Silverball guide · Elvira's House of Horrors
A Haunt you fail is gone for the game
Drain or time out during a Haunt and you cannot play it again until They Came From Space, which needs six Haunts started. Every other failure on this machine is graded and pays you something. That one is not.
Start a Haunt you can finish
Haunts are the core of the game and there are six main ones, started by shooting the House Entrance until it flashes purple and then choosing a window with the flippers. Every one gives you 45 seconds, and the timer pauses in the bumpers. A lit shot made with under fifteen seconds left resets the clock to fifteen, so a Haunt you are actively completing is hard to lose on time alone.
Lose it anyway, by draining or timing out, and it is locked away until They Came From Space is played, which itself needs six Haunts started. On a machine where completing Haunts is what advances almost everything else, that is the most expensive mistake available.
What completion buys is worth the care: it qualifies the Trailer Trash hurry-up, advances your B-Restorator rank towards Director's Cut, and two Haunts completed lights an extra ball.
Trailer Trash is a percentage, and you set it
Finish any Haunt and the House Entrance lights on a hurry-up worth fifty per cent of everything you scored during that Haunt, paid again. Shoot either ramp before collecting and it becomes seventy-five per cent. Shoot both and it becomes the full hundred.
Two ramp shots therefore double this award, and on a long Haunt that is a large number. It also plays during multiball if a Haunt completes there, and progress towards everything else continues while it runs. The atomic raygun cannot be used on the hurry-up itself, though it can be used on the ramps that raise it.
Director's Cut is the same idea at scale. Four Haunts completed lights it at the House, and it lets you re-collect the value of each completed Haunt in turn, finishing with a 100 million bonus.
Gappa Angry grades your failure
This is the opposite of the Haunt rule, and it is the most unusual thing on the machine. Reaching the top level of the Freak Fryer, which is driven purely by switch hits, lights Gappa Angry at the House: a single-ball mode asking you to make a set of shots and then lock a ball, six times over, in a fixed order.
Complete all six and you get the super jackpot built from every switch you hit, and a six-ball multiball. Fail, and what you get depends on how far you got. Draining in the second stage starts Pool Party, which runs quietly in the background for the rest of the ball paying the jackpot every twenty bumper hits. The third gives a two-ball Dance Fever, the fourth a three-ball Make-Out Mayhem, the fifth a four-ball Scream Test, the sixth a five-ball Run For Your Life. Every one of them pays out the jackpot value you built.
Scream Test is the pick of them: three of its four lit shots each add +1x to the jackpot multiplier, up to six times, and only one collects. So it is worth knowing that draining in the fifth stage is not a disaster.
The skill shot that starts your mode for you
Two skill shots exist and they are not equivalent. Landing in either Dead End lane pays 250,000 and +5x bonus. Landing in the Back Door pays a million, rising to a cap of 2.5 million, and instantly qualifies a Haunt at the House Entrance.
If a Haunt is already qualified, that same shot starts it immediately. If a Haunt or Gappa Angry is already running, it advances the mode by spotting the next shot. The Back Door also catches weak orbit shots during Haunts and spots progress then too, so a missed orbit is not always a wasted one.
The Crypt is a separate ladder worth climbing
The Deadhead Family Crypt runs on its own count. Hit the Crypt entrance enough times to lower it, shoot the scoop, then hit the skull head repeatedly and shoot the Crypt once more to finish that Deadhead. Both requirements grow with each one you defeat, and there are fifteen in all.
The rewards arrive early: the first Deadhead lights Return at the right outlane, the second lights an extra ball, and the third lights the Super Head Shot at the Crypt, which is one of the seven tasks needed for the final wizard mode. Each defeated Deadhead is also worth 250,000 in end-of-ball bonus.
Three garage multiballs, and two wizard modes before the last one
The Garage holds three multiballs, started by locking three balls behind its drop target, and they arrive in order. Wild Women lights all major shots for jackpots and then both orbits for supers. Add-a-Zombie lights the orbits, House and Crypt, and the Garage shot adds a jackpot at a random shot. These can be started during any running Haunt, which is the efficient way to play them.
House Party lights after three Haunts played: a four-ball multiball whose jackpots are priced at 25,000 times the number of shots you made in the previous three Haunts, so a well-played run of Haunts is what makes it worth anything. They Came From Space lights after six, and runs six phases of five jackpots each, paying 100 million for the lot.
Seven tasks in total qualify Wild Market Value, the final mode, each scoring 5 million more than the last.
A note on this source and this cabinet
This was compiled from a community rule sheet whose author is not recorded in our copy. It is honest about its gaps and marks them: the Satanic Rites of Dracula Haunt is unwritten, the Gar-Goils Gone Wild super jackpot is guessed at rather than known, and how the Gappa Angry jackpot builds is flagged as missing. Those gaps are left as gaps here rather than filled in.
The sheet documents a Premium and never mentions a Pro or an LE, so this guide is tagged to the Premium rather than claiming to hold on cabinets the source says nothing about. Both Elvira's House of Horrors listed on UK floors are Premiums, so that is very likely the machine in front of you. Elvira's House of Horrors is on Stern code that has continued to change, and two of the locked Haunts are calendar-dependent by default: Dracula unlocks first on 31 October, and Santa Claus throughout December.
Where this came from
Silverball wrote this, but not from scratch: it was compiled against the published rules below and checked against them, rather than written up from one person’s games. None of the wording is theirs. Machines get code updates that move the right shot, so a guide has a date on it for a reason.
- Elvira's House of Horrors rule sheet (author not recorded in our copy)
