Chris Navo never intended to become Dr. Mortis, but that has become his alter-ego. What began as a Halloween lark became an identity, bringing visibility and community goodwill to his plumbing and drain-cleaning franchise in Grass Valley, Calif.
“It started very simply,” says Navo. “My wife and I entered a Halloween decorating competition in our apartment complex. I decorated the two rooms you could see from the road to look like a tomb. I had a big captain’s waterbed and made that look like a crypt, then actually painted the walls so they looked like bricks. It was way overboard, but we won the contest.”
The next year, 1994, Navo decorated the entire apartment as a haunted house. In 1995, they moved to a rental home and created a walk-through haunted house. When they moved their act to the suburbs in 1997, some 1,000 people went through the attraction in three hours, creating traffic problems in the neighborhood. At that point, Navo realized things were getting out of hand.
Dilemma solved
Navo asked the local Lions Club for permission to use a building in Condon Park that the club had built and donated to the city. When the Lions agreed, Navo recruited actors from Nevada Union High School to play zombies, mummies, vampires and other fright characters.
By the next year, the haunted house drew 1,500 paying customers. Since then, face painting, a bounce house and other diversions for the younger kids have been added to the program, because the house itself is so scary.
Navo’s day job is general manager of his family’s business. Roto-Rooter Sewer & Drain Cleaning Service, formerly Navo & Sons Plumbing, founded by George Navo in 1956. Sons Randy and Mark joined the business 1968. Chris, Randy’s son, joined the company full-time in 1992.
Today, Chris’s mother, Jaye Deen Navo is office manager and accountant. George Navo, retired, remains on the corporation’s board. Chriss’ younger brothers Jeremey, Justin, and Josh work there, as do two in-laws and seven other employees.
The company picked up the Roto-Rooter franchise in 1987 and now provides services that include drain cleaning, plumbing, and septic system installation, repair and maintenance. Chris Navo says the company strives to be “on the cutting edge of whatever is going on in plumbing.”
Get the party started
The haunted house runs for about a week at the end of October but takes almost all year to plan and execute. “I finally had to make a deal with my wife not to talk about the haunted house in November and December,” Navo says. “But after that, we work on it on and off for the rest of the year.”
The design is new every year, and that means drawing out plans, then putting the drawing into a CAD program. Navo erects the entire haunted house – all 18 rooms – in 24 hours, using just three people. He gets help from his father-in-law, Ken Pearson, and best friend Aaron Tate.
The design changes every year. “It’s all about distract and surprise,” says Navo. “A haunted house can’t scare you. It just has to have the different elements to spur you to scare yourself.”
Navo stays away from gratuitous gore or chainsaws, which he deems “too lazy and unimaginative.” Still, he says, the house is scary enough so that 5 percent of the people who buy tickets never actually go in, and another 10 percent leave within the first few rooms.
Be very afraid
Navo applies the same concepts to promoting the event as he does to running the business. “One of the rules to a successful business is creating a name people remember,” he says. “If you think about words that have the same first letter, it’s more memorable. So I came up with Mortis Manor, from rigor mortis. Then we came up with the idea that it would be an insane asylum, because that’s really scary, and the idea that the doctor named it after himself.” And so Navo’s character, Dr. Mortis, was born.
The project makes money because he doesn’t spend much on props. “Because my experience is in plumbing, making air-powered animatronics is easy,” Navo says. He takes off work for the whole week of the show.
“During the week when it’s happening, we need to move lots of the wall panels we’ve fabricated from our facility where they’re stored, and do the initial setup. So there’s some distraction, but it’s mostly a good kind: people getting excited, talking about how fun it’s going to be. We push off non-emergency calls and schedule appropriately.”
The event has some great perks for the Roto-Rooter team. “It definitely builds morale,” Navo says. “The employees really get into it. They all get free tickets. They know they’re helping their community by being part of something bigger than themselves. Their kids can get a behind-the-scenes look at how we do the effects. We videotape the whole experience and give copies to our employees and sponsors.”
The Lions Club and the drama department each receive about $3,000 from the event each year. That gives him a kick that keeps him coming back. “The day I get tired of it is the day I quit,” Navo says. “But I can’t see that coming.”
