Oregon.
His bread and butter, however, is blood and slime, and his business is firmly rooted in Halloween — and he’s glad he can be there to help the haunted house crowd process their complicated emotions.
“When it comes to Halloween and horror, it’s a way for humans to deal with their own fears,” he says. “That’s why Halloween is at that time of year when winter is approaching. Halloween was a way for people to embrace their fears. Instead of dreading this darkness, they embrace and process it.”
By the time October rolls around each year, most of his monsters have shipped out to destinations across the country, and Bruns gets a short break before pondering how to package our nightmares yet again for the darkest, spookiest month of the year.
Learn more about Unit 70 Studios’ work at www.unit70.com.
